Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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| Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | |
|---|---|
| Image:DrstrangeloveCover.jpg {{{caption|}}} | |
| Directed by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Produced by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Written by | Peter George (also the novel Red Alert) Stanley Kubrick Terry Southern |
| Starring | Peter Sellers George C. Scott Sterling Hayden Keenan Wynn Slim Pickens |
| Music by | |
| Cinematography | {{{cinematography}}} |
| Editing by | {{{editing}}} |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Released | January 29, 1964 |
| Running time | 94 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1,800,000 |
| Preceded by | {{{preceded_by}}} |
| Followed by | {{{followed_by}}} |
| IMDb profile | |
| {{{footnotes|}}} | |
- "Strangelove" redirects here. For other uses, see Strangelove (disambiguation).
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 film by Stanley Kubrick loosely based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. A black comedy starring Peter Sellers (in three different roles), the film is a satire of the Cold War. The plot begins with an insane American general's order to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and proceeds towards doomsday.
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Cast and crew
The film stars British actor Peter Sellers, who improvised much of his dialogue during filming. Sellers plays multiple parts, each with an appropriate accent:
- Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a sane, well-meaning British exchange officer, with an upper-class English accent. Sellers' experience mimicking superiors as an RAF airman during World War II must have helped.
- Adlai Stevenson-esque U.S. President Merkin Muffley, decent, flustered and weak. The President's first and last name each imply the term pussy, in the sense of being weak or unmanly. Sellers flattens his natural English accent and sounds like an American Midwesterner.
- Dr. Strangelove, from Merkwürdigliebe, his German name, includes aspects of each of Herman Kahn, Wernher von Braun, Edward Teller, and apparently, Robert McNamara (and perhaps Henry Kissinger, though the latter is unlikely, as Kissinger was not a prominent figure at the time the movie was made). The accent used by Sellers is supposedly based on that of Weegee. His speeches are interrupted by struggles to gain control over his affliction of alien hand syndrome (his hand at one point attempts to strangle him, at another it thrusts itself out in a Nazi salute). Kahn is said to have remarked that "Strangelove wouldn't have lasted a week in the Pentagon. He was too creative."
Sellers was also to have played the part of Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber captain, but a fractured foot during filming prevented him from doing so (he would have had to work in the confined space of the B-52 cockpit set). It has been suggested that Sellers, who was concerned about correctly reproducing the Texan accent required, contrived the injury - or at least contrived to make it seem worse than it was. Instead, the role was played by Slim Pickens, who gives it the performance of a lifetime. Pickens was unaware the film was to be a comedy and played the role straight, thereby adding to the humor (compare to David Prowse). Also appearing in the film are George C. Scott in his breakout part as General "Buck" Turgidson, a strategic bombing enthusiast (Turgidson was a thinly-disguised avatar of General Curtis LeMay); the debut of James Earl Jones as the bombardier, Lt. Lothar Zogg; Sterling Hayden, who came out of retirement for his role as General Jack D. Ripper; and Keenan Wynn, as Col. "Bat" Guano. Tracy Reed plays Gen. Turgidson's seductive secretary Miss Scott, the film's only female role.
Photography: Gilbert Taylor
Written by: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George (from the novel by Peter George)
Editor: Anthony Harvey
Production design: Ken Adam
Special effects: Wally Veevers
Synopsis
US Air Force General Jack D. Ripper plans to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union to stop what he believes to be a fearful Communist conspiracy to put fluoride in the water supply, by his reasoning, thereby threatening the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people. He orders — without Presidential authorization — the planes under his command to attack the Soviet Union, under radio silence which cannot be broken save by a recall code that Ripper alone knows. He then seals himself inside his base and hopes that the President will order a full-scale attack to prevent an otherwise inevitable retaliation from the Soviet Union. Ripper is apparently psychotic; his conspiracy theory seems to result largely from a "petit mort" or an episode of impotence he experienced after sexual intercourse.
From the script:
- Ripper: A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works.
- Mandrake: Jack... Jack, listen, tell me, ah... when did you first become, well, develop this theory.
- Ripper: Well, I ah, I-I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
General Ripper is unaware that the Soviets have constructed a so-called "doomsday device" which automatically detects any nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, whereupon it destroys all life on Earth via massive nuclear fallout. Dr. Strangelove explains to the staff assembled in the American war room how the device is a natural extension to the Cold War stratagem of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent to an actual nuclear exchange. Moreover, the machine cannot be turned off as this would mitigate its value as a deterrent.
Image:Slim-pickens riding-the-bomb.jpg As a result, the American government cooperates with the Soviets to shoot the General's planes down until they can be recalled, and Ripper's plan is ultimately foiled by British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, an officer participating in an "exchange program" with the USAF, who deduces the recall code from Ripper's childish doodles.
Unfortunately, one B-52 ("The Leper Colony") was damaged, but not destroyed, by a Soviet anti-aircraft missile. With its radio disabled, it cannot be called back; and with a fuel leak, it also cannot reach its intended target, the Laputa Missile Complex, where the remaining Soviet defenses have been concentrated. So the plane continues its mission to drop its nuclear payload on a new Soviet target (now selecting the Kodlosk ICBM complex, not the plane's secondary target but still within the plane's range), which will in turn set off the doomsday machine. The particular bomb is jammed in its bay, and in trying to release it, the pilot of the B-52, Major "King" Kong (in one of Hollywood's most memorable film moments) inadvertently ends up riding it down to global destruction — with Kong cheering all the way. Kong straddles the bomb, gripping it with one hand and waving his cowboy hat in the air with his other in a homage to rodeo bullriding technique.
The doomsday device is activated. According to the Soviet ambassador, life on Earth's surface will be extinct within ten months; Dr. Strangelove recommends to the President that a group of about 100,000 humans are relocated to deep in a mine shaft, where the nuclear fallout cannot reach, so the Earth can be repopulated. Because of obvious limits to space in the mines, Strangelove suggests that the ratio of females to males be 10:1. The chosen women would be selected based on their youth and beauty (to ensure the males would want to impregnate them), while the chosen males would be selected based on their intellectual and physical strength. Turgidson rants that they "cannot allow a mine shaft gap" (spoofing the missile gap fears) and begins planning a war for when they emerge in a hundred years. Strangelove eventually gets out of his wheelchair shouting "Mein Führer, I can walk!" a mere second before the doomsday bombs begin exploding.
Themes
Although it is a comedy, Dr. Strangelove is also suspenseful and engrossing and not the least "madcap". Two major scenes of action are the immense War Room dominated by the Big Board showing the location of every American bomber in the world, and the meticulous B-52 interior. The remainder is set in General Ripper's headquarters at Burpleson Air Force Base.
The Pentagon did not cooperate in making the film, as it did in making Strategic Air Command (1955). Because the B-52 was state of the art in the 1960s, its cockpit was off limits to the film crew; the cockpit was reconstructed by educated guesses made in comparing the interior of a B-29 Superfortress's cockpit and a single photo of a B-52 Stratofortress's cockpit to the geometry of the B-52's fuselage; it was so accurate that the Department of Defense suspected the film crew of sneaking into a B-52 and taking pictures.
Dr. Strangelove takes passing shots at all sorts of Cold War attitudes, but focuses its satire on the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), in which each side is supposed to take comfort in the fact that a nuclear war would be a cataclysmic disaster. Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War invented the concept of a doomsday machine in order to mock mutually assured destruction — in effect, Kahn argued, both sides already had a sort of doomsday machine. Kahn was a leading critic of American strategy during the 1950s and urged Americans to plan for a limited nuclear war. Kahn became one of the architects of the MAD doctrine in the 1960s. The prevailing thinking that a nuclear war was inherently unwinnable and suicidal was illogical to the physicist turned strategist. Kahn came off as cold and calculating; for instance, in his works, he estimated how many human lives the United States could lose and still rebuild economically. This attitude is reflected in Turgidson's remark to the president about the outcome of a pre-emptive nuclear war: "Now I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I am saying no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops!" In the War Room, Turgidson also has a binder which is labeled “World Targets in Megadeaths”.
It satirizes the conventions of Hollywood war movies, as well as the curious "red telephone" relationship between heads of state, in which a first-name intimacy competes with a culturally conditioned dislike for the other and for the entire political system which he heads:
- "I'm sorry, too, Dimitri. ... I'm very sorry. ... All right, you're sorrier than I am, but I am as sorry as well. ... I am as sorry as you are, Dimitri! Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are. ... So we're both sorry, all right?! ... All right." (Dialog improvised by Sellers)
The title character, Dr. Strangelove, is a comment on the US government's morally questionable use of Nazi scientists in programs such as nuclear weapons research. Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, retains a thick German accent, and mistakenly calls the President "Mein Führer" on more than one occasion. His appearance echoes the villains of the Fritz Lang era in 1920s Germany whose sinister and evil characters were usually offset by some disability. Sellers improvised Dr. Strangelove's lapse into the Nazi salute, borrowing one of Kubrick's black gloves for the uncontrollable hand that makes the Sieg heil gesture. Sellers found the director's gloves that Kubrick perpetually wore to avoid direct contact with hot lights to be especially menacing. The thought of the new, post-war centrally controlled, underground, male-dominated society with its members specially selected from the population is evocative of Nazi visions and animates Dr. Strangelove at the end.
Also, the film is sprinkled with many sly sex jokes. For example: the long opening scene of a bomber being fueled mid-flight from a long pipe, accompanied by romantic music; the classic image of Slim Pickens straddling the nuclear bomb in ecstasy; and the final montage of multiple nuclear explosions. Foreshadowing the idea of "missile envy" in later decades, it suggests that the Cold War's obsession with nuclear weapons might at least partially be a silly and immature contest of perceived sexual prowess and phallic fixations.
The movie is based upon the Cold War thriller novel Red Alert. Stanley Kubrick had originally wanted to film the story as a serious drama. However, he explained during interviews that the comedy inherent in the idea of MAD became apparent as he was writing the first draft of the film's script. Kubrick stated:
- "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." — Macmillan International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, vol. 1, p. 126
Ending
The planned original ending to the film was a chaotic pie-fight scene with the Soviet ambassador in the war room. It was cut from the final print and the film ends with Strangelove stepping out of his wheelchair (saying, "Mein Führer, I can walk!") right before a montage of nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn's singing of the WWII standard "We'll Meet Again". Reportedly, Spike Milligan was responsible for suggesting the montage ending.
Critical views
Dr. Strangelove is currently #18 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, and was also listed as #26 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies and #3 on its 100 Years, 100 Laughs. Sellers' line "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" made #64 on AFI's 100 Years, 100 Quotes. The film has also been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the 24th greatest comedy film of all time.
Roger Ebert has Dr. Strangelove in his list of Great Movies[1], saying it's "arguably the best political satire of the century."
Red Alert, Fail-Safe and Seven Days in May
Dr. Strangelove was based on the paperback novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George. George collaborated on the screenplay with Kubrick and satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert was more solemn by far —Dr. Strangelove is not a character— but the plot and the technical elements were similar. Strangelove and its source material differed so substantially that a novelization of the film (rather than a re-print of the novel) was written by Peter George in 1964. (ISBN 0839824750, ISBN 0760709408, and ISBN 0192818406).
Two other films released in 1964 reflected similar concerns and had similar themes. Warner Brothers released Seven Days in May the same year. The plot turned on a military coup d'état that sought to prevent the president from signing a nuclear disarmament treaty.
Strangelove's studio, Columbia, also released Fail-Safe, a "serious" version of a similar plot directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick.
The Kennedy assassination
A first test screening of the movie was actually scheduled to be on November 22, 1963, which ended up being the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The film was just weeks from its scheduled premiere. 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.
Additionally, one line by Slim Pickens ("a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff") was dubbed to become "in Vegas".
Additionally, the climactic pie-fight scene was scripted to include General Turgidson exclaiming, "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!" after Muffley takes a pie in the face. While the pie fight was filmed but cut, this line, no matter how coincidental, would have hit too close to home to be used.
Songs
- An instrumental version of "Try a Little Tenderness", a sentimental pop song from the 1930s, is played during the opening titles sequence which features shots of aerial refueling of a B52 bomber.
- "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", Irish traditional anti-war song. Instrumental version used to accompany the B-52 flight.
- "We'll Meet Again" sung by Vera Lynn, optimistic, sentimental World War II song, played as the bombs explode at the end of the film.
- Mandrake suspects that all is not as it seems, when he turns on an unconfiscated radio and hears pop music when there should be Civil Defense alerts, but the music itself is anonymous.
Trivia
- 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 snow below. The B-52 was a model composited into the arctic footage which was sped up to create a (quite unconvincing) sense of jet speed. The camera ship, a former USAAF B-17G-100-VE, serial 44-85643, registered F-BEEA, had been one of four Flying Forts purchased from salvage at Altus, Oklahoma in December 1947 by the French Institut Geographique National and converted for survey and photo-mapping duty. It was the last active B-17 of a total of fourteen once operated by the IGN, but it was destroyed in a take-off accident at RAF Binbrook in 1989 during filming of the movie "Memphis Belle." Home movie footage included in "Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove" on the 2001 Special Edition DVD release of the film show clips of the Fortress with a cursive "Dr. Strangelove" painted over the rear entry hatch on the right side of the fuselage.
- In the classic WW2 film "Twelve O'Clock High" one of the B-17 bombers is named "Leper Colony" and is crewed by all the shirkers and misfits rejected from other bombers.
- The line "I can walk" given by Peter Sellers in this film is repeated by Sellers in Revenge of the Pink Panther when he has to walk on his knees in his Toulouse-Lautrec disguise.
- The nuclear explosions at the end of the film are all of actual US nuclear tests. Many of them were shot at Bikini Atoll, and old warships (such as the German Prinz Eugen heavy cruiser) expended as targets are plainly visible. In others the smoke trails of rockets used to create a calibration backdrop on the sky behind the explosion can be seen.
- In the novelisation, the "mineshaft" survival technique succeeded, at least for a while, as the story is said to have been reconstructed from documents found at the bottom of deep mineshafts.
- During the filming, Stanley Kubrick and George C. Scott had differences of opinions regarding certain scenes. However, Kubrick got Scott to conform based largely upon his ability to beat Scott at chess (which they played frequently on the set).
- The photographic mural in General Ripper's office, presumably showing an aerial view of Burpelson AFB, is actually a view of Heathrow Airport, London.
- A trailer for the movie was included as an extra in the DVD release of "Fahrenheit 9/11"
- Conservative author Ann Coulter has said that this movie is the one that she would choose to have were she on a deserted island.
- "Strangelove" is the title of a hit single by Depeche Mode from the 1987 album Music for the Masses
- British electronica band Supreme Beings of Leisure also wrote a song titled "Strangelove Addiction". Despite the name, no references to the film are made in this song.
- The popular television series The Simpsons contains several references to Dr. Strangelove. Here are only a few examples:
- In the episode "Homer the Vigilante", Homer Simpson rides a bomb à la Major Kong
- The episode "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" features a 'war room', and Sideshow Bob whistles "We’ll Meet Again"
- The episode "$pringfield (or, How I learned to stop worrying and love legalized gambling)" is an obvious parody of the title.
- General Turgidson appears in Treehouse of Horror XIII, again in Mayor Quimby's war room. Professor Frink can be seen as Dr. Strangelove.
- In Dr. Strangelove the CRM-114 is the nomenclature of the encryption/decryption device aboard the B-52. This has been referenced several times:
- In an episode of the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters talk about a powerful laser cannon called the 'CRM-114'.
- In yet another Stanley Kubrick movie "A Clockwork Orange" the serum which is given to the main character during the so-called "Lodovico treatment" is called 'CRM-114'.
- In the first scene of Back to the Future, Marty switches on Doc Brown's amplifier with a key whose corresponding lock is marked 'CRM-114'.
- The CRM114 Discriminator is the name of a data stream analyzer (think SPAM filter) which achieves very high accuracy based on a "learning" algorithm.
- The 2005 film Fun with Dick and Jane includes a reference to a financial transaction form known as a 'CRM-114'.
- Major Kong's bomb ride may have been inspired by, or have been a reference to, The Catcher in the Rye. At one point in that novel, Holden Caulfield comments that he would volunteer to drop the atomic bomb and ride it to its final destination.
- The film inspired the nickname "Dr. Strangeglove" for Boston Red Sox slugger Dick Stuart, a first baseman notorious for fielding his position poorly.
- The 1998 film Deep Impact discussed preparations for surviving a massive asteroid strike upon the Earth, and mineshafts are drafted into service for this reason, in an echo of the survival plan in "Dr. Strangelove." Additionally, a lottery system is proposed for selection of candidates for survival, much like that proposed by Dr. Strangelove himself.
- The character of Sellers in Xenosaga appears to be based off Dr. Strangelove. He appears as a wheelchair-bound man who always wears sunglasses and physically resembles actor Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove right down to his crazy hair-do.
- The character Ze Proffesor from Conker's Bad Fur Day has a uncanny resemblace to Dr. Strangelove. The weasel proffesor flies in a hoverchair (since his legs were chopped off)and speaks with a thick German accent. He also wears a black glove in his left hand.
- In 1965 Science fiction author Philip K. Dick released a novel about a post apocalyptic society Titled Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. This was not the originaly intended title, but was suggested by his publisher to coincide with the popularity of the Kubrick film.
- In the fictional video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a conversation with the Colonel is shot from a 45 degree undeneath angle reminisant of the rants of General Jack D. Ripper. Also, Revolver Ocelot often is controlled by the arm of Liquid Snake, which was used as a transplant after Ocelot lost his own. The film is also mention by Para-Medic in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater as a film Naked Snake should go see. Snake Eater ties in with many of the themes of the film and is set in the same year Dr Strangelove was released.
- In the video game Unreal Tournament, there is a modification available titled Strangelove. The modification allows the player to ride the redeemer, a small nuclear weapon, around the game. More advanced versions of the modification allowed the player to pilot the path of the redeemer from atop, as well as to jump off as it flew to detonation.
- In the video game Starcraft, the race of aliens known as the Zerg are described as having a "purity of essence". This could be a reference to the "purity of essence" that General Ripper describes.
- An episode of the cartoon Super Milk Chan was titled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Drop the Bomb", an obvious play on the film's title.
- Shane Johnson's novel Ice features an abandoned Antediluvian Lunar base having a war room quite similar to the room depicted in this movie, causing one character in that novel to remark specifically on the similarity.
See also
- Slim Pickens for listing of the survival pack
- Films that have been considered the greatest ever
- Alistair Beaton's 2004 novel A Planet for the President
External links
- {{{2|{{{title|Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb}}}}}} at The Internet Movie Database
- Dr. Strangelove at Filmsite.org
- "Dr. Strangelove" at DVD Journal
- Herman Kahn's doomsday machine
- Continuity transcript
- A Commentary on Dr. Strangelove
- Great Movies: Dr. Strangelove By Roger Ebert
| Films by Stanley Kubrick |
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| Short films: Day of the Fight | Flying Padre | The Seafarers Feature films: Fear and Desire | Killer's Kiss | The Killing | Paths of Glory | Spartacus | Lolita | Dr. Strangelove | 2001: A Space Odyssey | A Clockwork Orange | Barry Lyndon | The Shining | Full Metal Jacket | Eyes Wide Shut Productions: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence |
de:Dr. Seltsam oder: Wie ich lernte, die Bombe zu lieben es:Dr. Strangelove fi:Tohtori Outolempi fr:Docteur Folamour he:דוקטור סטריינג'לב it:Il dottor Stranamore, ovvero: come imparai a non preoccuparmi e ad amare la bomba ja:博士の異常な愛情、又は私は如何にして心配するのを止めて水爆を愛するようになったか nl:Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb pt:Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ru:Доктор Стрейнджлав, или Как я перестал бояться и полюбил бомбу (фильм) simple:Dr. Strangelove sv:Dr. Strangelove eller: Hur jag slutade ängslas och lärde mig älska bomben
