Stanley Kubrick began with a serious source novel and intended to make a political thriller. He began working with the novel's author Peter George but soon came to see the possibilities of comedy in the dizzying cold-war notion of mutually assured destruction. Add touches by Terry Southern and Red Alert becomes Dr Strangelove or How I stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb. What this meant was that however comedic the resulting film became it was also based on meticulous research that gave its settings a authentic look. Compared to the oft compared Fail Safe (same year) with its necessity-driven patchwork of technology, Strangelove looks and feels darker.
That said, the obvious question about this film is how it travels over the decades to generations who were raised without the threat of nuclear war. In no small way the rival Fail Safe delivers an ending that anyone can be sobered by as it involves massive sacrifice following a mistake. Strangelove gives us an ironic fulfilment which didn't take place when the going got tough. What we are left with is more like an elaborate and bitchy comedy of manners that slips into documentary mode here and there. While I think that's true if the film is to be taken as given, there is still too much on offer to withstand such easy dismissal.
The major underlying theme is sex and anxiety about sex. The opening sequence of a plane refuelling mid-air is an act of penetration between two war machines that would not tax the dullest imagination. The fuel pump is phallic but it's the scrotal bulge in the mechanism that seals it and when it withdraws, the open flaps beside the circular entry point are a relaxed vulva. The muzak strings on the audio play an arrangement of Try a Little Tenderness. Jack D. Ripper's monologue about how he discovered his impotence is given in disturbing denial of his own failing physiology. He thinks it inconceivable (nyuck nyuck) that he should come to this; it has to be the commies and their collectivist syndicalist fluoridation of the water supply. His "precious bodily fluids" failure to appear have been enough to start World War III. Buck Turgidson is having an affair with his secretary who is also Playmate of the Month in the copy of Playboy in their bedroom. In a move that doesn't travel well through time, the President's name of Merkin Muffley is intended to write him off as a pussy. The Soviet Premier on the phone is partying hard and probably privately. It's not the sex that's bad, it's the sublimation of it into politics. Disarm the horny!
Once that's out of the way (although it never really exits) there is the decaying matter of ethics as humanity's time is racing to a big finish. The magnificently imagined Pentagon War Room is a mid-century paring down of German Expressionism with its blocky map of the world, metal columns and massive up-lit conference table. Amid the flatly delivered data about the plummeting chances of recalling the plane, and Turgidson's cocky outbursts, there is Peter Sellars in one of three roles as the President who must limit his activity to receipt until he is engorged with intel by which time there is so very little he can do beyond looking for a humane solution. It is to Sellars' credit that he plays Muffley straight and reserved. Against George C. Scott's tempest (Kubrick effectively tricked a bombastic turn out of Scott and it's worth reading about) we are increasingly led to trust at least the motives of the chief, if despairing of his efficacy.
Sellars turn as the R.A.F. officer who tries to control the chaos at Ripper's base, involving containing Ripper himself, while it offers more of the actor's talent for comedy, is still more of a moral centre. He might speak in the tones that Sellars as a Goon would have ridiculed but he insists on the character's core goodness. He must; Sterling Hayden's rigid (and, yes, toxic) masculinity admits no room for variance. Hayden, an actor cast for his physical power, commanding voice and hard presence in westerns and crime dramas, expresses Ripper's obsession as though speaking through a trance. He is so wholly seduced by his own crank logic that it has become quasi religious. His unblinking gaze when talking of his impotence and its supposed cause (in almost every one of his lines) will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed a party conspiracy goof all but physically shrink back into the shadows of their refurbished unreality. All of Ripper's scenes are played for laughs (however black) but the bleakness at their core makes them increasingly eerie.
And then there is the title character, the one Sellars uses to steal the show from himself. Dr Strangelove is twisted in his wheelchair, part designer of WMDs for the American Way, part never-quite-ex-Nazi, he holds the floor with scenarios of the post apocalyptic realm in which the very male-domination of the world would not just be repeated but intensified. Sellars, in hoch show-off mode, manages to impose himself from his mangled form, even doing battle with his own sieg-heiling right arm. His calculating psychopathy is overdone and stunning all at once, from his first gentle voiced statements to the Hitlerian screaming he adopts to the final line which manages to be both pathetic and horrifying at once.
As for Kubrick, beyond the exactness of the performances he drew from his cast (of which I've only scratched the surface) he remains in the black and white of most of his previous films but it's for the last time. But this is a black and white of riches. Whether it's the noir chiaroscuro of the Ripper scenes, the faux stock footage of the attack on the air base, the grainy real footage of B52s at rest and in flight, the cathedral-like muted greyscale of the War Room or the back projected endless vistas of the Russian country, it's a showcase of what may be made of monochrome. After this came the cosmic colour of 2001: A Space Odyssey, workaday Britain of A Clockwork Orange, the landscape and courtly painting of Barry Lyndon and so on, exploring the possibilities of the infinite pallet. For now, though, the sobering look of the daily news.
It's wroth noting that the score, when it isn't smirking at the mating aircraft, centres our attention on the progress of the bomber as it heads into mass destruction. The theme is an old American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home which is loud with hurrahs but really mostly celebrating the return of the warrior rather than his exploits. (It's worth noting, also, that both sides of that conflict adopted the song.) It starts as a tune for a single trumpet but, when we return to the bomber, the arrangement grows until it is a deafening orchestral blare with brittle snare drums sounding the march. This was done by Laurie Johnson, a U.K. composer with a long and distinguished career whose theme for The Avengers won him a lifelong admiration in my heart.
I was twelve when I first saw this. It was on tv and I was helped through it by the laughter and appreciation of older siblings who got the political humour where I wouldn't have. If I knew irony from any ingested culture up to that point I now could name it and recognise it on sight. My '70s in Townsville, which was and remains a significant military centre, was overcast with nuclear threat. I also saw Fail Safe around the same time and thrillers with a World War III theme were effectively worrying. I recall that, while being delighted by the comedy of Dr Strangelove, I was also bluntly reminded of the stakes of its story. It was also easy to see that bad guys could wear good guy uniforms and that the worst things might come out of tiny gripes. I saw that in the movie but it was also evident in the playground at school. It's also in the news as I write this. For the worst and best reasons, this is a film that does endure, even if its intended laughs seem scarcer than they used to be.
Viewing notes: I saw this on the splendid locally available 4K but, really, it has always looked pretty good on home formats so you can't go far wrong. Also available for hire through a few online sources.
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