United States, 1964
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
With Peter Sellars (Group Captain Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley/Dr. Strangelove), Sterling Hayden (Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper), George C. Scott (General “Buck” Turgidson), Slim Pickens (Major “King” Kong”)
A stony and blunt United States Air Force Brigadier General commanding an air base supervising a group of bombers flying above the globe ready to launch an attack, including with atomic bombs single-handedly and with little interest in legality decides it is time to fight and destroy the Communist menace. Jack D. Ripper puts thus his base on high alert, locks it up, and orders his planes to activate a plan enabling them to drop atomic bombs on a set of targets deep inside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
From this shocking starting point, which is handled both in highly dramatic terms, with a fitting dark cinematography and intense closeups on the fellow’s forbidding mad face but also with a grotesque touch hinting at farce, the story unfolds on three fronts. The first, which is obvious but does not actually stay long in the editing, is the base, which is swiftly attacked by troops from the US Army on the order of the political authorities eager to thwart Jack D. Ripper’s plans before any bomb is dropped and where even as the brigadier general rants his deputy, a British Royal Air Force officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, tries to talk him into reason and above get the codes that would enable their superiors to call the bombers back.
Unsurprisingly, the base is captured, but unfortunately the general kills himself without spilling the beans. However, the British, who is British to a fault, suiting so delightfully and predictably to the stereotypes that is hard not to smile even as his role is dead serious and crucial, is clever enough to get the right guess – and indeed, Lionel Mandrake in his scenes but also in the wider course of the film displays a kind of intelligence and efficiency that the many American soldiers depicted in the film woefully lack (to the audience’s fun), in a move that is plainly sarcastic, in fact like a deliberate slight by a director born in the United States but now a permanent expatriate in Britain helping to produce the film with his own money.
The second front, taking more and more room in the editing, is one of the bombers sent to the USSR, which, after a close call with a Soviet missile, gets badly damaged, with the ability to get and send any kind of radio message busted. This means that unlike the others this bomber will never get the order to end the mission and carry on till the worst happens. Far more than the action back at its base, what is going on onboard the plane has a strikingly realistic touch, the camera lingering, seemingly mesmerized, on the many buttons, levers, and reading instruments that the crew manipulates with increasing frenzy, shooting in the most vivid and credible manner both incidents and the crew’s reaction.
This makes the inevitability of the final disaster even more compelling while illustrating both the terrific and the flimsy power of the technology the American military (and in fact most armed forces) is keen to display and to use and in fact prides loudly itself of wielding and storing at an ever-greater cost for the society (the film is released not even four years after a stunning end of mandate speech by President Dwight D. Eisenhower where he slammed the growing clout of a military-industrial complex). But far more than the technology, the malaise, wrapped inevitably in biting irony and outrageous farce, lies with the officer in charge of it, a gung-ho pilot with an extraordinary twang and unforgettable hat, Major “King” Kong – the name speaks volume and his gritty and stubborn ways, which could have earned him praise in another context, open unfortunately the gates to an absurd dead end.
The third front is a spacious and high-tech war room the film suggests is at the Pentagon when many would have instinctively below the White House. It is swiftly the stage of a clash of wills and temperaments pitting the president, eager to avoid Armageddon and angry at the conspicuous failures of the military, Merkin Muffley, and the chief of the US Air Force, General “Buck” Turgidson, who has been far more concerned with the charm and whims of his female personal secretary and then, as the crisis unfolds, rather concerned with shielding the obviously troublesome Jack D. Ripper from real punishment and instead to make the point it may be the right moment to assert his nation’s domination. Like the major piloting the fateful plane, the general displays a high-octane and absolutely intolerant and shocking patriotism barely disguising a dreadful self-confidence in manly, aggressive, chauvinist, sexist too, values and the president would have a hard time making him shut up and do what should be done for peace’s sake – the name tells as much: the surname of the political leader may hint at an ability to hush dissent as well as the struggle to get heard, while the first name ironically evokes the very hair he does not have and the allure he struggles to have as he copes with the unruly general or a drunk Soviet leader.
From the insane worry of Jack D. Ripper about his bodily fluids to the exuberant picture of “King” Kong straggling ecstatically the dropped bomb, heavily – that is woefully unsubtly – signaled by their names and nicknames from the start anyway, the traditional, crowd-pleasing, self-satisfying picture of virility associated with the military is gleefully mocked and upended. The men of war “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and to Love the Bomb” features are stupidly horny or downright impotent, in any case everything save balanced and fulfilled: this is a company where testosterone brings disaster more than anything. Their virility is definitely not reassuring and pathetic beyond hope – although it is truly hilarious to watch such scathing portrayals.
Generals and politicians, however, do not have the last word in this rash satirical effort: it is uttered, with a lot of difficulty, by the character giving the film its title even though he showed up quite late in the story. Wheelchair-bound, with his left arm partly paralyzed, wearing sunglasses all the time, chain-smoking, Dr. Strangelove cuts a rather sorry and scary figure at the same time. He is officially the Executive’s top expert on atomic armament, a source of knowledge ideally measured and rational, responsible and clever. But as he raves about the extraordinary situation the nation is it is a far less pleasant face that he shows and a far more chilling and crazy discourse that he utters unashamedly, driven by impulses rooted in his previous life as a Nazi official – quite bluntly, the film is a reminder that after all the US did not always hotly chase down all the collaborators of the Nazi regime and was pleased to benefit from the expertise of some of them.
Dr. Strangelove expresses more deeply, but also in a far too grotesque and outlandish fashion, the director’s fears, shared by others, that his native country could still fall prey to far-right ideas supposedly buried in 1945 – the problem the character rises by the way is not just a matter of over-the-top performance or outré dialogues: he steals the show even as the bomb has dropped, the film moving from one event to another without worrying about any logical sense of continuity, focusing on the war room where folks talk as if nothing had happened on the ground, a narrative quirk hard to grasp and probably to be put down to the impatience to expose an evil side that would have been far more compelling if it were not such a contrived element to make the satire even more prickly and politically smart.