DR. STRANGELOVE; OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

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UK, 1964

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Production: Hawk Films, a Stanley Kubrick Production; black and white, 35mm; running time: originally 102 minutes, edited down to 93 minutes. Released 30 January 1964. Cost: $1,500,000.

Producer: Stanley Kubrick; associate producer: Victor Lyndon; screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George, originally conceived as a serious adaptation of Red Alert by Peter George, main titles by Pablo Ferro; photography: Gilbert Taylor; editor: Anthony Harvey; sound supervisor: John Cox; sound recordist: Richard Bird; dub mixer: John Aldred; sound editor: Leslie Hodgson; production designer: Ken Adam; art director: Peter Murton; music: Laurie Johnson, song "We'll Meet Again," is the original recording by Vera Lynn; special effects: Wally Veevers; travelling matte: Vic Margutti; costume designer: Pamela Carlton; aviation advisor: Capt. John Crewdson.

Cast: Peter Sellers (Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake/President Muffley/Dr. Strangelove); George C. Scott (Gen. Buck Turgidson); Sterling Hayden (Gen. Jack D. Ripper); Keenan Wynn (Col. Bat Guano); Slim Pickens (Maj. T. J. "King" Kong); Peter Bull (Ambassador de Sadesky); Tracy Reed (Miss Scott); James Earl Jones (Lieut. Lothar Zagg); Jack Creley (Mr. Staines); Frank Berry (Lieut. H. R. Dietrich); Glenn Beck (Lieut. W. D. Kivel); Shane Rimmer (Capt. G. A. "Ace" Owens); Paul Tamarin (Lieut. B. Goldberg); Gordon Tanner (General Faceman); Robert O'Neil (Admiral Randolph); Roy Stephens (Frank); Laurence Herder, John McCarthy, Hal Galili (Burpelson defense team members).

Award: New York Film Critics' Award, Best Direction, 1964.

Publications

Books:

Austen, David, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, London, 1969.

Walker, Alexander, Stanley Kubrick Directs, New York, 1972.

Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New York, 1972.

Devries, Daniel, The Films of Stanley Kubrick, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1973.

Bobker, Lee R., Elements of Film, New York, 1974.

Phillips, Gene D., Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, New York, 1975.

Leyda, Jay, editor, Voices of Film Experience, New York, 1977.

Monaco, James, How to Read a Film, New York, 1977.

O'Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson, editors, American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, New York, 1979.

Ciment, Michel, Kubrick, Paris, 1980; revised edition, 1987; translated as Kubrick, 1983.

Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988.

Hummel, Christoph, editor, Stanley Kubrick, Munich, 1984.

Brunetta, Gian Piero, Stanley Kubrick: Tempo, spazia, storia, e mondi possibili, Parma, 1985.

Articles:

Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), February 1962.

Kubrick, Stanley, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cinema," in Films and Filming (London), June 1963.

Prideaux, T., "Take Aim: Fire at the Agonies of War," in Life (New York), 20 December 1963.

Tornabene, Lyn, "Contradicting the Hollywood Image," in Saturday Review (New York), 28 December 1963.

Milne, Tom, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1963–64.

Taylor, Stephen, in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1964.

Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 31 January 1964.

Forbes, Bryan, in Films and Filming (London), February 1964.

Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 13 February and 11 June 1964.

Burgess, Jackson, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1964.

Milne, Tom, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Stanley Kubrick," in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1964.

Goldberg, Joe, "Dr. Kubrick," in Seventh Art (New York), Spring 1964.

Price, James, "Stanley Kubrick's Divided World," in London Magazine, May 1964.

Russell, Lee, "Stanley Kubrick," in New Left Review (New York), Summer 1964.

Macklin, F. A., "Sex and Dr. Strangelove," in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1965.

MacFadden, Patrick, in Film Society Review (New York), January 1967.

Manchel, Frank, in Media and Methods (Philadelphia), December 1967.

Edelman, Rob, in Magill's Survey of Cinema 1, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980.

Verstappen, W., "Dr. Strangelove: Analyse op de montagetafel," in Skoop (Amsterdam), October 1980.

Hoberman, J., "When Dr. No Met Dr. Strangelove," in Sight and Sound (London), December 1993.

Lefcowitz, Eric, "Dr. Strangelove Turns 30. Can it Still be Trusted?" in New York Times, 30 January 1994.

Southern, T., "Strangelove Outtake: Notes from the War Room," in Grand Street, no. 49, Summer 1994.

Tweg, S., "Reading Dr. Strangelove," in Metro Education (Melbourne), no. 6, 1995.

Séquences (Haute-Ville), September-October 1995.

Kubrick, Stanley, "Une comédie cauchemardesque," in Positif (Paris), September 1997.

Bourguignon, Thomas, in Positif (Paris), September 1997.

Macnab, Geoffrey, "Will it Dress?", an interview with set designer Ken Adams, in Sight & Sound (London), September 1999.

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Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which has won wide and continued acceptance from the time of its release, has come to be considered one of the screen's great masterpieces of black comedy. Yet Kubrick had originally planned the film as a serious adaptation of Peter George's Red Alert, a novel concerned with the demented General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his decision to order a group of B-52 bombers to launch an attack inside Russia. Gradually Kubrick's attitude toward his material changed: "My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question."

Kubrick remembers that he kept revising the script right through the production period. "During shooting many substantial changes were made in the script, sometimes together with the cast during improvisations. Some of the best dialogue was created by Peter Sellers himself." Sellers played not only the title role of the eccentric scientist, but also the president of the United States and Captain Mandrake, a British officer who fails to dissuade General Ripper from his set purpose.

General Ripper's mad motivation for initiating a nuclear attack is his paranoid conviction that the explanation of his diminishing sexual potency can be traced to an international Communist conspiracy to taint the drinking water. Kubrick subtly reminds us of the general's obsession by a series of suggestive metaphors that occur in the course of the film. The very opening image of the film shows a nuclear bomber being refueled in mid-flight by another aircraft, with "Try a Little Tenderness" appropriately playing on the sound track to accompany their symbolic coupling. As Ripper describes to Mandrake his concern about preserving his potency, which he refers to as his "precious bodily essence," Kubrick photographs him in close-up from below, with a huge phallic cigar jutting from between his lips while he is talking. Later, when the skipper of a B-52 bomber (Slim Pickens) manages to dislodge a bomb that has been stuck in its chamber and unleash it on its Russian target, he sits astride this mighty symbol of potency clamped between his flanks, as it hurtles toward the earth.

Black ironies abound throughout the picture. During an emergency conference called by President Muffley, a disagreement between General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and the Russian ambassador (Peter Bull) threatens to turn into a brawl, and the president intervenes by reminding them, "Please, gentlemen, you can't fight here; this is the War Room!" Later, when Mandrake tries to reach the president in order to warn him about the imminent attack on Russia, he finds that he lacks the correct change for the pay telephone he is using, and that the White House will not accept a collect call. He then demands that Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) fire into a Coca-Cola machine in order to obtain the necessary coins. Guano reluctantly agrees, ruefully reminding Mandrake that it is he who will have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company. Guano blasts the machine, bends down to scoop up the silver—and is squirted full in the face with Coca-Cola by the vindictive machine.

Kubrick had originally included a scene in which the Russians and the Americans in the War Room engage in a free-for-all with custard pies, but deleted it from the final print of the film when he decided that "it was too farcical, and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Very much in keeping with the satiric, dark humor of the picture is the figure of Dr. Strangelove himself, Kubrick's grim vision of man's final capitulation to the machine: he is more a robot than a human being, with his mechanical arm spontaneously saluting Hitler, his former employer, and his mechanical hand, gloved in black, at one point trying to strangle the flesh and blood still left in him.

In the end a single U.S. plane reaches its Russian target, setting off the Russian's retaliatory Doomsday machine. There follows a series of blinding explosions, while on the sound track we hear a popular song which Kubrick resurrected from World War II: "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when." (Kubrick used the original World War II recording by Vera Lynn, which brought popularity back not only to the song but to Ms. Lynn as well.)

One critic summed up the film by saying that the black comedy which Kubrick had originally thought to exclude from Dr. Strangelove provides some of its most meaningful moments. "They are made up of the incongruities, the banalities, and misunderstandings that we are constantly aware of in our lives. On the brink of annihilation, they become irresistibly absurd."

The theme that emerges from Dr. Strangelove is the plight of fallible man putting himself at the mercy of his "infallible" machines and thus bringing about his own destruction. Kubrick, who is always on the side of humanity in his films, indicates here, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that human fallibility is less likely to destroy man than the relinquishing of his moral responsibilities to his supposedly faultless machinery. Summing up his personal vision as it is reflected in Dr. Strangelove, the director has said: "The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale. Our extinction would be little more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens. And if that match does blaze in the darkness, there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre."

—Gene D. Phillips