#821: KUBRICK, Stanley: Dr. Stangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)

KUBRICK, Stanley (United States)

Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb [1964]

Spine #821
Blu-ray

Stanely Kubrick's painfully funny take on cold war anxiety is one of the fircest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood. The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles: Royal Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general (Sterling Hayden); the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded U.S. President Merkin Muffley, who must deliver the very bad news to the Soviet Premier; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound Presidential adviser with a Nazi past. Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist.

95 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2016

Director/Writers

Based on the book Red Alert by Peter George.

Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, George, and Terry Southern.

Kubrick was 36 when he directed Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Other Kubrick films in the Collection:

#575: The Killing (1956)
#538: Paths Of Glory (1957)
#105: Sparticus (1960)
#897: Barry Lyndon (1975)

#1290: Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

The Film

A good satirist must walk an excruciatingly thin line!

Kubrick used every item in his bag of tricks to make this masterpiece, a comedy/thriller that sits right on the edge of serious silliness. A look at how the brilliant screenplay made it to celluloid:

• The opening crawl disclaimer:
• It is the stated position of the U.S. 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 film originally included additional text:
• There is no intent to ridicule the Air Force of the United States, nor any other military organization, foreign or domestic.
• Most likely, Kubrick wrote the first part, and Columbia’s legal department the second, which has since been excised.
• The opening credits (over a B-52 being refueled midair [inferring copulation]) use a funky unique type font designed by Pablo Ferro, set to a calming cue (based on Try a Little Tenderness) by the composer, Laurie Johnson.
• Narration by Peter Bull (who also plays Ambassador Sadesky).
• Four establishing shots:
• An airport runway and surroundings (miniature)
• Sweeping radar antenna
• Parked B-52
• B-52 in the air
• A computer room. Group Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers; one of three roles) takes a phone call from General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden, cigar clenched between his teeth). This opening dialogue sets a tone of seriousness while maintaining a certain aura of incredulous absurdity:
• Group Captain Mandrake speaking.
• This is General Ripper speaking.
• Yes sir.
• Do you recognize my voice, Mandrake?
• I do sir, why do you ask?
• Why do you think I ask?
• Well, I don’t know sir; we spoke just a few moments ago on the phone, didn’t we?
• You don’t think I’d ask if you recognize my voice unless it was pretty damned important, do you Mandrake?
• No, I don’t sir — no.
• Alright, let’s see if we can stay on the ball. Has the wing confirmed holding at their fail-safe point?
• Yes sir, the confirmations have all just come in.
• Very well, now listen to me carefully. The base is being put on condition red. I want this flashed to all sections immediately.
• Condition red, sir, yes. Jolly good idea. Keeps the men on their toes.
• Group Captain, I’m afraid this is not an exercise.
• Not an exercise, sir?
• I shouldn’t tell you this, Mandrake, but you’re a good officer and you have a right to know. It looks like we’re in a shooting war.
• Oh, hell. Are the Russians involved, sir?
• Mandrake, that’s all I’ve been told. It just came in on the red phone. My orders are for this base to be sealed tight, and that’s what I mean to do — seal it tight. Now, I want you to transmit Plan “R” — “R” for Robert — to the wing. Plan “R” for Robert.
• Is it that bad, sir?
• It looks like it’s pretty hairy.
• Yes, sir. Plan “R” for Robert.
• Now last, and possibly most important. I want all privately owned radios to be immediately impounded.
• Yes, sir.
• They might be used to issue instructions to saboteurs. As I previously arranged, air police will have lists of all owners, and I want every single one of them collected without exception.
• Yes, sir.
• And after you’ve done that, report back to me.
• Yes, sir.
• More narration about the B-52s.
• Inside the airplane — at the cockpit: Major Kong (Slim Pickens). The camera pulls back to reveal that he’s reading a Playboy magazine, looking at the centerfold.
• 
• The camera leisurely moves around finding the various crew members before returning to Kong, at rest with his eyes closed. Suddenly an alarm sounds.
• The camera zooms in on the CRM-114 discriminator.
• Lt. Goldberg (Paul Tamarin) decodes the order (Wing attack Plan R).
• At this point, Johnson incorporates When Johnny Comes Marching Home into the soundtrack.

Thus, at only 0:11:55 into the film, the plot is unmistakably clear — the two superpowers are about to engage in nuclear combat.

• A bikini-clad young woman — Miss Scott (Tracy Reed, stepdaughter of director Carol Reed) — is lying face down on a bed. (We’ve already seen her! She’s pictured in the Playboy centerfold [above].) The telephone rings.
• Buck, should I get it?
• (We can infer that General Buck Turgidson [George C. Scott] is in the bathroom) … Yeah, you’ll have to.
• A brilliant scene — a three-way conversation — the camera remains on her as she relays what the officer on the phone (“Freddie” — Miss Scott seems to know him) is saying, and Turgidson’s off-camera responses.
• The next scene features the voice of Ripper commanding his troops.
• You’re Commie has no regard for human life, not even his own.
• Dramatic tension: During Ripper’s speech, we see radios being collected and confiscated. Mandrake turns off the lights in the computer room, and while looking at a printer, finds a radio, turns it on and hears music. He makes a beeline for Ripper’s office.
• Cut back to the B-52. The top secret attack plan envelopes are passed out.
• The code prefix is set and locked (OPE).

Note the fantastic sync of these process shots where we see the arctic landscape through the windows of the plane. (The second unit was three weeks filming this icy scenery in Greenland and the Arctic.)

• Cut to a very Kubrick-ian POV shot — a long hallway; we hear the sound of the radio Mandrake has confiscated as he heads to Ripper’s office. (We see similar shots in many future Kubrick films — 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]; The Shining [1980], for example.)
• Unusual close-ups of Ripper (low angle), his gun, and Mandrake.
• An important bit of dialogue, reflecting Kubrick’s view of how a nut-case like Ripper could possibly initiate this type of end-of-the-world scenario:
• Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?
• No, I don’t think I do, sir — no.
• He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians.
• Establishing shot of the Pentagon. War room. (A remarkable shot, using a wide-angle lens; the lower half of the frame shows 13 or 14 men sitting under a circular ring; the upper half divided with a map of the US and USSR.
•  (Ken Adam gets huge credit for his production design.)
• Sellers in his second role here, as President Merkin Muffley. The back and forth between Sellers and Scott here is brilliantly written and acted.
• Equally compelling is the hushed conversation between Buck and Miss Scott, who has called him in the war room.
• Listen, shug, don’t forget to say your prayers.
• Cut to the B-52, as Kong recites the contents of the survival kit (see note below, on how Dallas had to be changed to Vegas).
• Cut to the ambassador entering the war room.
• Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here — this is the war room!
• Cut to exterior of Burpelson Air Force Base; viewed from binoculars, as General Faceman (Gordon Tanner)’s troops attack.
• Cut to Ripper’s office.
• Cut back to war room. The ambassador speaks to Premier Kissoff in Russian. It is not translated in the subtitles.
• Hello? Hello? Hello, Comrade Kissoff! This is Alexei de Sadesky speaking! … Yes… Yes… We’ve found President Merkin Muffley! … Yes, he’s here! … No, Comrade Premier, he’s not drunk! … No, I’m not drunk!
• The “doomsday machine” is mentioned.
• Cut back to Ripper’s office. How a commie never drinks water, only Vodka.
• Cut back to the war room. We finally meet Dr. Strangelove (Sellers, role #3) …
• … as director of weapons research and development, I commissioned last year a study of this project by the Bland Corporation.
• Barely concealing the real RAND Corporation (research & development).
• Staines (Jack Creley) tells Turgidson how Strangelove anglicized his original name: Merkwurdichliebe.
• Cuts between Air Force base exterior and Ripper’s office; gunfire.
• Ripper’s suicide; immediate cut to the B-52.
• Evading missile. Explosion; the airplane is losing power.
• Once again, the process shots are spectacular.
• Mandrake is studying a paper Ripper drew with doodles containing connected phrases: “Peace On Earth/Purity of Essence.” Col. “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) shoots open the door.
• Cut back to the airplane, now flying low.
• Lt. Zogg (James Earl Jones, in his very first film role):
• Major Kong, is it possible this is some kind of loyalty test? You know, use the go code and then recall to see who would actually go?
• Cut back to Guano holding a gun on Mandrake, who says:
• I can assure you, if you don’t put that gun away and stop this stupid nonsense, the Court of Inquiry on this’ll give you such a pranging, you’ll be lucky if you end up wearing the uniform of a bloody toilet attendant!
• Mandrake orders Guano to shoot the vending machine in order to get change for the telephone (yes, kids, you used to need actual money to feed a telephone booth in order to make a long-distance call!)
• If you don’t get the president of the United States on that phone, you know what’s going to happen to you?
• What?
• You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
• 
• The recall code has been received. The cuts between the war room and the B-52 quicken.
• The bomb door won’t open. Kong goes down to the bomb bay and sits astride the bomb as he attempts to repair the wiring to open the door. Johnson’s score accentuates the tension.
• The door opens. Kong rides the bomb to his target, screaming yahoos all the way.
• Impact! All sound is cut off as we see a mushroom cloud.
• Cut back to the war room. Strangelove speaks about surviving a nuclear blast deep in mine shafts.
• Mein Führer, I can walk!
• Fast cutting of various mushroom clouds, as the soundtrack blares out We’ll meet again (Vera Lynn). Dark irony.
• We’ll meet again. Don’t know where, don’t know when.

Film Rating (0-60):

57

The Extras

The Booklet

The contents contain a twenty-four page booklet (screenwriter Southern) and a loose-leaf four pager with an essay by scholar David Bromwich.

Be sure to give the envelope a shake so this cute mini-sized booklet will pop out:

which begins with four English questions translated into Russian (both Cyrillic and transliteration): Does anyone here speak English? / Help! / I don’t understand / Where is the toilet?

Normally found in the larger booklet, Criterion decided to put the Cast/Crew/Credits in this tiny little miniature! There follows an article on the restoration and more credits.

Bromwich:

“A canonical satire that Dr. Strangelove holds steadily in view is Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathan Swift, in his impersonation of an eighteenth-century explorer memoirist, offered a point-by-point negation of Enlightenment humanism, and Kubrick aimed for an approach just as unsparing toward the optimism of mass democracy and modern technology: the little-guy heroes of Dr. Strangelove are slated to bomb ‘the missile complex at Laputa.’ What Swift’s novel did for the age of the orrery, Kubrick doubtless hoped his film would do for the age of the cyclotron. Yet Swift elsewhere added a reservation about the mode in which he worked: ‘Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own’ — a pertinent warning about how cheaply satire may buoy up the complacency of the spectator. Only by a masterly deployment of cinematic realism, grafted onto a plot and characters of the grossest extravagance, was Kubrick able to construct a mirror in which we discover a face that resembles our own.”

Southern:

“Mo Rothman, I was to learn, was the person Columbia Pictures had designated executive producer on the film, which meant that he was the bridge, the connection, the interpreter, between the otherwise incomprehensible artist and the various moneybags incarnate who were financing the film … the studio continued to distance itself from the film. Even when Strangelove received the infrequent good review, it dismissed the critic as a pinko nutcase, and on at least one occasion the Columbia Pictures publicity department defended the company against the film by saying it was definitely not ‘anti-U.S. military’ but ‘just a zany novelty flick which did not reflect the views of the corporation in any way.’ This party line persisted, I believe, until about five years ago, when the Library of Congress announced that the film had been selected as one of the fifty greatest American films of all time, in a ceremony at which I noted Rothman in prominent attendance. Who said satire was ‘something that closed Wednesday in Philadelphia?’”

Commentary

None.

Interviews

Kubrick scholar Mick Broderick.

• How Kubrick attained creative control and became his own producer;
• Themes of Strangelove: the machine versus humanity;
• How Kubrick’s knowledge of chess paralleled his capabilities as director/editor;
• Sellers’ performances, culled from multiple takes;
• Scott’s over-the-top performance;
• 20-30 minutes of material left on the cutting room floor;
• President Muffley’s cold — all cut out;
• Major Kong sings a cowboy song;
• General Turgidson sings “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to Dr. Strangelove;
• Production delay due to Sellers’ acccident (sprained ankle) which led to him being unable to do a fourth role — Major Kong.
•  Loss of a film reel, which had to be reconstructed from memory;
• Kennedy assassination (Kong’s line: “shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas” [originally Dallas]);
• The Fail-Safe lawsuit;
• Kubrick’s involvement and hassles with Columbia about with the marketing of the film.

and Rodney Hill, archivist Richard Daniels, DP and camera innovator Joe Dunton, camera operator Kelvin Pike, and David George, son of Peter, on whose novel Red Alert the film is based.

Excerpts

From a 1966s audio interview with Kubrick, conducted by physicist and author Jeremy Bernstein.

Kubrick discusses how his interest in thermonuclear war was piqued during the 1961 Berlin crisis. He also speaks about his collaboration with Southern and his need to be his own editor.

The Art of Stanley Kubrick

Interviews with James Earl Jones, Lee Minoff, John Baxter, Alexander Walker, Roger Caras, James B. Harris, Anthony Harvey, Oswald Morris, Ken Adam, Kelvin Pike, and Gilbert Taylor. 

Kirk Douglas after Kubrick took over directing Spartacus (1960) {Spine #105}:

Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit.

Columbia insisted that a condition of financing would be that Sellers again play multiple roles.

Stanley Kubrick’s Pursuit of Perfection:

Kelvin Pike (camera operator):

Stanley’s philosophy is simplicity, although he was really keen on his technology, he often said, “I wish I could just get in a car with a couple of people and go off and make a movie.”

Joe Dunton (cinematographer):

He was a great friend of the camera crew. Stanley would make a connection purely for knowledge; if he knows that you’re knowledgeable — and there was nobody more knowledgeable than dear old Gilbert (Taylor) … 

Inside Dr. Strangelove

Harris, Walker, Minoff, Adam, Carol and Nile Southern (wife and son of Terry), Jones, Bridget Sellers (wardrobe), Peter Murton (art director), Gilbert and Dee Taylor (his wife), Ray Lovejoy (assistant editor), Joe McGrath (friend of Sellers), who reports:

The script read, I have this thing in my leg … Sellers improvised:

Jack, I’d love to come, but um what’s happened, you see, is the string in my leg’s gone.

Pamela Carlton (continuity) on Sellers as President Muffley:

And though the conversations were actually scripted, Peter started and then only really delivered the first line of the script, and after that he just improvised …

Sellers was initially slated to play four roles, but he had to cede Major Kong to Pickens due to an ankle injury:

Shane Rimmer (Captain Owens):

They had the plane suspended about fifteen feet in the air, and Sellers was in the cockpit, and he and Kubrick were engaged in an awful row. Sellers got so taken away with the whole thing, that he fell out of the cockpit.

Caras:

You’ve got to shoot. So what do you do? If you’re Stanley Kubrick, you go get Slim Pickens.

Baxter:

As it turned out, Slim Pickens had never left the United States; he had to hurry and get his first passport.

Kubrick won over Scott with a chessboard:

Tracy Reed:

Watching George C. Scott, who took hours looking at the chessboard and planning his moves, and then Kubrick would walk over and just do his moves instantly, and won almost every time.

Scott felt Kubrick was encouraging him overact.

Jones:

Kubrick manipulated some of those performances out of George, by saying “okay George, you give it to me straight, or you give it to me simple — now I want you to go over-the-top!”

Sidney Lumet:

We started casting. Henry Fonda was already set, which of course meant a big commitment in terms of money — I was set, Walter Matthau was set — and suddenly this lawsuit arrived, filed by Stanley Kubrick and Columbia Pictures.

Bud Rosenthal (director of publicity for Columbia Pictures):

The thoughts were vaguely similar, but totally different approach, and we handled it that way — Fail Safe (1964) {Spine #1011} was much more of a melodrama.

Ferro:

I got a phone call from Stanley, and he says, “Pablo, do you know that you misspelled a word?”

Base should be Based.

From the infamous deleted pie-fight scene:

Kubrick took an active role in marketing the film. This poster was his main idea:

Richard Kahn (advertising and publicity):

Some of us resisted that cartoon art and fought with Stanley to add a photographic element to the campaign and ultimately that art was supplemented with little postage stamp inserts of each of the principal characters:

Sid Ganis (publicist):

The trailer became the new frontier for trailer-making and the print ad became the new frontier for print advertising.

Bosley Crowther’s review (February 16, 1964)

Exploding Myths: Richard Daniels on the Stanley Kubrick Archive

Richard Daniels:

The archive gives us an insight into a man who so much is spoken about and so much is theorized over, but often isn’t really based on primary evidence.

No Fighting in the War Room

Robert McNamara:

During the seven years I was Secretary, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, we were facing the threat of Soviet movement against the West in some fashion that we might have to respond to with military action. I’ll give you an illustration: in September of 1961 — a few months after President Kennedy had been inaugurated — the Soviets tried to take West Berlin away from NATO.

Bob Woodward:

Nuclear deterrence did not make sense, but what was the alternative? Seeing that there were none, it seemed to make sense.

Best Sellers

Roger Ebert, Shirley MacLaine, David Frost and Michael Palin discuss Sellers’ genius.

Transcending Time: Symbols and Strangelove

Rodney Hill

It’s almost like he’s saying, “okay, we’re pretty despicable as a race of beings, but we still have the capacity for humanity; there is still the capacity for compassion and art …”

Split Screen Marketing

Sellers and Scott.

March 12, 1980 Today Show interview with Sellers

Sellers is very genuine here, cracking up Gene Shalit and displaying various accents.

Exhibitor’s trailer (16:53)

Theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

57 + 36 =

93

By Director
By Spine #