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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Year: 1964
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writer: Peter George (novel)
Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens
Rating: PG
Runtime: 96 mins
Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s cold-war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age.
Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with “the purity of precious bodily fluids”, mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union.
The Soviets counter the threat with a so-called Doomsday Device, and the world hangs in the balance while the US president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line negotiations with his Soviet counterpart.
Sellers also plays a British military attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr Strangelove; George C Scott is outrageously frantic as General Buck Turgidson, whose presidential advice consists mainly of panic and statistics about “acceptable losses”.
With dialogue (“You can’t fight here! This is the war room!”) and images (Slim Pickens’s character riding the bomb to oblivion) that have become a part of our cultural vocabulary,
Kubrick’s film regularly appears on critics’ lists of the all-time best.
