Whilst it was released 60 years ago, at the height of the cold war, with the Cuban Missile crisis a very recent memory for audiences at the time and with the similarly themed Sidney Lumet drama Fail Safe (which starred Henry Fonda and Walther Matthau) released a few months later in the same year, I don’t think I finally caught up with Kubrick’s brilliant Dr Stangelove until the mid 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war hung heavily over us – yet again.
At this point, a number of events had contrived to put nuclear war back on the agenda: the Thatcher/Reagan “star wars” project; the protests of the women at Greenham over the US deployment of nuclear weapons on British soil; the TV screening of both the long-banned 1960s BBC docudrama, Peter Watkins’ brilliant The War Game plus the unforgettable Barry Hines penned “end of days” drama Threads, coupled with the raising of awareness done by CND (including protest marches and benefit concerts by several popular bands from the period including The Jam, The Damned and Madness) all played their part in getting us concerned about fact that we now lived in a post-nuclear world. One that could come to an end at any minute, if some idiot with power decided to “press the button.”
And that’s exactly what happens in Kubrick’s savage film – billed at the time as a surreal black comedy; now simply bleak, when viewed all these years later. A load of misguided, blinkered idiots, doing idiotic things, in an idiotic world, egged on, finally, by an insane neo-Nazi ideologue, who fantasises about fornicating with “carefully chosen” buxom women in the presidential nuclear shelter, whilst the world falls apart. The fact that this character gives the film its title (accompanied by the “none more 60s” sub clause “Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”) and is played to genius perfection by Peter Sellers is just one of the movie’s many, many dark pleasures.
Sellers, one of the greatest and anarchic of all British actors, had previously worked with Kubrick on his superb version of the “unfilmable” Lolita in 1962 (alongside the mercurial James Mason in one of his greatest performances) and in Strangelove plays three major roles (it was meant to be four but an injury sustained during shooting meant that the proliferate, veteran cowboy actor Slim Pickens, formerly Louis Burton Lindley Jr. had to take on the role of US Air Force Major T.J. “King” Kong).
In addition to the relatively minor role of Strangelove, he’s also the (ironically) balding American president, the punningly named Merkin Muffley and the decent, if increasingly desperate Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, the closest character the film has resembling a hero.
Early on I described Sellers as an actor – not a “comedian,” for the main reason that, more often than not, in his best films, Sellers revealed himself to be a very fine actor indeed. Just think about the subtle work he did in (amongst others) The Ladykillers, The Smallest Show on Earth, I’m All Right Jack, Never Let Go, Only Two Can Play and his swansong Being There. These are great performances – not all of them funny. And certainly there’s none of the clowning around which tarnished his career when he became a big international star on the back of the Inspector Clouseau character. In fact, it could be argued that Sellers was one of the great method actors – up there with Brando in his ability to become completely subsumed by the parts he played.
In addition to Sellers at the top of his game, Strangelove also features a strong performance by the mighty George C Scott (who never really liked the work he did – feeling that he was being pushed too hard by Kubrick to be “over the top”) as Buck Turgidson (another fairly weak pun) and blacklisted Sterling Hayden, who had previously worked with Kubrick on his heist noir The Killing (1956) plays the rather obviously named Brigadier General Jack D Ripper. English actress, the little known Tracey Reed (who subsequently appeared with Sellers in A Shot in the Dark) is Miss Scott, Turgidson’s amorous secretary (in a bikini), which is the only female role in the film (this is 1964, remember – though some modern viewers may find this unforgivable).
Essentially, there’s something in the water (i.e. communism) which causes a mad American General (Hayden) to launch a nuclear attack on Russia. He’s cottoned onto by the Brits (Sellers’ Mandrake) but it may be too late. Meanwhile, in The Pentagon “War Room,” the US President (Sellers’ Muffley) tries to persuade the Russian premier Dmitri (over the phone) not to retaliate – subsequently learning that the Russians have developed an unstoppable super weapon The Doomsday Device, capable of destroying the world, which will be triggered in the event of any attack.
Yes there are some funny moments (“No fighting, please, gentlemen. This is the war room”); George C Scott getting carried away with his own invective; the conversations between the President and his Russian counter-part, who is more than a little bit drunk, but, as the film moves on, the smile on your face becomes more of a rictus grin as you begin to realise that this is the insanity we live in and are surrounded by. Bureaucracy, incompetence, chain of command, bigotry, prejudice, misunderstanding, power, xenophobia: all themes with much to tell us about the times we live in too.
Absurdist writer (and substance abuser) Terry Southern was drafted in to rewrite Peter George’s original script, based on his novel Red Alert, arguably bringing in some of the more zany elements (Southern had written the satire The Magic Christian and later had his name attached to scripts for The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, Casino Royale, Barbarella and Easy Rider)
On a cinematic level, in spite of Ken (James Bond) Adams’ ambitious set design, the film is largely shot (by Gilbert Taylor) in a faux documentary style, giving it an added sense of verisimilitude, which adds to the film’s genuinely chilling nature. Interestingly enough, a year later Taylor works on another (slightly overlooked) take on nuclear conflict, James B Harris’ submarine drama The Bedford Incident (co-incidentally Harris had been Kubrick’s producer on The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita but they parted ways over Strangelove, which Harris wanted to be even more serious: he may well have been missing the point, somewhat).
Music in the film is used sparingly (though the soundtrack is credited to Laurie Johnson, better known for his work on popular ITV TV shows The Avengers, Jason King and The Professionals) and Anthony Harvey (who had cut Lolita and who followed this with the sparse The Spy Who Came in from the Cold for American director Martin Ritt) edits.
All told, Stanley Kubrick is one of those great auteurs who never made a bad film (although some are better than others). He’s a bit like Bowie, in that every cineaste will have their favourite “Stanley picture,” just as all Bowie fans have their favourite Bowie album. With that in mind, if you compared these wildly differing modern artists, you might say that Dr Strangelove is similar to Bowie’s “Berlin” trilogy.
Dark, harsh, bleak, ragged, tainted by despair but resilient. Yes, it’s Kubrick’s Low or Heroes, if you like. That great.
Dr Andrew C Webber is a Film teacher and examiner with nearly 40 years’ experience. He currently contributes to both the Cinema of the 70s and 80s magazines (available on Amazon); cassette gazette fanzine (available from cassette pirate on e-bay) and the Low Noise music podcast available on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
