Dr. Strangelove; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Hawk Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday Turner Classic Movies did what was advertised as their Hallowe’en marathon of horror movies, but they did some films that don’t really qualify as “horror” generically because they had to fit them into their usual Saturday series, “The Essentials” and “Noir Alley.” The “Essential” was Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The film began as a serious speculative novel called Red Alert by a writer variously referred to as Peter George (in the credits of the movie) and Peter Bryant (in my copy of the book), in which a psychotic U.S. general orders an unauthorized nuclear attack on the Soviet Union which threatens to trigger the Russians’ dreaded “Doomsday Device” by which the Russians will automatically set off nuclear weapons that will make the surface of the earth totally uninhabitable to humans for the next 200 years or so. (I haven’t read the book in years and I don’t have a copy of it anymore, but that’s the general idea.) Later another, more famous writer named Eugene Burdick -- whose most famous book was The Ugly American, about a U.S. agent who gets involved with and unwittingly destabilizes the fictitious Asian country of “Sarkhan” (which was obviously Viet Nam) -- wrote a book on the same premise called Fail-Safe, and Bryant/George sued Burdick for plagiarism. Both books were purchased for movies, with Stanley Kubrick buying Red Alert and, as TCM co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Brad Bird explained, Kubrick originally hired George to write the script and intended to film the novel as a serious warning story come scritto.

Then Kubrick started reading the literature by various pundits on how to survive and win a nuclear war -- and he came to the conclusion that the whole idea was ridiculous. One of the books that particularly unnerved him was a short one I’ve actually read by so-called “futurist” Herman Kahn called Thinking the “Unthinkable,” which was the source of the whole idea of a “Doomsday Device.” (Herman Kahn was actually the model for the character of Dr. Strangelove, though other names -- including Henry Kissinger and nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller -- have been suggested.) Kubrick ultimately decided that the whole idea of “winning” a nuclear war was so ridiculous that the only possible way to make a movie about it was to make it a satirical comedy. So he brought in Terry Southern as a writer and gave the people and places campy spoof names: the bomb wing set to attack Russia and start World War III is based out of “Burpleson Air Force Base” (full of signs depicting the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s motto, “Peace Is Our Profession,” which is so loony-tunes to begin with Kubrick and Southern didn’t have to tweak it any to make it a satire of itself!) and the psycho general who orders the attack is “Jack D. Ripper” (Sterling Hayden, whose usual overwrought acting style is just right for the part -- this, The Killing -- his previous film for Kubrick -- John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar are his best films). Ripper’s assistant is Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), a British Royal Air Force officer on loan to the U.S. Air Force.

The overall Strategic Air Command head is General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and the hapless, ineffectual President of the U.S. is Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). The commander of the B-52 that flies into Russia to drop the bomb that will set off the “Doomsday Device” is Major Kong (Slim Pickens) and the field office in charge of the U.S. Army unit that launches an invasion of Burpleson to get General Ripper on the phone to the President is “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn). Add to that a Suviet leader named “Premier Dmitri Kissoff,” whom we never see; the Russians are represented by their ambassador, Alexei de Sadesky (Peter Bull in a marvelous comic performance that got overshadowed by the more illustrious names in the cast) and Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) himself, the U.S.’s top advisor on nuclear strategy and a former Nazi whom the U.S. essentially requisitoned from Germany after World War II. Dr. Strangelove uses a wheelchair and his wartime injuries apparently included the loss of his hand, since he has a black-gloved prosthesis on his right arm that he can barely control -- a running gag is his difficulty in using it to lift his cigarette to his mouth (this is 1964, so virtually all the dramatis personae smoke) -- I suspect this gimmick was borrowed from Lionel Atwill’s artificial hand in Son of Frankenstein.

You’ll notice I’ve listed Peter Sellers in three different roles -- he was actually supposed to play Major Kong as well but he had a severe heart attack right after filming all the sequences except those taking place inside the B-52 (which also feature a young and virtually unrecognizable James Earl Jones as the plane’s bombardier) -- and TCM’s co-host, Brad Bird (a director who’s mostly done animated films but has several live-action credits as well, including the most recent Mission: Impossible movie), recalled that he was once given an assignment by his drama teacher to get up at 2 a.m. to watch a TV showing of Dr. Strangelove to study Peter Sellers’ tour de force in creating three totally different characterizations in three different nationalities (British -- his own -- American and German). Ironically, five years previously Sellers had played even more roles in The Mouse That Roared, also a spoof of the Cold War and the nuclear threat and also a movie which ends in a series of nuclear explosions that spells doom for the human race (though in The Mouse That Roared that’s only a fantasy sequence), but the difference between The Mouse That Roared and Dr. Strangelove is the difference between talent and genius.

Dr. Strangelove strikes me as the real follow-up to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) -- also a film about leaders whose egos push them and their countries into a catastrophic war -- and a movie that makes its anti-war points in the language of comedy and at once makes us laugh and cry over the horror of it all. One thing about Dr. Strangelove is the extent to which the obsessions of its characters are bound up with sex. General Ripper is almost never shown without a cigar sticking out of his mouth (and this is one movie in which a cigar is not just a cigar -- and remember that a stiff, unsmoked cigar in his mouth was one of Groucho Marx’s trademarks as well). General Turgidson is summoned to the War Room at the White House while he’s in bed with a young trophy mistress identified only as his secretary and referred to as “Miss Foreign Policy.” Ripper explains to Mandrake that he got the idea to start World War III on his own authority when he had trouble maintaining and erection during “the physical act of love,” and he insists that though he appreciates women “I do deny them my essence” (which I presume to mean he pulled out before ejaculating). Major Kong goes through the contents of the survival kits the bomber crew have been provided with in case they’re shot down or crash on Russian soil, notes that they include condoms, and says, “A fellow could have a good time in Vegas with all this stuff.”

Col. “Bat” Guano sees Mandrake’s British uniform and immediately decides he’s a “prevert” -- and when Mandrake finally persuades Guano to let him call the President because he’s deduced the stop-code that will abort Ripper’s attack orders, as Mandrake enters a phone booth to make the call Guano says, “If you try any preversions in there I’ll blow your head off!” Even the opening sequence, in which stock footage of bombers undergoing air-to-air refueling is shown under the opening credits while the soundtrack gives us a lounge-music version of the old romantic ballad “Try a Little Tenderness,” emphasizes the film’s connections between military violence and sexuality. (Interestingly, these same stock clips were used in another 1964 film, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, so they appeared in one of the worst movies of all time as well as one of the greatest!) Since Dr. Strangelove was made at the tail end of the Production Code the sexual innuendi couldn’t be as explicit as they could have a decade or so later, but they’re strong enough to get the point across and I think they’re funnier for being subtle.

Dr. Strangelove is odd viewing right now during the Trump administration, if only because right now what we’d have to worry about in this situation isn’t a rogue general but a bonkers President ordering an unnecessary, unjustified and catastrophic nuclear attack -- though, like Duck Soup, Dr. Strangelove is a timeless political satire about how wars get started by the fragile egos of national leaders and their willingness to authorize absolutely insane policies (in one scene the Russian ambassador says they went ahead with their Doomsday Device when they learned that the U.S. was planning something similar -- he thunders, “Our source was the New York Times!” -- and President Muffley is told he authorized the feasibility study but can’t remember doing so because a President signs so many papers a day he can’t recall the contents of each one) with virtually no thought because national leaders are encased in intellectual bubbles in which there’s no one around to tell them how stupid these ideas are. Some Presidents, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, have at least tried to correct for this sort of groupthink by recruiting advisors who would give them different points of view -- but Donald Trump, with his bottomless appetite for flattery and his demands for “loyalty” not to the interests of the U.S., but the person of Donald Trump, has rigorously rid his administration of anyone who could possibly tell him when he’s being a moron (a term a number of his advisors, including some now-former Cabinet members, have actually used about him) or an asshole.

Dr. Strangelove isn’t a “horror” film in the sense in which the term is usually used, but it is literally horrific in that it ends with the destruction of most of humanity, aside from a few survivors who will live underground in mineshafts until the earth’s surface is habitable again -- and there’s a line about how the choices for who gets one of the limited slots in the mineshafts will have to include members of the established political and military elites .. thereby ensuring that the same horriffic attitudes and philosophies that precipitated the disaster will be reproduced in whatever section of humanity survives it. The magnificent closing -- with stock shots of nuclear explosions heard over a soundtrack of Vera Lynn’s World War II-era record “We’ll Meet Again (Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When)” -- just puts a capstone on a great and, regrettably, timeless movie. And this time around I was also struck by the similarity between the beautiful tracking shots of the bomber traveling over the winter wasteland of eastern Russia and the traveling shots of similar country, albeit photographically altered (the Hebrides in Scotland) in the Star-Gate sequence at the end of Kubrick’s next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (my current choice as the greatest movie of all time) -- a visual motif Kubrick went back to again in the opening scenes of Jack Nicholson driving to the mountain resort in what’s otherwise one of Kubrick’s worst movies, The Shining. And it’s fascinating that in an era where the terms “hawks” and “doves” were used to express people’s overall attitudes towards war, with “hawks” favoring war and “doves” favoring peace, it’s ironic that the director of three of the greatest anti-war movies ever made -- Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket -- called his production company “Hawk”!