" Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is producer/director Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, satirical, provocative black comedy/fantasy regarding doomsday and Cold War politics that features an accidental, inadvertent, pre-emptive nuclear attack. The undated, landmark film - the first commercially-successful political satire about nuclear war, has been inevitably compared to another similar suspense film released at the same time - the much-more-serious and melodramatic Fail-Safe (1964). However, this was a cynically objective, Monty Python-esque, humorous, biting response to the apocalyptic fears of the 1950s.
The witty screenplay, co-authored by the director (with Terry Southern), was based on Peter George's novel Red Alert (the U.S. title). [George's work, under his pseudonym Peter Bryant, was first published in England with the title Two Hours to Doom. Early drafts of the script were titled Edge of Doom and The Delicate Balance of Terror.] The novel's primary concern was the threat of an accidental nuclear war. Dr. Strangelove himself did not appear in the novel, however - he was added by Kubrick and co-screenwriter Southern.
The mid-1960s film's nightmarish, apocalyptic theme was about how technology had gone haywire and had dominated humanity. The film's anti-war fears actually became a plausible scenario, shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the heated-up intensification of the Cold War and nuclear arms race. [The satirical film's release was delayed from December 12, 1963 to late January, 1964 due to Kennedy's assassination in late November.]
However, Columbia Pictures had to include a disclaimer at the film's beginning:
It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any real persons living or dead.
The funny (and frightening), dark film cleverly cuts back and forth mid-scene (and increases in rapidity as the film draws to an insane close) from three main set locations, each with their own distinctive camera styles:
* a locked office in a sealed-off Air Force command base of a psychotic, impotent bomb-group commander who is zealously convinced that the Russians have devised water fluoridation to weaken American men - filmed with a cinema verite, documentary style
* the cramped, flight deck interior of the B-52 bomber sent to destroy the Soviets with a preemptive strike - led by a Southern-accented, gung-ho major - often filmed using close-up shots
* the Pentagon's huge underground War Room where an inept US President has convened an advisory staff - including a saber-rattling general (and other military brass), a Soviet ambassador, and a crazed German nuclear scientist speaking to each other over considerable distances - usually seen in long, static camera shots
There were a total of four Academy Award nominations (with no wins) for the film: Best Picture, Best Actor (Peter Sellers), Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It lost the first three Oscars to the popular My Fair Lady (1964), and the Screenplay award to Becket (1964).
Dr. Strangelove is most memorable for Peter Sellers' Oscar-nominated, masterful performances in three distinct roles in two of the three set locales (similar to his various identities in Kubrick's Lolita (1962)):
* Dr. Strangelove (an eccentric, wheel-chair bound German scientist, a Presidential advisor - similar to real-life Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, who has an uncontrollable mechanical hand that involuntarily makes Nazi salutes and threatens homicide)
* Mr. ****** Muffley (an egg-headed President of the US with a bland American accent, similar to 50s Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson)
* Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (a stuffy British Exchange Programme liaison officer with a crisp English accent, similar to the Alec Guinness' character Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957))
* NOTE: Sellers was originally cast to appear in a fourth role, as Major T. J. Kong (played by Slim Pickens in the film), but once he was finally able to acquire the right Texan accent, he broke his leg and couldn't play the part
In addition to numerous sexual images and jokes throughout the film (including large phallic cigars, mating airplanes, guns, Ripper's impotent "loss of essence", and the orgasmic atomic bomb that Kong rides between his legs), many of the absurd, omnipresent names of the male, military characters (caricatures) have sexual connotations or allegorical references that suggest the connection between war, sexual obsession and the male sex drive:
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