Widely hailed as the greatest black comedy ever filmed, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb[1] is Stanley Kubrick's subversive take on a common Cold War theme[2]. Deranged Brig. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has sent his squadron of planes an order to attack the Soviet Union as they held at the fail-safe point, and subsequently made it impossible for anyone other than him to call the planes back. When news of this reaches Washington, President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) calls his advisors to the war room, where General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) suggests the best plan of action may be to back the planes up with a coordinated all-out offensive that's sure to cripple the Soviet forces and limit American casualties to twenty million, tops. But the Russians, to everyone's surprise, have just completed a "Doomsday Machine" designed to destroy all plant and animal life on the planet, and even they cannot prevent it from retaliating.
Combine the plot details with the direction of Stanley Kubrick, and it's probably safe to assume that few people in 1964 automatically assumed Dr. Strangelove would be a biting political satire. But on second thought, maybe they did. In retrospect, Dr. Strangelove feels like a departure from Kubrick's normal fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Full Metal Jacket (1987)[3], but Dr. Strangelove pre-dates them all.
So a comedy doesn't seem like a Kubrick project to us, but it makes sense when you view it in context. This is a man who had done several self-produced projects, which he had parlayed into the Kirk Douglas war film Paths of Glory (1957). When Douglas couldn't get along with Anthony Mann, he replaced Mann with Kubrick for Spartacus (1960), primarily to serve as a figurehead through whom Douglas could operate. Naturally, this didn't work. Kubrick took over, then made Lolita (1962), a lighthearted[4] version of the Vladimir Nabokov novel that featured a supporting turn by Peter Sellers. All this is to say that when you view Kubrick's career in that sequence, a Peter Sellers dark comedy isn't all that unexpected. In fact, it's a rather natural progression.
Article comments
1 - Joey
Gee an Anti-War comedy. Don't take it the wrong way, but there is nothing funny about war... and as benign as the Cold War is made to seem. It wasn't.
Let's see... Fail safe, good. On the beach, very good. Those "plots" were very real. The Cuban missile crises, had us sitting in the hallways of elementary schools with our heads between our legs. In Seattle no less! There was nothing funny about it. I'm glad it's over... but 9/11 brings it all painfully back... China is looming on the horizen, Russia may be, Iran is to the middle east, what the CCCP/USSR was to Europe and America... a very real, very hard and credible threat.
2 - El Bicho
[4] At least, that's what I'm told. I haven't seen it.
You've been told wrong. It's certianly not as realistic as it could have been due to the era it was shot in, but light-hearted it is not. Yours is the first article I've seen online to include footnotes. Interesting idea, but the scrolling up and down makes for a tough read as it screws up the pacing.
"Gee an Anti-War comedy. Don't take it the wrong way, but there is nothing funny about war"
Sorry, but this film is very funny. As is, M*A*S*H, Stalag 17 and a number of other war films. Maybe it's a sensitive issue today.
3 - Bliffle
"Lolita" was an amusing novel, in the Nabakov way, which, of course, is different from anyone elses way. The first film was pretty good, but lacked the frothiness of the book.
"Dr. Strangelove" was well known to be a black comedy, and anti-war, before it appeared in theaters. I remember some priceless scenes, like Sterling Hayden blithering that the commies were "trying to pollute our vital juices" which was a scant parody of what some political nut was actually saying, and one of the jingoists stopping the guy breaking into a coke machine to get some quarters for the payphone so he could make the call to save the world, with "You can't do that, it's private property!"
4 - Lucas McNelly
joey,
sure, war isn't funny, but to suggest that Dr. Strangelove is anything but an anti-war comedy is absolutely absurd. the threat may have been real, but that's pretty irrelevant when talking about this film. real or not, it was a perceived threat and that's what the film is dealing w/.
el bicho,
the footnotes in the brackets are something a friend of mine started and i've adopted. i find them usefull for dumping "facts" (i.e. awards and whatnot) that would break up the flow of the paragraph. also, sometimes i use them in vain attempts to be clever.