Dr Strangelove - The Criterion Collection [Blu-ray] [1964]

I have always loved this film and its very very dark humour. A nuclear war started because an American general thinks he is being poisoned by the Soviets using fluridation making him impotent and robbing him of his manly essence. A twit of an RAF officer played by Peter Sellers trying to stop him, an ineffectual American president (Sellars) trying to explain what is happening to an irrate Soviet Premier over the hotline and the movie's main named character Dr. Strangelove (again Sellars), the wheelchair bound former(?) Nazi. If you want to see the same idea done seriously watch the superb 'Failsafe', it you want to laugh at the insanity of it all watch Dr Strangelove. Criterion gives you plenty of extras.

Superb performances. A film based on the premise that satire needs no exaggeration. The truth is crazy enough. Kubrick spent years researching and reading about nuclear war and the deterrent systems in place at the time. The response to the film from governments and the military was as you would expect - horror, indignation and an unequivocal rejection of any scenario depicted in the film. But this dangerous fantasy was as close to the truth as it was possible to get. It even highlighted the inherent dangers in the deterrent systems to the president. Makes you wonder what we have come to accept as 'normal'. Our inclination to be controlled and accept the surreal with unthinkingly compliance is more ingrained than in 1963. Where are the filmmakers who can shock us with such wit and black humour in quite the same way as Kubrick did with Dr Strangelove? This film is profoundly salutary even now. Unmissable

Peter sellers, sterling Hayden, George c Scott, slim Pickens. Stanley kubrick. And all others involved in this film. I salute you. Painfully funny, how Peter sellers did 3 roles so well one will never no. Allegedly did ad lib his usa president calling the ussr president! George c marvellous as crazed General turgison. Slim beyond funny! Sterling came out of retirement to fight! Plot unbelievably believable. Good not in colour. More real. Stanley kubrick. Not many films, but all good. I mean he made 2001!clockwork orange! The shining. Also paths of glory. Spartucus. so he's alright. Just buy it.

There is good reason to regard Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) as Stanley Kubrick’s most perfectly realized film. Made at the crossroads of his career, it is the work which carries through to its fullest extent his perception (germinating through The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita) of mechanical man trapping himself within machines of his own making. It is also the film that announces the metaphysical tenor that will be expressed in texts (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon) which will be increasingly open and speculative. In many ways Dr. Strangelove is a classic Kubrick text, but in one sense it is crucially atypical. An achingly funny, tightly structured Swiftian satire, it is the only Kubrick film that communicates so compellingly and so insistently through the spoken word as opposed to his usual insistence on ideas expressing themselves through conceptual cinematography. It relies on a brilliant script (Terry Southern giving terrific satiric bite to Kubrick and Peter George’s adaptation of the latter’s originally very serious novel Red Alert), and a cluster of absolutely marvelous performances which involved a lot of improvisation and necessitated a great deal of temporal re-jigging at the editing stage by Kubrick and his editor Anthony Harvey. The anarchic nature of Dr. Strangelove’s satire necessitated a kind of ‘on the spur of the moment’ inspiration as every day of shooting involved constant re-writing with great emphasis laid on collaboration between all the artists concerned. In a usual Kubrick film it’s fair comment to say actors simply do as they are told and the success of their performances comes down to casting, script and direction, but here in addition to the script and Kubrick’s overall worldview, any analysis has to take into account the amazing acting which is crucial for getting the wicked humor across. What follows contains spoilers. Don’t read if you haven’t seen.As everyone surely knows Dr. Strangelove is the film which made people laugh at thermonuclear global destruction. In 1963 this was outrageous as well as timely for Kubrick here cashes in on the post-World War 2 nuclear paranoia which had just recently flared up in Cuba. Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe were earnest, respectable films made on the same subject which treated it with appropriate gravity. But Kubrick and producer James B. Harris realized nuclear threat could be even scarier if treated irreverently and in Swiftian dead-pan satiric fashion. Like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) their film would be a Juvenalian satire with a clear point of attack. Swift suggested the poor Irish peasants might ease their suffering by selling their children as food to rich English absentee landlords and ladies. His target of attack was the rationalistic thinking of the English establishment at the expense of traditional human values. Likewise Kubrick attacks the rationalist thinking of the American military establishment who also disregard human values. He suggests the nuclear defense system is so ‘full-proof’, so ‘cast-iron safe’ and so ‘reliable’ that it only wants one man in a senior position to make a mistake and the whole system will be compromised, and further to that, the various safeguards and failsafe mechanisms are so efficient that they ensure an unstoppable chain reaction which ends in inevitable nuclear annihilation.The American military establishment is one of Kubrick’s machines in which mechanical man entraps himself and the director breaks it down into three locations – the War Room in the Pentagon containing President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) and his chiefs of staff, the office and the grounds of Burpelson Air Force Base containing base commander Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) who presides over the SAC 843rd Bomb Wing which is air-born constantly, and the inside of a B-52 bomber piloted by Major T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) and stationed 2 hours away from their target in Russia. All characters are mere cogs in the human machine. As per the satiric remit we learn nothing personal about anyone, everyone being extensions of their immediate machines which all interlock at a higher level. Ripper is the cog who fails and causes everyone else to fail in a series of events spun on mechanical inevitability. He goes “a little funny in the head” and orders his planes to attack Russia under the provisions of ‘Wing Attack Plan R,’ the plan authorizing an officer to order an attack if the chain of command from the President has been disrupted. The crew of the B-52 assume America has already been hit by Russian nuclear missiles, seal off all communication to the plane, and concentrate on reaching their target. Ripper orders his airbase be sealed off and protected from any intruding force. Kubrick spends the whole narrative cutting between these 3 locations, each of which is isolated. Not only can each location not communicate with the other, but the characters within each location also cannot communicate with each other. As so often in Kubrick people talk without saying anything. There is no normal dialogue in the film as the English language is laundered of meaning and given 3 brands of inarticulacy. At Burpelson we have lunatic ravings as Ripper rambles incoherently to his executive officer Mandrake (Peter Sellers again) about “the Commie conspiracy,” “purity of essence” and “bodily fluids.” On the B-52 we have an endless stream of military jargon as the crew do what they have to do to dodge a missile and continue to their target. They are very obviously mechanical extensions of the very machine they are flying. And in the War Room we have endless clichés as Muffley listens to his jingoistic USAF Chief of Staff General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and deals with the Russians, the ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (Peter Bull) and, on the hotline, Premier Kissoff. Things get even more ‘mechanized’ when the Russians reveal they have a doomsday machine which will trigger several nuclear bombs which will shroud the world in Cobalt-Thorium G making the planet uninhabitable for 93 years. The device is a deterrent which will be triggered automatically in the event of nuclear attack. Muffley seeks the advice of his director of weapons research Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers in a third performance), an ex-Nazi scientist based loosely on Werner von Braun, representing the fascism in the machine still present almost 20 years after the war who is excited at the prospect of nuclear annihilation and the human race surviving down the bottom of mine shafts. If every character is a cog in the human machine, he is already very visibly half-machine, confined to a wheelchair and struggling with a gloved robot-like hand which has a life of its own.The film is told in linear almost real time and continues unrelentingly to its despicable conclusion, but stressing repeatedly Man’s fault for what happens. Ripper starts the problem, and when Mandrake tries to call the President having intuited the recall code for the planes he is delayed by an army officer with the ridiculous name of ‘Bat Guano’ (Keenan Wynn) who hesitates to shoot the lock off a Coke machine to get change for the public phone. When Mandrake does get through and the planes are recalled, all planes acknowledge except Kong’s B-52 which due to “human initiative” has managed to dodge a missile aimed at it. Muffley assures Kissoff that if he puts everything into the sector of the plane’s primary and secondary targets then the plane will be shot down, but the B-52 has been hit, is losing fuel and so is going to a new target unknown to anyone outside the plane. Finally, the Russian doomsday machine is a nuclear deterrent that would only work if the whole world knows about it, but Kissoff “loves surprises” and fails to tell everyone in time. In this way, at every stage mechanical man combined with human error (in Kong’s case this codes as ‘initiative’) ensures nuclear annihilation is inevitable.Kubrick’s stunning treatment of Swiftian satire ensures that throughout the film the wicked humor is delivered in dead-pan fashion with none of the actors laughing. In this way the serious is made to look ridiculous and the ridiculous is made to look serious. The spectator is caught between laughing at the outrageous situations and gasping at the scary implications of events as they pan out. Kubrick proceeds by introducing things seriously only to undercut them comically. The off-screen narrator announces with grave seriousness the SAC defense system with its B-52s permanently air-born in case of an emergency only to follow it up by showing the pilot of one of the planes (Kong) reading Playboy magazine and another crew member playing cards. We expect the pilot to be a serious type, but as soon as he opens his mouth his Texan drawl announces a cowboy. What’s a cowboy doing piloting a B-52? As he prepares himself to respond to the go-code he dons his magnificent cowboy hat and drawls laconically, “This is it boys. Nuclurur combat toe to toe with the Rooskies!” John Wayne was mooted for the part after Peter Sellars said “no” to a 4th role, but Slim Pickens is perfectly cast here to the extent that once seen we can imagine nobody else in the role. Then, when we are first introduced to Turgidson it is through his ‘private secretary’ Ms. Scott (Tracy Reed) lying on a hotel sunbed in the same pose that we have just seen her as Kong’s Playboy centerfold. The big news that Ripper has flipped is relayed by her to Turgidson who is in the bathroom. A playmate should not be the secretary of the Chief of Staff just as the Chief of Staff should not be giving important directions while voiding his bowels or even giving them ‘through’ his bowels. And so it goes throughout the film, Kubrick continually pulling the rug from underneath serious situations with subversive humor which all the characters fail to see, but we surely do!The comedy is rich and arises mainly from 3 themes that snake through the film seeming to connect the 3 locations as much as they are actually sealed off from each other – food, sex and infantile regression. The opening credit sequence captures all three at once as the child-like graffiti credits appear over two B-52s, one re-fueling the other to the song “Try a Little Tenderness.” The images connote sex as well as a mother giving suck to her baby. Kubrick’s cutting of the concluding custard pie fight in the War Room weakens the food connection, but we still notice food omnipresent throughout. Following the B-52 feeding her ‘baby’ we notice the seriousness of the radio operator’s relay of the attack order to Kong undercut by speaking through a sandwich he is stuffing into his mouth. When Mandrake collects a radio from inside a machine we notice an apple and a banana left there. When Ms. Scott relays the telephone conversation to Turgidson we notice reflected in the mirror behind her the remains of a meal, and in the War Room one side of the triangular construction is lined with a long buffet where we can see amongst other food those custard pies that were eventually cut. When Sadesky arrives he asks if there’s fresh fish and settles for poached eggs. When Kong dishes out the emergency pack supplies prominent among them are rations for 4 days. Ripper never eats but he talks endlessly about bodily fluids and his idea of the Commie conspiracy contaminating ice cream with fluoride. Turgidson spends the entire film chewing down on gum as if it were cud providing for an endless series of hilarious facial expressions, and the concluding scene has him and Muffley sitting in front of the buffet drinking away as Dr. Strangelove gets excited talking about slaughtering cows for the mines.Anthony Macklin has noted the film’s progression from “foreplay to explosion,” the continuing sex metaphor dominating the way these characters think and act throughout. If the “foreplay” is the credits sequence, the “explosion” is the final orgasmic doomsday ride as Kong straddles the nuclear bomb like a giant phallus as he waves his hat and plays the rodeo rider plunging to oblivion. We eventually learn that Jack D. Ripper (the name of the most notorious sex-murderer in history) is sexually somewhat unbalanced, confusing post-coital depression with impotence. This caused him to blame the Commies for sapping his bodily fluids and so he retaliates sexually – by sending bombers out to kill the sappers, by smoking a huge phallic cigar which shrinks as the film goes on, by replacing it with a machine gun and then a pistol with which he blows his own brains out. The film’s most priceless moment comes when Ripper makes his big speech, Kubrick’s camera low looking up stressing the man’s huge cigar suggestive of huge potency as he asks Mandrake, “Do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war? He said war was too important to be left to the generals…But today war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion and the International Communist Conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” The words are completely logical and suggestive of a strong, responsible mindset belonging to those die-hard grass-roots anti-Communists of the day until that is those last 3 words where he is revealed as a crackpot. As said Kubrick gives us plausible seriousness delivered seriously, but then pulls the rug from under our feet which causes us to belly-laugh at something that oughtn’t be funny at all. Sterling Hayden gives an inspired performance throughout – how he could keep a straight face during this speech simply amazes me!Prior to his phallic ride to the ultimate orgasm Kong has been reading Playboy. When the safe is opened to get the Plan R attack profile we see porno pictures on the door. When he dishes out the survival kit in addition to food there are lipsticks, nylons and prophylactics and Kong’s famous line, “Shoot, a fella could have a good time in Vegas with all this stuff.” (Vegas was changed from Dallas because of the JFK assassination). Their primary objective is given as ‘Laputa’ which is not only a flying island visited by Gulliver (thus making the Swift connection explicit) but the Spanish word for ‘whore.’ Sex is also uppermost in Turgidson’s mind as he leaves a sore Ms. Scott telling her to start her sexual “countdown” and be ready to “blast off” on his return. Scott also calls him at the War Room, her sex drive as difficult to satisfy as Turgidson’s. Then right at the end his face lights up at the prospect of living at the bottom of a mine shaft with a ratio of 10 women to 1 man. In the War Room there also sits a President with a rude name – both ‘merkin’ and ‘muffley’ are names for the female pudenda – but his head is ironically bald and phallic-like. His opposite number in Russia is named ‘Kissoff’ and then most sinister of all there is Dr. Strangelove’s darkly erotic sexual nature. As the President sits on a chair rendered impotent by the machine he has lost control of, Strangelove gets excited at the prospect of mineshafts to the point where he stands up from his wheelchair, a throbbing human erection signifying a sinister future for the human race.Even more than food and sex we notice infantile regression increasingly dominates proceedings, especially in the War Room in the three way relationship between Turgidson, Muffley and the Russians. Turgidson starts off carefully, but his over-enthusiasm for a pre-emptory nuclear strike is pure child with childish language and body gestures to match. On the Russian reaction to the American attack he says, “they are going to go absolutely ape,” and with face twitching and eye-brows executing gymnastics he outlines Ripper’s hope for an all-out American attack which “will catch ‘em with their pants down!” He accepts the Russians may still retaliate, but he minimizes the damages with “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops. Depending on the breaks.” George C. Scott’s performance here has to be seen to be believed, cutting to the essence of the jingoistic military man in a brilliant way which is both realistic and completely off the wall. The childishness continues with his objections to Sadesky entering the room (“He’ll see the big board!”) followed by schoolyard name-calling (Kissoff is “an atheist Commie rat”) and then the slapstick highlight of the film where he wrestles with Sadesky over a spy camera which causes President Muffley to reprimand them with the classic line, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight here, this is the War Room!” We notice Turgidson doesn’t just regress to acting the infant (he was that already in the hotel room with Ms. Scott), he regresses back to being an ape. The Russians are not the only ones to “go ape” in the film as he assumes increasingly simian postures, huddled over clutching his book ‘World Targets in Megadeaths,’ standing on a chair for a prayer which gets rudely interrupted and then losing control of himself completely as he imitates (arms spread out) a B-52 landing perfectly when asked by Muffley if Kong’s plane can still get through before he remembers where he is and his apologetic hand comes up to cover his mouth. Scott was reportedly angry with Kubrick for printing the takes where he was only practicing with what he thought was over-acting. Kubrick even retained one take where he accidentally falls over and continues to talk completely in character. He may have complained, but his performance is absolutely brilliant as he was later forced to admit. Peter Sellers is also brilliant, all 3 of him. As Mandrake he is in his element doing a British upper class twit accent. At Burpelson he is the voice of reason as Ripper rambles on madly and Bat Guano equally madly defends the sanctity of private property. As Muffley he excels playing him as a mild-mannered liberal in the image of Adlai Stevenson, the UN ambassador during the Cuban missile crisis. His great infantile regressive moments come in two beautifully judged telephone conversations with Kissoff, the first a series of hilarious childish exchanges (“….it’s good to be fine…”) in which he speaks to a drunk Russian premier in the manner of an adult addressing a 4-year old infant: “Now Dmitri, you know we’ve always talked about the bomb…” Kissoff hilariously directs him to Omsk information because he’s forgotten the phone number of the civil defense agency, and then they waste precious minutes competing to be sorrier than the other. We never hear Kissoff, Sellers getting the conversation across on his own with inspired lunacy. The way he hesitates slightly before announcing Russia is about to be annihilated is again priceless. The second phone call is more fraught as they worry over the loose B-52 – “I’m not hysterical,” says Muffley hysterically to an equally hysterical Kissoff. And of course his advice to “put everything you’ve got in those 2 sectors and you can’t miss,” is completely wrong. Sellers’ third character Strangelove is also very effective for me though other people seem to disagree. He gets the mad German scientist down pat especially when we recognize the Fritz Lang connection. The glove and wild hair comes from Rotwang, the mad scientist in Metropolis (1927) while the wheelchair comes from Hagi, the master criminal in Spione (1928). And we mustn’t forget that in 1964 it was a brave insight to make that fascism was still with us despite Hitler having died 20 years before. If people call Sellers’s portrait infantile then that is precisely the point. This is a film where ‘the masters of the world’ are unmasked as infantile herdmen blindly following mechanized procedures which doom them to ultimate destruction. Such is the nature of modern man says Kubrick (echoing Nietzsche), the rot having set in during the 18th century enlightenment to which Swiftian satire was the natural response.With so much conceptual brilliance concentrated into the script and the acting the visual side of Dr. Strangelove may seem relatively low-key, but Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography and Ken Adam’s marvelous sets are extremely accomplished, suiting the text brilliantly. Kubrick asked Adam to design sets with ceilings, set-ups to be source-lit either from the side or from below. The three main arenas are therefore dark with characters tending to lean into the camera with ceilings bearing down oppressively. Extreme whites and blacks are accentuated making for a threatening series of images – Ripper rambling on nonsensically with Kubrick’s camera looking up capturing his profile with the huge phallic cigar, Turgidson’s simian postures caught again from a low angle as his bulk seems to bully the whole War Room, and Dr. Strangelove caught in the shadows as Turgidson says his prayer about “the valley of fear.” The triangular set for the War Room is inspired with its darkness enveloping a huge round poker table and the computer maps which loom down pressurizing everyone. The visual presentation is in the usual Kubrickian diametrically opposite manner. In the War Room the talk is increasingly animated and out of control so Kubrick captures everything with static cameras, use of wide angle lenses, sensing the drama coming from the actors. In the B-52 the actions of the crew couldn’t be cooler and more mechanized and so Kubrick adds the drama with a handheld camera which he operates himself. Similarly, the outside fighting sequences at Burpelson are handheld while the office with protracted scenes between Ripper and Mandrake are as static as the scenes in the War Room, the drama again allowed to come from the performances. A lot of people might at first object to the artificial use of model planes shot in front of projected images (actually shot over Norway) for the B-52’s protracted run into Russia, but everything falls into place when Kong rides his phallic bomb at the end, a sequence that could only be artificial. With all the artificiality that precedes it, the sequence doesn’t jar at all, the natural culmination of everything that has happened.Finally, perhaps the thing that raises Dr. Strangelove to the level of genius is the film’s passionate anger, an anger which is so essential for Swiftian satire to work. Kubrick is clearly not happy with a power structure which allows for nuclear warfare and in this film he voices his exasperation at the state of modern man that things should have come to such a sorry state. His perception has always been essentially misanthropic and later this view leads to an icy-coldness which remains brilliant, but becomes somehow passion-less. Here, he seems to be amplifying out of the humanism shown so skillfully in Paths of Glory. That was a film set in two spaces which define one another – the French chateau where the generals play with each other, and the trenches where men pay the price for their games. The film’s humanism is present in the voice of Colonel Dax who gives us a clear moral viewpoint condemning the generals and forcing us to sympathize with his men. The angry protest is carefully articulated and was so successful that the film was banned in France for many years. Dr. Strangelove adds a third space to the equation. The French chateau becomes the War Room, the trenches become both Burpelson and the B-52, but the figure of humanism is removed. Dax has no equivalent in the film as everyone becomes extensions of their machines with no humanity involved at all. Kubrick’s misanthropy lies right here, but because he uses satire (in which characters are stripped of personalities and made into comic cyphers) he is able to retain the passion and the anger is allowed to hit home with resounding success. Scary, hilarious, despicably brilliant, as a film I’d say it’s nigh on faultless.

As relevant today as it was in 1964 unfortunately. Another quality release by Criterion who've restored and reconstructed the whole film because the original print was destroyed 50 years ago. Again, as well as wonderful video / audio it comes with a ridiculous amount of interesting extras.

This is the kind of film you feel you should have watched as everybody talks about what a milestone it was. Well, I've watched it now and while there is plenty to admire it doesn't quite compare to the enveloping experience of a modern film. The acting is brilliant, especially George C. Scott. I had no idea what a talent he was, a kind of Woody Harrelson for the Cold War generation. Obviously Peter Sellers draws most of the praise as he plays three roles and he does them all very well. Nice cameos from Sterling Hayden as a mad Airforce base commander and Slim Pickens as a cowboy pilot on a mission. I suppose the real star was director Stanley Kubrick who concocted this clever satire on the US/Soviet arms race, albeit loosely based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. It certainly captures the madness of the age and there are aspects of the movie that could still apply to the strange types who see Donald Trump as a prophet.

Great packaging, great transfer and, rather obviously, a great movie. I can only hope that criterion gives more Stanley Kubrick movies their superb treatment.

Great UK version - has all the packaging and extras from the US release. Criterion UK - we need more of these.