Based on the meticulously researched 1958 novel Red Alert by Peter George, Kubrick originally planned to do a straight adaptation. Yet, as he and George worked on the screenplay, Kubrick kept seeing the material as more of an absurdist farce, and he eventually decided to commit to that route, bringing in novelist Terry Southern (Candy, The Magic Christian) to punch up the satire and dialogue. The result is one of the most astonishingly unexpected comedies ever made, a film that is both hilarious and unnerving. The effectiveness of Dr. Strangelove rides heavily on the disjunction between the absolute sense of realism with which Kubrick treats the visual and narrative details—the jargon-heavy militarist dialogue, the complex communication technologies, the use of documentary-like handheld camerawork during the battle sequences—and the comic grotesquerie of the characters, all of whom have been rechristened in the film with names that carry various levels of sexual charge. The black-and-white cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (A Hard Day’s Night), the choice of serious dramas in the 1960s, seals the effect; one couldn’t possibly imagine it in color.

The world is put on the brink of nuclear annihilation by General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden, whom Kubrick lured out of early retirement), the commanding officer at Burpelson Air Force base who orders his squadron of bombers to drop their payloads on targets inside the Soviet Union. Ripper has essentially lost his mind due to his dwindling sexual potency, which he blames on communist poisoning of the water via fluoridation, which has sapped his “precious bodily fluids.” He is stationed with Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), a British RAF officer who attempts to reason with Ripper, but is mostly reduced to an impotent accomplice.

From there, we are introduced to the War Room inside the Pentagon, the film’s most iconic location with its giant screens (“The Big Board!” as one character repeatedly refers to them) and massive round table lit by a circular panel of low-hanging lights. There we watch as various administration officials and military men attempt to stop what is sure to be the kick-off for World War III, which would seem to be as simple as sending out counter orders, but due to various safeguards that have been built into the system to ensure that a nuclear attack couldn’t be thwarted by the enemy, is actually quite impossible (a scroll at the beginning of the film, added at the last minute at the insistence of the U.S. military, assures us that such a situation is not actually possible).

Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers again), the Adlai Stevenson-esque U.S. President, is the lone voice of the reason in the vast room, as he essentially plays audience surrogate in conveying the same sense of utter incredulity that such a situation could arise. Military hawkishness is embodied by General “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott), a gruff, overzealous, gum-chomping goofball of a commander whose anti-communism borders on the hilariously pathological, especially when President Muffley invites the Russian Ambassador (Peter Bull) into the War Room to help him get in touch with the Russian Premier. The conversation in which Muffley tries to inform Dimitri, the never-seen, but hugely amusing Premier, about what has happened in the most calm, polite way possible is one of the film’s most dexterous comic highlights. We only hear what Muffley says, but his reactions are such that we can easily imagine the man on the other end of the phone.

The absolute lunacy of nuclear warfare is embodied by the titular Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers … again), a creepy, half-mechanical weapons expert inherited from Nazi Germany who advises the President on various courses of action with a plastered smile and unnervingly piercing eyes shining out from behind his tinted glasses. The good doctor is by far the film’s most insidious creation, and he feels like he was imported from a Weimer-era sci-fi film by Fritz Lang (he was clearly modeled on Metropolis’s Rotwang, the cinema’s original mad scientist). The fact that Strangelove Freudian slips with some regularity into calling the President “Mein Fuhrer” and later his mechanical right arm starts malfunctioning and making “Sieg Heil!” movements against his will (surely one of Sellers’ most inspired bits of comic physicality) pessimistically suggests that evil is evil no matter who it’s working for, which casts aspersion on the U.S. government’s hiring of numerous Nazi scientists and use of Nazi technologies after the war.

When not at the Air Force base or in the War Room, we are aboard one of the 34 B-52 bombers that Ripper has ordered into Russia, this one piloted by Major “King” King (Slim Pickens), a good ol’ boy from Texas who dons a cowboy hat once he realizes that he’s about to go “toe to toe with the Rooh-skies.” Pickens embodies the well-intentioned, but ultimately dangerous naiveté of blind patriotism, as he unwittingly becomes an instrument of wholesale destruction while believing that he is doing the greatest good (President Muffley is a similar kind of character who is clearly in over her head; it is he, after all, who utters the film’s most infamous, ironic line: “Gentleman! You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!”). Major Kong’s tenacity in seeing his orders through generate much of the film’s suspense, as we keep hoping—ironically, perversely—that he will be stopped, shot down, even, to prevent unnecessarily triggering the war to end all wars.

From the sexualized imagery of a B-52 bomber being refueled in midair with a giant phallic hose to the tune of “Try a Little Tenderness,” to the montage finale of nuclear bombs exploding to “We’ll Meet Again,” everything about Dr. Strangelove is audacious. Kubrick had already gotten away with adapting Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous novel Lolita two years earlier, and he clearly wasn’t interested in shying away from controversy and button-pushing. Dr. Strangelove does what so few comedies do today: it challenges us, provokes us, unsettles us while also making us laugh. Some of the laughs are fundamentally low-brow (bathroom jokes, endless sexual innuendo, even a few slapsticky pratfalls), but the core of the humor is designed to make us laugh at our own vulnerability and our own culpability. Although we no longer live with the same sense of dread of nuclear annihilation that permeated the culture during the Cold War, we still live under shrouds of fear, particularly regarding foreign terrorism and random mass shootings, which means that Dr. Strangelove, despite being a direct product of its era’s particular concerns, is just as relevant today as it was in 1964. One of Kubrick’s central themes that bound so many of his films together was the circularity of violence—the endless cycle of humankind inflicting violence on itself—which makes Dr. Strangelove not a relic of its time, but a frighteningly prescient view of how things have always been.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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