| Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster by Tomi Ungerer
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| Directed by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Produced by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Screenplay by |
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| Based on | Red Alert by Peter George |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Laurie Johnson |
| Cinematography | Gilbert Taylor |
| Edited by | Anthony Harvey |
Production
company | |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release date
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Running time
| 94 minutes |
| Country |
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| Language | English |
| Budget | $1.8 million |
| Box office | $9.4 million (North America) |
Dr. Strangelove, trailer
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, more commonly known simply as Dr. Strangelove, is a 1964 black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick and stars Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens. Production took place in the United Kingdom. The film is loosely based on Peter George's thriller novel Red Alert (1958).
The story concerns an unhinged United States Air Force general who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It separately follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Royal Air Force (RAF) exchange officer as they attempt to prevent the crew of a B-52 plane (who were ordered by the general) from nuking the Soviets and starting an atomic holocaust.
The film is often considered one of the best comedies ever made,
as well as one of the greatest films of all time. In 1998, the American
Film Institute ranked it twenty-sixth in its list of the best American movies (in the 2007 edition, the film ranked thirty-ninth), and in 2000, it was listed as number three on its list of the funniest American films. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress included Dr. Strangelove as one of the first twenty-five films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which houses the Strategic Air Command (SAC) 843rd Bomb Wing, flying B-52 bombers armed with hydrogen bombs. The 843rd Wing is flying on airborne alert, two hours from their targets inside the USSR.
Ripper
explains to Mandrake that he discovered the Communist plot to pollute
Americans' "precious bodily fluids" during "the physical act of love".
General Ripper orders his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake of the UK Royal Air Force,
to put the base on alert, and to issue "Wing Attack Plan R" to the
patrolling aircraft, one of which is commanded by Major T. J. "King"
Kong. All of the aircraft commence an attack flight on the USSR and set their radios to allow communications only through their CRM 114 discriminators,
which was designed to accept only communications preceded by a secret
three-letter code known only to General Ripper. Mandrake discovers that
no war order has been issued by the Pentagon and he tries to stop
Ripper, who locks them both in his office. Ripper tells Mandrake that he
believes the Soviets have been using fluoridation
of the American water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids"
of Americans. Mandrake realizes that Ripper has gone insane.
In the War Room
at the Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson briefs President Merkin Muffley
and other officers about how Plan R enables a senior officer to launch a
strike against the Soviets if all superiors have been killed in a first strike
on the United States. Turgidson reports that his men are trying every
possible three-letter CRM code to issue the stand-down order, but that
could take over two days and the planes are due to reach their targets
in a couple of hours. Muffley orders the U.S. Army
to storm the base and arrest General Ripper. Turgidson then attempts to
convince Muffley to let the attack continue, but Muffley refuses to be
party to a nuclear first strike. Instead, he brings Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadeski into the War Room to telephone Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov on the "hot line". Muffley warns the Premier of the impending attack and offers to reveal the positions of the bombers and targets so that the Soviets can protect themselves.
After a heated discussion in Russian with the Premier, the
ambassador informs President Muffley that the Soviet Union has created a
doomsday machine, which consists of many buried bombs jacketed with "cobalt-thorium G"
connected to a computer network set to detonate them automatically
should any nuclear attack strike the country. Within two months after
detonation, the cobalt-thorium G would encircle the planet in a
radioactive "doomsday shroud", wiping out all human and animal life, and
rendering the surface of the Earth uninhabitable. The device cannot be
deactivated, as it is programmed to explode if any such attempt is made.
When the President's wheelchair-bound scientific advisor, the former Nazi German
Dr. Strangelove, points out that such a doomsday machine would only be
an effective deterrent if everyone knew about it, de Sadeski replies
that the Soviet Premier had planned to reveal its existence to the world
the following week.
Meanwhile, U.S. Army
troops arrive at Burpelson. General Ripper then shoots and kills
himself, while Mandrake identifies Ripper's CRM code from his desk
blotter ("OPE," a variant of both Peace on Earth and Purity of Essence)
and relays this code to the Pentagon. Using the recall code, SAC
successfully recalls all of the bombers except one whose radio equipment
has been destroyed. The Soviets attempt to find it, but its commanding
officer, Major Kong, with his fuel dwindling, has switched to a closer
backup target. As the plane approaches the new target, the crew is
unable to open the damaged bomb bay doors. Kong enters the bomb bay and repairs the broken electrical wiring while sitting on the H-bomb,
whereupon the doors open and the bomb is dropped. With Kong straddling
it, the bomb falls and detonates over a Soviet missile site.
Bomber commander Major T. J. Kong riding the bomb down.
Back in the War Room, Dr. Strangelove recommends that the President
gather several hundred thousand people to live in deep underground mines
where the radiation will not penetrate. He suggests a 10:1
female-to-male ratio for a breeding program to repopulate the Earth once
the radiation has subsided. Turgidson, worried that the Soviets will do
the same, warns about a "mineshaft gap",
while Alexei secretly photographs the war room. Dr. Strangelove
declares he has a plan, but then rises from his wheelchair and announces
"Mein Führer, I can walk!" as the Doomsday Machine activates. The film
ends with a montage of many nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn's version of the World War II song "We'll Meet Again".
Cast
- Peter Sellers as:
- Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a British RAF exchange officer
- President Merkin Muffley, the President of the United States
- Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound nuclear war expert and former Nazi
- George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, the USAF Chief of Staff
- Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, a paranoid SAC commander
- Keenan Wynn as Colonel Bat Guano, the Army officer who finds Mandrake and the dead Ripper
- Slim Pickens as Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber's commander and pilot
- Peter Bull as Soviet Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski
- James Earl Jones as Lieutenant Lothar Zogg, the B-52's bombardier
- Tracy Reed as Miss Scott, General Turgidson's secretary and mistress, the film's only female character. She also appears as "Miss Foreign Affairs," the Playboy Playmate in Playboy's June 1962 issue, which Major Kong is shown perusing at one point.
- Shane Rimmer as Capt. Ace Owens, the co-pilot of the B-52
Peter Sellers's multiple roles
Peter Sellers's roles
President Merkin Muffley
Dr. Strangelove
Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the film if Peter Sellers
played at least four major roles. The condition stemmed from the
studio's opinion that much of the success of Kubrick's previous film Lolita
(1962) was based on Sellers's performance in which his single character
assumes a number of identities. Sellers had also played three roles in The Mouse That Roared (1959). Kubrick accepted the demand, later explaining that "such crass and grotesque stipulations are the sine qua non of the motion-picture business".
Sellers ended up playing three of the four roles written for him.
He had been expected to play Air Force Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 Stratofortress
aircraft commander, but from the beginning, Sellers was reluctant. He
felt his workload was too heavy, and he worried he would not properly
portray the character's Texas accent. Kubrick pleaded with him, and he asked the screenwriter Terry Southern
(who had been raised in Texas) to record a tape with Kong's lines
spoken in the correct accent. Using Southern's tape, Sellers managed to
get the accent right, and he started acting in the scenes in the
aircraft, but then sprained his ankle and he could not work in the
cramped cockpit set.
Sellers is said to have improvised much of his dialogue,
with Kubrick incorporating the ad-libs into the written screenplay so
the improvised lines became part of the canonical screenplay, a practice
known as retroscripting.
Group Captain Lionel Mandrake
According to film critic Alexander Walker, the author of biographies of both Sellers and Kubrick, the role of Group Captain
Lionel Mandrake was the easiest of the three for Sellers to play, since
he was aided by his experience of mimicking his superiors while serving
in the Royal Air Force during World War II. There is also a heavy resemblance to Sellers' friend and occasional co-star Terry-Thomas and the prosthetic-limbed RAF ace Sir Douglas Bader.
President Merkin Muffley
For his performance as President Merkin Muffley, Sellers assumed the accent of an American Midwesterner. Sellers drew inspiration for the role from Adlai Stevenson, a former Illinois governor who was the Democratic candidate for the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections and the U.N. ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In early takes, Sellers faked cold
symptoms to emphasize the character's apparent weakness. That caused
frequent laughter among the film crew, ruining several takes. Kubrick
ultimately found this comic portrayal inappropriate, feeling that
Muffley should be a serious character. In later takes Sellers played the role straight, though the President's cold is still evident in several scenes.
In keeping with Kubrick's satirical character names, a "merkin" is a pubic hair wig. The president is bald, and his last name is "Muffley"; both are additional homages to a merkin.
Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove is an ex-Nazi scientist, suggesting Operation Paperclip, the US effort to recruit top German technical talent at the end of World War II.
He serves as President Muffley's scientific adviser in the War Room.
When General Turgidson wonders aloud what kind of name "Strangelove" is,
saying to Mr. Staines (Jack Creley) that it is not a "Kraut name", Staines responds that Strangelove's original German surname was Merkwürdigliebe
("Strange love" in German) and that "he changed it when he became a
citizen". Twice in the film, Strangelove accidentally addresses the
president as Mein Führer. Dr. Strangelove did not appear in the book Red Alert.
John von Neumann proposed the strategy of mutual assured destruction
The character is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, mathematician and Manhattan Project principal John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (a central figure in Nazi Germany's rocket development program recruited to the US after the war), and Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb". It has been claimed that the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this; Sellers said, "Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger—that's a popular misconception. It was always Wernher von Braun." Furthermore, Henry Kissinger points out in his memoirs that at the time of the writing of Dr. Strangelove, he was an unknown academic.
The wheelchair-using Strangelove furthers a Kubrick trope of the menacing, seated antagonist, first depicted in Lolita through the character "Dr. Zaempf". Strangelove's accent was influenced by that of Austrian-American photographer Weegee, who worked for Kubrick as a special photographic effects consultant. Strangelove's appearance echoes the mad scientist archetype as seen in the character Rotwang in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis
(1927). Sellers's Strangelove takes from Rotwang the single black
gloved hand (which, in Rotwang's case is mechanical, because of a lab
accident), the wild hair and, most importantly, his ability to avoid
being controlled by political power. According to Alexander Walker, Sellers improvised Dr. Strangelove's lapse into the Nazi salute,
borrowing one of Kubrick's black leather gloves for the uncontrollable
hand that makes the gesture. Dr. Strangelove apparently suffers from alien hand syndrome.
Kubrick wore the gloves on the set to avoid being burned when handling
hot lights, and Sellers, recognizing the potential connection to Lang's
work, found them to be menacing.
Slim Pickens as Major T. J. "King" Kong
Wing Attack Plan R, fresh from the cockpit's safe, allows a nuclear strike without the President's authorization.
Slim Pickens, an established character actor
and veteran of many Western films, was eventually chosen to replace
Sellers as Major Kong after Sellers' injury. Terry Southern's
biographer, Lee Hill, said the part was originally written with John Wayne in mind, and that Wayne was offered the role after Sellers was injured, but he immediately turned it down. Dan Blocker of the Bonanza western television series was approached to play the part, but according to Southern, Blocker's agent rejected the script as being "too pinko". Kubrick then recruited Pickens, whom he knew from his brief involvement in a Marlon Brando western film project that was eventually filmed as One-Eyed Jacks.
His fellow actor James Earl Jones
recalls, "He was Major Kong on and off the set—he didn't change a
thing—his temperament, his language, his behavior." Pickens was not told
that the movie was a black comedy, and he was only given the script for
scenes he was in, to get him to play it "straight".
Kubrick's biographer John Baxter explained, in the documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove:
As it turns out, Slim Pickens had never left the United States. He had to hurry and get his first passport. He arrived on the set, and somebody said, "Gosh, he's arrived in costume!", not realizing that that's how he always dressed ... with the cowboy hat and the fringed jacket and the cowboy boots—and that he wasn't putting on the character—that's the way he talked.
Pickens, who had previously played only supporting and character
roles, said that his appearance as Maj. Kong greatly improved his
career. He later commented, "After Dr. Strangelove the roles, the dressing rooms, and the checks all started getting bigger."
George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson
General Buck Turgidson imitating a low-flying B-52 "frying chickens in a barnyard"
Kubrick tricked Scott into playing the role of Gen. Turgidson far
more ridiculously than Scott was comfortable doing. Kubrick talked Scott
into doing over-the-top "practice" takes, which Kubrick told Scott
would never be used, as a way to warm up for the "real" takes. Kubrick
used these takes in the final film, causing Scott to swear never to work
with Kubrick again.
During the filming, Kubrick and Scott had different opinions
regarding certain scenes, but Kubrick got Scott to conform largely by
repeatedly beating him at chess, which they played frequently on the set.
Scott, a skilled player himself, later said that while he and Kubrick
may not have always seen eye to eye, he respected Kubrick immensely for
his skill at chess.
Production
Novel and screenplay
Stanley Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident that built on the widespread Cold War fear for survival. While doing research, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and paradoxical "balance of terror" between nuclear powers. At Kubrick's request, Alastair Buchan (the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies) recommended the thriller novel Red Alert by Peter George. Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an article written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The Observer, and immediately bought the film rights. In 2006, Schelling wrote that conversations between Kubrick, Schelling, and George in late 1960 about a treatment of Red Alert updated with intercontinental missiles eventually led to the making of the film.
In collaboration with George, Kubrick started writing a screenplay based
on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some
brief consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn.
In following the tone of the book, Kubrick originally intended to film
the story as a serious drama. However, as he later explained during
interviews, he began to see comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction as he wrote the first draft. Kubrick said:
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.
Among the titles that Kubrick considered for the film were Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying, Dr. Strangelove's Secret Uses of Uranus, and Wonderful Bomb. After deciding to make the film a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer in late 1962. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian, which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers,
and which itself became a Sellers film in 1969. Southern made important
contributions to the film, but his role led to a rift between Kubrick
and Peter George; after Life
magazine published a photo-essay on Southern in August 1964 which
implied that Southern had been the script's principal author—a
misperception neither Kubrick nor Southern did much to dispel—Peter
George wrote an indignant letter to the magazine, published in its
September 1964 issue, in which he pointed out that he had both written
the film's source novel and collaborated on various incarnations of the
script over a period of ten months, whereas "Southern was briefly
employed ... to do some additional rewriting for Kubrick and myself and
fittingly received a screenplay credit in third place behind Mr. Kubrick and myself".
Sets and filming
Dr. Strangelove was filmed at Shepperton Studios, near London, as Sellers was in the middle of a divorce at the time and unable to leave England. The sets occupied three main sound stages:
the Pentagon War Room, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber and the last one
containing both the motel room and General Ripper's office and outside
corridor. The studio's buildings were also used as the Air Force base exterior. The film's set design was done by Ken Adam, the production designer of several James Bond films (at the time he had already worked on Dr. No). The black and white cinematography was by Gilbert Taylor, and the film was edited by Anthony Harvey and an uncredited Kubrick. The original musical score for the film was composed by Laurie Johnson and the special effects were by Wally Veevers. The theme of the chorus from the bomb run scene is a modification of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Sellers and Kubrick got on famously during the film's production and shared a love of photography.
Model of the War Room constructed for the film.
The War Room with the Big Board.
For the War Room, Ken Adam first designed a two-level set which
Kubrick initially liked, only to decide later that it was not what he
wanted. Adam next began work on the design that was used in the film, an
expressionist set that was compared with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It was an enormous concrete room (130 feet (40 m) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide, with a 35-foot (11 m)-high ceiling)
suggesting a bomb shelter, with a triangular shape (based on Kubrick's
idea that this particular shape would prove the most resistant against
an explosion). One side of the room was covered with gigantic strategic
maps reflecting in a shiny black floor inspired by dance scenes in Fred Astaire
films. In the middle of the room there was a large circular table lit
from above by a circle of lamps, suggesting a poker table. Kubrick
insisted that the table would be covered with green baize
(although this could not be seen in the black and white film) to
reinforce the actors' impression that they are playing 'a game of poker
for the fate of the world.' Kubrick asked Adam to build the set ceiling in concrete
to force the director of photography to use only the on-set lights from
the circle of lamps. Moreover, each lamp in the circle of lights was
carefully placed and tested until Kubrick was happy with the result.
Lacking cooperation from the Pentagon
in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft
cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52
and relating this to the geometry of the B-52's fuselage. The B-52 was
state-of-the-art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off-limits to the
film crew. When some United States Air Force
personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they
said that "it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which
was the CRM." It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned about whether Adam's team had carried out all its research legally.
In several shots of the B-52 flying over the polar ice en route to Russia, the shadow of the actual camera plane, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress,
is visible on the icecap below. The B-52 was a scale model composited
into the Arctic footage, which was sped up to create a sense of jet
speed. Home movie footage included in Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove
on the 2001 Special Edition DVD release of the film shows clips of the
B-17 with a cursive "Dr. Strangelove" painted over the rear entry hatch
on the right side of the fuselage.
In 1967, some of the flying footage from Dr Strangelove was re-used in The Beatles' television film Magical Mystery Tour. As told by editor Roy Benson in the BBC Radio Documentary Celluloid Beatles, the production team of Magical Mystery Tour lacked footage to cover the sequence for the song "Flying". Benson had access to the aerial footage filmed for the B52 sequences of Dr Strangelove, which was stored at Shepperton Studios. The use of the footage prompted Kubrick to call Benson to complain.
Fail Safe
Red Alert author Peter George collaborated on the screenplay with Kubrick and satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert
was more solemn than its film version, and it did not include the
character Dr. Strangelove, though the main plot and technical elements
were quite similar. A novelization
of the actual film, rather than a reprint of the original novel, was
published by Peter George, based on an early draft in which the
narrative is bookended by the account of aliens, who, having arrived at a
desolated Earth, try to piece together what has happened. It was
reissued in October 2015 by Candy Jar Books, featuring
never-before-published material on Strangelove's early career.
During the filming of Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick learned that Fail Safe, a film with a similar theme, was being produced. Although Fail Safe
was to be an ultrarealistic thriller, Kubrick feared that its plot
resemblance would damage his film's box office potential, especially if
it were released first. Indeed, the novel Fail-Safe (on which the film is based) is so similar to Red Alert that Peter George sued on charges of plagiarism and settled out of court.
What worried Kubrick the most was that Fail Safe boasted the acclaimed director Sidney Lumet and the first-rate dramatic actors Henry Fonda as the American president and Walter Matthau as the advisor to the Pentagon, Professor Groeteschele. Kubrick decided to throw a legal wrench into Fail Safe's production gears. Lumet recalled in the documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove:
"We started casting. Fonda was already set ... which of course meant a
big commitment in terms of money. I was set, Walter [Bernstein, the
screenwriter] was set ... And suddenly, this lawsuit arrived, filed by
Stanley Kubrick and Columbia Pictures."
Kubrick argued that Fail Safe's own source novel Fail-Safe (1960) had been plagiarized from Peter George's Red Alert,
to which Kubrick owned creative rights. He pointed out unmistakable
similarities in intentions between the characters Groeteschele and
Strangelove. The plan worked, and Fail Safe opened eight months after Dr. Strangelove, to critical acclaim but mediocre ticket sales.
Ending
The end of the film shows Dr. Strangelove exclaiming, "Mein Führer, I can walk!" before cutting to footage of nuclear explosions, with Vera Lynn and her audience singing "We'll Meet Again". This footage comes from nuclear tests such as shot BAKER of Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll, the Trinity test, a test from Operation Sandstone and the hydrogen bomb tests from Operation Redwing and Operation Ivy. In some shots, old warships (such as the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen),
which were used as targets, are plainly visible. In others, the smoke
trails of rockets used to create a calibration backdrop can be seen.
Former Goon Show writer and friend of Sellers Spike Milligan was credited with suggesting Vera Lynn's song for the ending.
Original ending
The cream pie fight was removed from the final cut.
It was originally planned for the film to end with a scene that depicted everyone in the War Room involved in a pie fight. Accounts vary as to why the pie fight was cut. In a 1969 interview, Kubrick said, "I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Critic Alexander Walker
observed that "the cream pies were flying around so thickly that people
lost definition, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at."
Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern, suggested the fight
was intended to be less jovial: "Since they were laughing, it was
unusable, because instead of having that totally black, which would have
been amazing, like, this blizzard, which in a sense is metaphorical for
all of the missiles that are coming, as well, you just have these guys
having a good old time. So, as Kubrick later said, 'it was a disaster of
Homeric proportions.'"
Effects of the Kennedy assassination on the film
A first test screening of the film was scheduled for November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The film was just weeks from its scheduled premiere, but because of the
assassination, the release was delayed until late January 1964, as it
was felt that the public was in no mood for such a film any sooner.
During post-production, one line by Slim Pickens, "a fella could
have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff," was dubbed to
change "Dallas" to "Vegas," since Dallas was where Kennedy was killed. The original reference to Dallas survives in the English audio of the French-subtitled version of the film.
The assassination also serves as another possible reason that the
pie-fight scene was cut. In the scene, after Muffley takes a pie in the
face, General Turgidson exclaims: "Gentlemen! Our gallant young
president has been struck down in his prime!" Editor Anthony Harvey
stated that the scene "would have stayed, except that Columbia Pictures
were horrified, and thought it would offend the president's family."
Kubrick and others have said that the scene had already been cut before
preview night because it was inconsistent with the rest of the film.
Rerelease in 1994
In
1994, the film was rereleased. While the 1964 release used a 1.85:1
aspect ratio, the new print was in the slightly squarer 1.66:1 (5:3)
ratio that Kubrick had originally intended.
Themes
Satirizing the Cold War
Dr. Strangelove takes passing shots at numerous contemporary Cold War attitudes, such as the "missile gap", but it primarily focuses its satire on the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD),
in which each side is supposed to be deterred from a nuclear war by the
prospect of a universal cataclysmic disaster regardless of who "won".
Military strategist and former physicist Herman Kahn, in the book On Thermonuclear War (1960), used the theoretical example of a "doomsday machine" to illustrate the limitations of MAD, which was developed by John von Neumann.
The concept of such a machine is consistent with MAD doctrine
when it is logically pursued to its conclusion. It thus worried Kahn
that the military might like the idea of a doomsday machine and build
one. Kahn, a leading critic of MAD and President Eisenhower's administration's doctrine of massive retaliation upon the slightest provocation by the USSR, considered MAD to be foolish bravado, and urged America to instead plan for proportionality, and thus even a limited nuclear war. With this logical reasoning, Kahn became one of the architects of the flexible response
doctrine, which, while superficially resembling MAD, allowed for
responding to a limited nuclear strike with a proportional, or
calibrated, return of fire (see On Escalation).
Kahn educated Kubrick on the concept of the semirealistic "cobalt-thorium G"
doomsday machine, and then Kubrick used the concept for the film. Kahn
in his writings and talks would often come across as cold and
calculating, for example, with his use of the term "megadeaths" and in his willingness to estimate how many human lives the United States could lose and still rebuild economically.
Kahn's cold analytical attitude towards millions of deaths is reflected
in Turgidson's remark to the president about the outcome of a
preemptive nuclear war: "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get
our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed,
tops, uh, depending on the breaks." Turgidson has a binder that is
labelled "World Targets in Megadeaths", a term coined in 1953 by Kahn
and popularized in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.
The post-hoc planning in the film, by Dr. Strangelove, done after the MAD policy has clearly broken down, to keep the human race alive and to regenerate from populations sheltered in mineshafts, is a parody of those strict adherents of the MAD doctrine who are opposed to the prior creation of fallout shelters
on ideological grounds. To such adherents, talk of survival takes the
"Assured Destruction" out of "Mutual Assured Destruction", hence no
preparations should be conducted for fear of "destabilizing" the MAD
doctrine. Moreover, it is also somewhat of a parody of Nelson Rockefeller, Edward Teller, Herman Kahn, and Chet Holifield's November 1961 popularization of a similar plan to spend billions of dollars on a nationwide network of highly protective concrete-lined underground fallout shelters, capable of holding millions of people and to be built before any such nuclear exchange began. These extensive and therefore wildly expensive preparations were the fullest conceivable implementation of President Kennedy's, month prior, September 1961 advocacy in favor of the comparatively more modest, individual and community fallout shelters, as it appeared in Life magazine, which was in the context of shelters being on the minds of the public at the time due to the Berlin Crisis. The Kennedy administration would later go on to expand the nascent United States civil defense efforts, including the assessment of millions of homes
and to create a network of thousands of well known, black and yellow
plaqued, community fallout shelters. This was done, not with a massive
construction effort but by the relatively cheap re-purposing of existing
buildings and stocking them with CD V-700 geiger counters etc. In 1962 the Kennedy administration would found the American Civil Defense Association to organize this, comparatively far more cost-effective, shelter effort.
The fallout-shelter-network proposal, mentioned in the film, with its inherently high radiation protection characteristics, has similarities and contrasts to that of the very real and robust Swiss civil defense
network. Switzerland has an overcapacity of nuclear fallout shelters
for the country's population size, and by law, new homes must still be
built with a fallout shelter.
If the US did that, it would violate the spirit of MAD and according to
MAD adherents, allegedly destabilize the situation because the US could
launch a first strike and its population would largely survive a retaliatory second strike.
To refute early 1960s novels and Hollywood films like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove, which raised questions about US control over nuclear weapons, the Air Force produced a documentary film, SAC Command Post, to demonstrate its responsiveness to presidential command and its tight control over nuclear weapons.
However, later academic research into declassified documents showed
that U.S. military commanders had been given presidentially-authorized
pre-delegation for the use of nuclear weapons during the early Cold War,
showing that that aspect of the film's plot was plausible.
The characters of Buck Turgidson and Jack Ripper both deride the real-life Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command.
Sexual themes
In
the months following the film's release director Stanley Kubrick
received a fan letter from Legrace G. Benson of the Department of
History of Art at Cornell University
interpreting the film as being sexually-layered. The director wrote
back to Benson and confirmed the interpretation, "Seriously, you are the
first one who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from
intromission (the planes going in) to the last spasm (Kong's ride down
and detonation at target)."
Sexual metaphors often popped up when the nuclear analysts that Kubrick consulted were discussing strategy, such as when Bernard Brodie compared his not attacking cities/withhold plan following belligerent escalation to coitus interruptus in an internally circulated memorandum at the RAND Corporation (spoofed in the film as the "BLAND Corporation"), while he described the SAC plan of massive retaliation
as "going all the way". That led RAND scholar Herman Kahn, whom Kubrick
consulted, to quip to an assembled group of "massive retaliation" SAC
officers, "Gentlemen, you do not have a war plan. You have a Wargasm!".
Release
Box office
The film was a popular success, earning US$4,420,000 in rentals in North America during its initial theatrical release.
Reception
Critical response
Dr. Strangelove is Kubrick's highest rated film on Rotten Tomatoes,
holding a 98% approval rating based on 88 reviews, with an average
rating of 9.14/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Stanley
Kubrick's brilliant Cold War satire remains as funny and razor-sharp
today as it was in 1964." The film also holds a score of 96 out of 100 on Metacritic,
based on 11 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". The film is ranked
number 7 in the All-Time High Scores chart of Metacritic's Video/DVD
section. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Dr. Strangelove is on Roger Ebert's list of The Great Movies, and he described it as "arguably the best political satire of the century". One of the most celebrated of all film comedies, it is the only comedy to make the top 10 in any of the Sight & Sound polls of best films. John Patterson of The Guardian wrote, "There had been nothing in comedy like Dr Strangelove
ever before. All the gods before whom the America of the stolid,
paranoid 50s had genuflected—the Bomb, the Pentagon, the National
Security State, the President himself, Texan masculinity and the alleged
Commie menace of water-fluoridation—went into the wood-chipper and
never got the same respect ever again." It is also listed as number 26 on Empire's 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, and in 2010 it was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best films since the publication's inception in 1923. The Writers Guild of America ranked its screenplay the 12th best ever written.
In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the 24th greatest comedic film of all time.
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