Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Dr. Strangelove is the Stanley Kubrick black comedy that became the definitive cinematic statement on nuclear deterrence. Kubrick directed and co-wrote with Terry Southern and Peter George. The screenplay was adapted from George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, originally written as a straight thriller. Peter Sellers plays three roles: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (British exchange officer at Burpelson Air Force Base), President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove (the ex-Nazi German nuclear advisor). George C. Scott plays General Buck Turgidson. Sterling Hayden plays Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper.

Slim Pickens plays Major T.J. “King” Kong. Keenan Wynn plays Colonel “Bat” Guano. The plot follows General Ripper’s unauthorized order to launch a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and the increasingly hopeless attempts by the President and military command to recall the bombers.

The film made approximately nine million dollars worldwide in initial 1964 release on a budget of approximately two million. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor (Sellers, for the three roles). It won none. Later decades reframed Dr. Strangelove as one of the major American films of the 1960s. The film consistently appears on lists of the great American comedies, the great American war films, and the great American satires. It’s one of the few films that occupies all three categories.

The Tonal Choice

Kubrick began adapting Red Alert as a serious nuclear-war thriller. He shifted to comedy during preproduction after concluding that the actual escalation logic of mutual assured destruction was so absurd that straight drama couldn’t convey it. The decision was the film’s foundational creative choice. Every component of Dr. Strangelove works on the dual tone that nuclear war is at once the most serious subject available to filmmakers and a topic so unhinged in its actual policy logic that only comedy can address it honestly.

The tonal choice produced specific casting and performance decisions. Peter Sellers plays his three roles with three different comedic tones. George C. Scott plays Buck Turgidson as a pure cartoon of military bombast. Sterling Hayden plays Ripper as a man whose madness is presented straight instead of for laughs. The cast works at different comedic temperatures inside the same film. Kubrick lets them. The audience reads the temperature mix as the actual experience of being inside an institution whose internal logic has detached from its catastrophic stakes.

The War Room

The Pentagon War Room is the film’s most-photographed location and one of production designer Ken Adam’s permanent contributions to cinema. The set is a circular space with a black reflective floor, a massive circular conference table, and the iconic Big Board displaying the bombers’ positions across the world map. The room has no windows. The lighting is overhead and harsh. The space looks like a theater of paranoia instead of a functioning command center.

The Big Board became one of the most-imitated production design choices in cinema. Later films have copied the strategic-display visual vocabulary. The War Room concept itself was so cinematically powerful that during Ronald Reagan’s first White House tour as President-elect, he reportedly asked to see “the War Room.” White House staff had to explain that no such room existed. The film had inserted itself into American political imagination at the level where movies become assumptions.

The Sellers Performances

Peter Sellers’s three-role performance is one of the most technically ambitious comedic achievements in American cinema. Sellers plays Group Captain Mandrake (the British exchange officer trying to recall the bombers), President Muffley (the bald civilian Commander-in-Chief), and Dr. Strangelove (the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi nuclear advisor whose right arm involuntarily salutes Hitler). Each character has a distinct voice, posture, accent, and comedic tone. Sellers shifts between them in scenes that sometimes feature two of his characters in conversation.

The Strangelove character is the film’s title role and the most distinctive of the three performances. The character emerges late in the film. The wheelchair, the black-leather-gloved right arm, the German accent, and the visible inability to refer to the President as anything other than “Mein Führer” all combine into one of cinema’s most-imitated supporting characters. Sellers was supposed to play a fourth role (Major Kong) but injured his leg and the role went to Slim Pickens. The injury was probably good for the film.

Pickens’s performance of Kong riding the nuclear bomb at the climax has become one of the most-quoted images in American cinema.

Does Dr. Strangelove still hold up?

10/10. The definitive cinematic statement on nuclear deterrence and one of the major American films of the 1960s. Stanley Kubrick at his most controlled. Peter Sellers in his most technically demanding work. The War Room set, the Big Board, the closing montage of mushroom clouds set to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” and the Slim Pickens bomb-riding shot are all permanent contributions to American cinema and to the cultural understanding of nuclear policy. Watch it. Watch Fail Safe (1964) for comparison.

The two films released in the same year tell the same story in different tones.

For the real side of the B-52 world, my conversation with Terry Fossum, a former B-52 officer, covers what leading people under that kind of pressure takes.

Frequently Asked Questions