An Appreciation of “Dr. Strangelove”

This one goes out to my friend Seth Shelden, Harpo interpreter and peace-monger extraordinaire.

Today is Stanley Kubrick’s birthday. Having already done a general post on the great director, as well as one on (believe it or not) his connection to Charlie Chaplin, we thought we’d drill down into his brilliant Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which turned 60 years old earlier this year.

The film is older than I am, so you older folks will have to tell ME: does it chill you to the marrow, the extent to which we DID stop worrying? We fretted quite a bit more during the Reagan presidency (viz., The Day After, et al) but in point of fact, the danger of universal annihilation never went away at all, this entire time. The Sword of Damocles has simply hung there over the human race, and we only glance up and notice it once in a while, and shrug, as though there were nothing that can be done about it. Periods of tension come and go, but the deadly weapons are still aimed at each other, primed to go at a moment’s notice. Granted, at the period of which we speak, the early ’60s, the danger reached its maximum measure. Everyone’s Golden Boy JFK had actually run his campaign against Nixon on a fictional “missile gap” with the Soviets. A few months later came the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nerve-wracking battle of wills that ended in the usual stalemate. But disarm? Unthinkable.

There were some who protested, but the Ban the Bomb movement was much much stronger in the U.K. in the early ’60s than it was in the U.S. In America, to point out the insanity of blowing up the entire world in the name of “defense” was regarded as somehow being weak on Communism. Many still hold to something like that philosophy, if it can be called that. When Hollywood dealt with the subject at all, it was in the form of the Cold War thriller, such as Fail Safe and Seven Days in May, both of which came out the same year as Dr. Strangelove. Like the better remembered comedy, those too were filmed in grim B x W. It would be interesting to screen them as a kind of trilogy, or mini-festival. If I ever did so, I would do it in the spirit of P.T. Barnum and make sure I had a bar with hard liquor in the lobby, where I’d make my real money.

Comedy, too is a release. In Ancient Greece, tragedies were always presented as trilogies with a Satyr play for a kicker. After a while, the horror is too much, and so you have to laugh it off, and remind yourself that worrying in and of itself won’t change anything. In the theatre, the Absurdists (Beckett,Ionesco, etc) were well ahead of the cinema at examining the human predicament in the mid 20th century. Chaplin had taken a stab at it inMonsieur Verdoux (1947), but, man, did he get slapped down. James Agee wrote a scenario for him two years later that was set in a post-apocalyptic world, but Chaplin, having been burned, gave it a wide berth. It was risky. But audiences and film-makers slowly began to catch up. One thinks of the comedy of the “Sick Comedians”, Lenny Bruce,Mort Sahl, and Nichols and May that began to be popular in the late ’50s.

One inevitably thinks too of the 1959 British comedy The Mouse That Roared, directed by Jack Arnold, and (more importantly) starring Peter Sellers in three different roles. It’s fallen by the wayside, but it is entirely relevant. The plot concerns a tiny European nation called Grand Fenwick that decides to solve its financial difficulties by declaring war on the United States, knowing that they will certainly lose, and then the U.S. will bail them out with post-war reparations. But (in a twist that also anticipates Mel Brooks’ The Producers) their tiny army of two dozen soldiers accidentally captures an American scientist who has invented something called a Q Bomb, allowing Grand Fenwick to actually WIN the war.

In 1960, Billy Wilder was developing a Cold War satire called A Day at the United Nations starring the Marx Brothers, but Chico passed away, so he made One, Two, Three (1961) instead. Other related precedents, I think, believe it or not, include, the similarly long-titled It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), by the socially conscious director Stanley Kramer, which treats of the sacrosanct topic of American materialism, and Kubrick’s own 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s pedophilia comedy Lolita, which also had Sellers in multiple roles.

Kubrick, incidentally, didn’t set out to make Dr. Strangelove as a comedy. His original intention was to make one of those thrillers I just mentioned, in the vein of Fail Safe. But as he began to probe the story (based on a suspense novel called Red Alert) he couldn’t get the absurdities out of his mind. How did we so rapidly get to a place where the fate of the entire world rested in the hands of so few people? Where not just army generals, but scientists, diplomats, and hack politicians were so cavalierly wielding God-like powers? And where the very fabric of the discussion was so patently bonkers? It was a matter of life and death, not a game. But it was being played like one, like some crazy mix of chess, Mousetrap, D & D, and 52 Pick Up.

So a comedy it became, with Peter Sellers once again at its center. To help script it, Sellers suggested Terry Southern, whose novel The Magic Christian would later be made into a film featuring Sellers and Ringo Starr of The Beatles. The plot concerns a U.S. missile base commander (played by Sterling Hayden, who’d starred in Kubrick’s 1959 The Killing) who goes insane and orders a strike on Russia. The action is claustrophobically confined to a handful of interior locations, the base itself, a motel room, an air force bomber, and the War Room. Basically, the plot concerns efforts by American and Russian leaders at hour 11:59 to thwart the end of the world, even as an ace American bomber crew manages to evade every one of their efforts. For all the world, the film itself looks and feels like a legit thriller — and that (to me) is what makes the best satire, when the portrait gets so CLOSE to the target it is sending up. The art direction, in particular the design of the War Room and the bomber interior, were so accurate that those in the know thought someone had leaked them the information (those locations being 100% off limits to anyone without clearance). The script itself is funny of course; people to this day quote lines from the movie. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!”

But the actors who inhabit it are what take it over the top. Originally, Sellers was to have played four characters: the U.S. President (a simpering Cold War liberal based on Adlai Stevenson), a hilarious RAF liaison (who to his dismay is suddenly tasked with saving the entire world ON HIS OWN), the eponymous ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (based on Wernher Von Braun and Edward Teller), and the cowboy bomber commander.

You’ll observe that in the final product Sellers only plays three roles. The official line is that he had broken his ankle and couldn’t move around the plane interior as required. But it’s also come to light that he was insecure about his western accent, believe it or not. We’ve certainly heard him do such an accent before. He trotted it out in Lolita, for one. But it was very broad and silly, and he was hoping to get as close as he got that midwestern accent for the President. He was also exhausted. Playing just ONE role in a movie is fatiguing. And you’ll recall that Sellers had numerous work related heart attacks over the course of his career, including the one that eventually killed him. My personal instinct is that he used the genuinely broken ankle as an excuse. If he’d really wanted to do it, he’d have found a way. In any case, real life western character actor Slim Pickens replaced him in the cockpit and most of us have no regrets. Pickens riding a nuclear bomb through the air like a bucking bronco is one of the most indelible images in all of screen comedy, disturbing as it is. The third major player in the proceedings is of course George C. Scott, a stellar dramatic actor who (according to legend) was tricked into giving a broad comical performance by Kubrick, who assured him that he was requesting the big takes as warm-ups, and that he would use the subtler takes in the final edit.

The supporting cast are just as priceless, including Keenan Wynn, as a dense military officer who risks the end of the world so as not to upset the Coca Cola Company, Peter Bull (also memorable in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones and the original Pozzo in the British premiere of Waiting for Godot) as the Soviet Ambassador, and real life Playboy pin-up Tracy Reed, the film’s only female, who also appeared with Sellers in A Shot in the Dark that same year. Reed appears in a bikini the whole time, reminiscent of Barrie Chase in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. As if all that were not enough, James Earl Jones also makes his screen debut as one of the bomber crew.

So effective were many of the non-comedians in their roles that many of them went on to appear in similar black comedies: Scott in Paddy Chayefsky’sThe Hospital(1970), Slim Pickens in Spielberg’s 1941 (1979). Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H(1970) clearly owes a lot to Dr. Strangelove. He would later cast Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye (1973), and Keenan Wynn in Nashville (1975).

Weegee

Earlier we mentioned a possible nuclear themed comedy for Chaplin. Did you know that Laurel and Hardy actually made one? It’s their last feature Atoll K (1950), and it was a sad affair. I only bring it up because the original ending to Dr. Strangelove was a massive pie fight in the War Room, just like the one in Laurel and Hardy’s Battle of the Century. The great arcs of soaring pies moving through the air would have juxtaposed beautifully with missiles doing the same across the face of the earth. Kubrick actually staged it, filmed it, and included it, but ultimately cut it for being too light-hearted. I’d very much like to see that version, but it no longer exists.

Instead we get the chilling and ironic image of mushroom clouds accompanied by music hall star Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again”. Once, when I was a teenager, I was watching Dr. Strangelove on TV and at that moment, when the song comes in, my mother, who was in the next room, started happily singing along with it. I seem to remember snapping at her for doing so, and giving her a lecture. I’m sure it’s just that kind of behavior (mine) that explains why liberals have made so little progress in bringing peace and equality to the world. We’re insufferable! Neither the direct approach, nor the sugar-pill one, seems to do much to retard humanity’s headlong beeline to destruction. What’s there to do but laugh?

For more on classic comedy please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.