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:Drstrangelove1sheet-.jpg Original film poster designed by Tommy Ungar
Directed by	Stanley Kubrick
Produced by	Stanley Kubrick
Written by	Novel: Peter George Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick Peter George Terry Southern Peter Sellers (uncredited) James B. Harris (uncredited)
Starring	Peter Sellers George C. Scott Sterling Hayden Keenan Wynn Slim Pickens James Earl Jones Tracy Reed
Music by	Laurie Johnson
Cinematography	Gilbert Taylor
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	January 29, 1964
Running time	94 min.
Country	United Kingdom  United States
Language	English
Budget	$1,800,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (commonly shortened to Dr. Strangelove) is a 1964 film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Loosely based upon the Cold War thriller novel Red Alert (also known as Two Hours to Doom) by Peter George, the source material was refashioned as a black comedy by screenwriter Terry Southern. Dr. Strangelove satirizes the fragile nature of the Cold War conflict and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. The film opens at the fictional Burpelson Air Force Base, where the insane General Jack D. Ripper has just ordered a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and proceeds to follow the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer as they try to recall Ripper's bombers in order to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.

In 1989 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Additionally, it was listed as #26 on the AFI's "100 Years, 100 Movies" and #3 on its "100 Years, 100 Laughs."^[1][2]

[edit] Plot

General Jack D. Ripper, the delusional commander of a United States Air Force base, initiates an Air Force attack plan to strike the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. He later explains that the attack was intended to thwart what he believes is a Communist conspiracy which threatens to "sap and impurify" the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people with fluoridated water. Ripper orders the 843rd Bomb Wing (which is then airborne in a training exercise called "Operation Dropkick") past its fail-safe points and into Russia. He also succeeds in convincing the personnel of Burpelson Air Force Base that the U.S. and Russia have entered into a "shooting war." Although a nuclear attack should require Presidential authority to be carried out, Ripper uses "Plan R" to send the bombers to Russia. "Plan R" is an emergency war plan to enable a senior officer to launch a retaliation strike against the Soviets if the normal chain of command, including the President, has been killed during a sneak attack. The idea behind Plan R was to discourage the Soviets from the hope that a decapitation strike against the President in Washington, D.C. would disrupt U.S. command and control, preventing a nuclear counter-attack.

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (played by Peter Sellers), an RAF exchange officer serving as General Ripper's XO, realises that no attack is being made on the USA when he turns on a radio and hears pop music instead of Civil Defence alerts. He attempts to take matters into his own hands by trying to recall the wing "on [his] own authority." Ripper, however, refuses to give him the code word necessary for recalling the bombers.

In the War Room at the Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) of the USAF briefs President Merkin Muffley (Sellers) on these developments. Although he had been unaware of Ripper's initiative, Turgidson zealously tries to take advantage of the situation to convince Muffley to launch a full scale attack on the Soviets. Turgidson believes that the United States is in a superior strategic position, and a first strike against the Soviet Union would destroy 90% of their missiles before they can retaliate, resulting in a global victory for the USA with "acceptable" American casualties of, as Turgidson puts it, "no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops...depending on the breaks". He is shocked when Muffley instead admits the Russian Ambassador to the War Room, contacts the Soviet Premier on the Hotline and insists on giving them all the information necessary to shoot down the planes before they carry out their strikes.

Although his end of the conversation is never shown on-screen, the Soviet Premier appears to be having a drunken party. He apparently sobers up when his American counterpart tells what is happening. The Russian Ambassador then reveals to the American officials that the Soviets have constructed a doomsday machine which will automatically destroy all life on Earth if a nuclear attack is waged on the Soviet Union. The Doomsday Device is operated by a network of computers and has been conceived as the ultimate deterrent. What is more, the Doomsday Device is programmed to start its process of destruction if anyone tries to de-activate it.

The President now calls upon Dr. Strangelove, (a.k.a. Merkwürdigliebe, a former Nazi) (Sellers). The wheelchair-bound Strangelove is a type of "mad scientist", whose eccentricities include a severe case of alien hand syndrome — his right hand, clad in an intimidating black leather glove, alternates between attempting to strangle Strangelove and shooting out in a Nazi salute. Strangelove explains the principles behind the Doomsday Device. He seems to find nuclear annihilation sexually stimulating and in moments of excitement refers to the President as either "Mein President" and even "Mein Führer", the way he would have addressed Adolf Hitler.

The United States government cooperates with the Soviets in shooting the American planes down. Meanwhile American soldiers sent by the President arrive at Burpelson Air Force Base in order to arrest General Ripper. Ripper has warned his men that the enemy will probably attack dressed as U.S. Army troops and as such the security forces at the base open fire on their own side. A scene depicts General Ripper and Group Captain Mandrake attempting to defend themselves against the attackers from Ripper's office window. Mandrake continues his attempts to extract the code from Ripper. The Army divisions ultimately gain access to the base.

Ripper commits suicide in order not to give the code that will recall the planes. The feckless commander of the unit attacking the base, Colonel "Bat" Guano, fails to recognise Mandrake's RAF uniform as that of an allied nation, and believes that Mandrake is leading a mutiny of "deviated preverts" (sic) against General Ripper. However, Guano ultimately relents, and helps Mandrake to call the President to tell him the recall code, which Mandrake has deduced from Ripper's doodles. The code is OPE, based on the rearranged initials for PEACE ON EARTH and PURITY OF ESSENCE. Mandrake is forced to use a telephone booth to inform the President. Not having enough change, he tells Guano to shoot the coin box on a vending machine, which Guano, still suspicious of Mandrake, does reluctantly.

The code is issued to the planes. Those that have not been shot down by the Russians return to base. Amidst great relief the officials in the War Room hold a small prayer, from which Strangelove is conspicuously absent.

However, one B-52 ("The Leper Colony") cannot be recalled, as a Soviet anti-aircraft missile has triggered the self-destruct system of the airplane's radio (presumably designed to prevent the CRM114 code machine from being reverse-engineered should it be captured). It has thus not received the call to return to base. Damaged by the missile hit, and leaking fuel, the aircraft cannot reach its intended target, the Laputa Missile Complex, where the remaining Soviet defences have been concentrated. The plane's crew proceeds instead to the Kodlosk ICBM complex (not one of the plane's official targets, but still within its range), evading the combined efforts of both the US and the USSR to stop it.

However, the B-52's bay doors have jammed, and in forcing them open, the pilot, Major "King" Kong (played by Slim Pickens), ends up riding one of the bombs to the ground, cheering all the way. Kong straddles the bomb, gripping it with one hand and waving his cowboy hat in the air in rodeo bull riding style, whooping and hollering as he plummets to his death.

The doomsday device is triggered. According to the Soviet ambassador, life on Earth's surface will be extinct in ten months. Dr. Strangelove recommends to the President that a group of about 100,000 humans be relocated deep in a mine shaft, where the nuclear fallout cannot reach, so that the Earth can be repopulated. Because of obvious limits to space in the mines, Strangelove suggests a gender ratio of "ten females to each male." The chosen women would be selected based on their youth and beauty (to ensure their fertility), while the chosen males would be selected based on their intellectual and physical strength. The Soviet ambassador states at this point, "I must confess, that is an astonishingly good idea you've got there..."

General Turgidson, however, rants that the Soviets will likely create an even better bunker than the West, with nuclear weapons stores inside. He cautions the President that America "must not allow a mine shaft gap" (spoofing the missile gap fears), and begins planning a war to take place when their descendants emerge a century later. During this rant, the Soviet ambassador retreats into the shadows and takes pictures of the war room display screens.

In the concluding scenes, a visibly excited Strangelove bolts out of his wheelchair shouting "Mein Führer, I can walk!", mere seconds before the film ends with a barrage of nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn's famous World War II song "We'll Meet Again".

[edit] Cast

• Peter Sellers as
  • Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: A British exchange officer with an upper-class English accent.
  • President Merkin Muffley: The American Commander-in-Chief.
  • Dr. Strangelove: The wheelchair-bound, sinister German nuclear war expert and ex-Nazi.
• George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson: A strategic bombing enthusiast
• Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper: Who is equally (and rabidly) paranoid and patriotic.
• Slim Pickens as Air Force Major T. J. "King" Kong: The B-52 Stratofortress bomber captain and a stereotypical "American cowboy".
• James Earl Jones as Lieutenant Lothar Zogg: A bombardier.
• Keenan Wynn as Colonel "Bat" Guano:
• Peter Bull as Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadesky:
• Shane Rimmer as Captain "Ace" Owens:
• Tracy Reed as Miss Scott: General Turgidson's seductive secretary and mistress the film's only female character. She also appears as the centerfold in the Playboy magazine that Major Kong is shown reading.^[3] In the novel the Playboy model is refered to as "Miss Foreign Affairs". For the pose, Reed lay flat on the floor in order to cover her breasts and had a book covering the bikini bottom she was wearing; nevertheless her mother was furious.^[4]

[edit] Peter Sellers' roles

Columbia Pictures agreed to provide financing for the film only on the condition that Peter Sellers would play at least four major roles. This condition stemmed from the studio's impression that much of the success of Lolita (1962), Kubrick's previous film, was based on Sellers' playing multiple roles. Kubrick accepted the demand considering that "such crass and grotesque stipulations are the sine qua non of the motion-picture business".^[5][6]

Ultimately, Peter Sellers played just three of the four roles initially allocated to him. At the start of production, it was expected that he would also play the role of Air Force Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber captain, but from the beginning, Sellers was reluctant to do so. He felt that his workload was too heavy, and he was concerned that he would not be able to reproduce the Texan accent required for the character of Kong. Kubrick pleaded with him, and asked Terry Southern (who had been raised in Texas) to record a tape with Kong's lines spoken in the correct accent. Using Southern's tape, Sellers managed to get the accent right, and started shooting the scenes in the airplane. However, Sellers sprained an ankle and could not play the role, as technical constraints would have confined him to cramped space of the cockpit set.^[5][6]

Peter Sellers is said to have improvised much of his dialogue during filming. Kubrick, the director, is said to have incorporated Sellers' ad-libbed lines into the written screenplay as shooting progressed, so that the improvised lines became part of the canonical screenplay.^[7]

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake
According to film critic Alexander Walker, the author of biographies of both Sellers and Kubrick, the role of Lionel Mandrake was the easiest of the three for Sellers to play, as he was aided by his experience of mimicking his superiors while engaged in national service with the RAF.^[7]. There is also a heavy element of Sellers' friend and occasional co-star Terry-Thomas.

President Merkin Muffley
For his performance as President Merkin Muffley, a decent character, understandably flustered somewhat by the situation, Sellers flattened his natural English accent to sound like an American Midwesterner. Sellers drew inspiration for the role from Adlai Stevenson,^[7] the former governor of Illinois, who had sought presidential election in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections.

In early takes, Sellers faked cold symptoms in order to exaggerate the character's apparent weakness. This caused frequent laughter among the film crew, ruining take after take. This comic portrayal was ultimately deemed to be inappropriate by Kubrick, who felt that Muffley should be shown as a serious character.^[7] In subsequent takes, Sellers played the role straight, though the president's cold is still evident in a couple of scenes.

Dr. Strangelove
The title character, Dr. Strangelove, serves as President Muffley's scientific advisor in the War Room, presumably making use of prior expertise as a Nazi physicist: upon becoming an American citizen, he translated his German surname "Merkwürdigliebe" to the English equivalent. Twice in the film, he accidentally addresses the President as "Mein Führer."

The character is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, Nazi SS officer-turned-NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and "father of the hydrogen bomb" Edward Teller. The character was also compared to U.S. Secretary of State and controversial Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henry Kissinger. However, it is unlikely that he served as a basis for Dr. Strangelove as, at the time the film was made, Kissinger was only a Harvard professor who wrote some books on nuclear war strategy, being relatively unknown to the public.^[3] At one point, Strangelove refers to a study which he had commissioned from the BLAND Corporation (a pun on the RAND Corporation, a U.S. military think tank). In his interpretation of Dr. Strangelove, Sellers' accent was influenced by that of Austrian-American photographer Weegee (the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig), who was hired by Kubrick as a special effects consultant^{[citation needed]}.

Strangelove's appearance echoes the movie villains of the Fritz Lang era in 1920s Germany, in which sinister characters were often portrayed as having 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 gesture. Kubrick perpetually wore the gloves on the film set in order to avoid being burned when handling hot lights, and Sellers found the gloves to be especially menacing.^{[citation needed]}

At the end of the film, Dr. Strangelove is animated by the thought of a post-war, centrally controlled, male-dominated society whose members have been specially selected from the population. This idea is evocative of Nazi visions.

[edit] Slim Pickens as Air Force Major T. J. "King" Kong

Slim Pickens, an established character actor and veteran of many Western films, was quickly chosen to replace Sellers as Major Kong. Fellow actor James Earl Jones recalls, "He was Major Kong on and off the set—he didn't change a thing—his temperament, his language, his behavior." According to some sources, the British film crew thought he was a method actor, and his mannerisms were his way of "finding" his performance for the character, unaware that that was the way he really behaved.

Kubrick biographer John Baxter further explains in the documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove:

Pickens, who had previously played only minor supporting and character roles, stated that his appearance as Maj. Kong greatly improved his career. He would later comment, "After Dr. Strangelove the roles, the dressing rooms and the checks all started getting bigger."

[edit] Production

[edit] Novel and screenplay

Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident, building on the widespread Cold War fear for survival.^[3] While doing in-depth research for the planned film, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and unstable "Balance of terror" existing between nuclear powers and its intrinsic paradoxical character. At Kubrick's request, Alistair Buchan (the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies), recommended the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George.^[8] Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an article written for the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" and reprinted in "The Observer,"^[9] and immediately bought the film rights.^[10]

Kubrick, in collaboration with George, started work on writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn.^[11] Following his initial intention and the tone of the book, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious drama. However, as he later explained during interviews, the comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction became apparent as he was writing the first draft of the film's script. Kubrick stated:

After deciding to turn the film into a bleak comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian (1959), which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers.^[5] Sellers is also sometimes considered an uncredited co-writer, as he changed many lines by way of improvisation.

[edit] Sets and filming

Dr. Strangelove was filmed at Shepperton Studios, in London, as Peter Sellers was in the middle of a divorce at the time and, thus, unable to leave England.^[13] The sets occupied three main sound stages: the Pentagon War Room, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber and the last one containing both the motel room and General Ripper's office and outside corridor.^[5] The studio's buildings were also used as the military airport's exterior. The film's set design was done by Ken Adam, the famous production designer of several James Bond films (at the time, he had already worked on Dr. No). The black and white cinematography was by Gilbert Taylor, and the film was edited by Anthony Harvey and Stanley Kubrick (uncredited).

For the War Room Ken Adam first designed a two level set which Kubrick initially liked, only to decide later that it was not what he wanted. Adam next began work on the design that was used in the film, an expressionist set that was compared with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It was an enormous concrete room (130 feet long and 100 feet wide, with a 35-foot high ceiling^[10]) suggesting a bomb shelter, with a triangular shape (based on Kubrick's idea that this particular shape would prove the most resistant against an explosion). One side of the room was covered with gigantic strategic maps reflecting in a shiny black floor inspired by the dance scenes in old Fred Astaire films. In the middle of the room there was a large circular table lit from above by a circle of lamps, suggesting a poker table. Kubrick insisted that the table be covered with green baize (although this could not be seen in the black and white film) to reinforce the actors' impression that they are playing "a game of poker for the fate of the world."^[14] Kubrick asked Adam to build the set ceiling in concrete to force the director of photography to use for filming only the on-set lights from the circle of lamps. Moreover, each lamp in the circle of lights was carefully placed and tested until Kubrick was happy with the result.^[15]

Lacking cooperation from The Pentagon in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52, and relating this to the geometry of the B-52's fuselage. The B-52 was state of the art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off limits to the film crew. When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that "it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which was the CRM."^[7] It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned whether Ken Adam's production design team had done all of their research legally, fearing a possible investigation by the FBI.^[7]

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 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.

The original musical score for the film was composed by Laurie Johnson and the special effects were by Wally Veevers.

[edit] Fail-Safe and Seven Days in May

Red Alert author Peter George collaborated on the screenplay with Kubrick and satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert was far more solemn in tone than its film version and the character of Dr. Strangelove never even existed on its pages. The main plot and technical elements, however, were quite similar. A novelization of the actual film, rather than a re-print of the original novel, was later penned by George. George committed suicide in 1966.

During the filming of Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick learned that Fail-Safe, a film with a similar theme, was being produced. Although Fail-Safe was to be an ultra-realistic thriller, Kubrick feared that its overall plot resemblances would damage Strangelove's box office run, especially if it were to be released first. Indeed, the novel Fail-Safe (on which the film of the same name is based) is so similar to Red Alert that Peter George sued on charges of plagiarism and settled out of court.^[16] What worried Kubrick the most about Fail-Safe was that it boasted an acclaimed director, Sidney Lumet, and first-rate dramatic actors, Henry Fonda as the American President and Walter Matthau as the bold ex-Nazi advisor to the Pentagon, Professor Groeteschele. Kubrick decided that it would be in his film's best interests for a legal wrench to be thrown into the gears of the Fail-Safe production. Director Sidney Lumet recalls in the documentary, Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove:

Kubrick tried to halt production on Fail-Safe by arguing that its own 1960 source novel of the same name had been plagiarized from Peter George's Red Alert, to which Kubrick himself owned the creative rights. Also, he pointed out the unmistakable similarities in intentions between the characters Groeteschele and Strangelove. The plan ended up working exactly as Kubrick intended; Fail-Safe opened a full eight months behind Dr. Strangelove to critical acclaim, but mediocre box office results.

Also released in 1964 was Paramount Pictures' Seven Days in May (now owned by Warner Bros. Pictures). The plot involves a coup attempt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prevent the President of the United States from signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, who, they believe, cannot be trusted.

[edit] The Kennedy assassination

A first test screening of the film was scheduled for November 22, 1963, the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The film was just weeks from its scheduled premiere, but as a result of the assassination, 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". The dub is apparent if Pickens' lips are watched closely when he speaks. The original reference to Dallas survives in some dubbed versions of the film (eg the French release of the film).

[edit] Alternate ending

The end of the film shows Dr. Strangelove exclaiming "Mein Führer, I can walk!" before cutting to footage of nuclear explosions. This footage comes from actual nuclear tests, many of them from Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll. In some, old warships (such as the German Prinz Eugen heavy cruiser), which were used as targets, are plainly visible. In others the smoke trails of rockets used to create a calibration backdrop can be seen.

Reportedly, Spike Milligan was responsible for suggesting the montage ending. When asked what would be the best song for the ending, Tracy Reed, not knowing how the film would end, suggested "We'll Meet Again".^{[citation needed]}

This nuclear explosion ending was a replacement to the original climactic cream pie fight scene, which has become one of the most famous "deleted" scenes in cinema history; the scene was never released to the general public and not included in the laserdisc or DVD releases of Dr. Strangelove. The only known public showing of the footage was in the 1999 screening at the National Film Theatre in London following Kubrick's death.^{[citation needed]}

Accounts vary as to why the scene was cut. In a 1969 interview, Kubrick said: "I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film."^[13] Alexander Walker observed that "the cream pies were flying around so thickly that people lost definition, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at."^[7] Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern, suggests that the fight was intended to be less jovial. "Since they were laughing, it was unusable, because instead of having that totally black, which would have been amazing, like, this blizzard, which in a sense is metaphorical for all of the missiles that are coming, as well, you just have these guys having a good old time. So, as Kubrick later said, 'it was a disaster of Homeric proportions.'"^[7] However, editor Anthony Harvey states that "it would have stayed, except that Columbia Pictures were horrified, and thought it would offend the president's family."^[17]

The scene included General Turgidson exclaiming, "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!" after Muffley takes a pie in the face. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, this line, no matter how coincidental, would have hit too close to home to be used.

[edit] Themes

[edit] Sexuality

From the opening scene of the B-52 "mating" in flight with the KC-135 Tanker (set to an instrumental version of "Try a Little Tenderness") to General Ripper's sexual frustration being at the root of the eventual apocalypse, sexual references are readily apparent.

• The character of Strangelove is laced with innuendo—aside from his suggestive name. He is the character responsible for creating fantasies of a polygamous postapocalyptic society with a ratio of "ten females to each male."
• General Jack D. Ripper is named after Jack the Ripper, the famous serial killer who murdered prostitutes. General Ripper's primary concern about Communism is his assertion that water fluoridation is "a Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids," of which he was made aware when his "loss of essence" during sexual intercourse greatly fatigued him. He continues to explain that women "seek the life essence" and then states, "I do not avoid women...but I do deny them my essence".
• Many characters' names are sexual plays-on-words. Group Captain Lionel Mandrake's last name refers to the Mandrake plant which has mythical fertility properties. The Soviet Ambassador Alexei de Sadesky is named for the Marquis de Sade, and Dmitri Kisof's last name is pronounced "Kissoff". The name of the target, Laputa, is close to the Spanish la puta meaning "the whore". (Laputa is also the name of a flying island populated by scientists and artists in Gulliver's Travels, the 18th century political satire by Jonathan Swift.) President Merkin Muffley's first and last name each crudely imply that he is a pussy by nature, since "Merkin" is a female pubic wig used mainly by prostitutes in the 18th century and "muff" (pubic hair) references the area where the wig is applied. The name of General Turgidson, who when introduced is preparing to have sex with his secretary, is derived from turgid, a biological term meaning full of fluid to the point of hardness, as in an erection. "Buck" is an explicit reference to virility.
• Colonel Bat Guano's name literally means "bat droppings".

[edit] Satirizing the Cold War

Dr. Strangelove takes passing shots at numerous 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 used 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, urged Americans to plan for a limited nuclear war, and later became one of the architects of the MAD doctrine in the 1960s. The prevailing thinking that a nuclear war was inherently unwinnable and suicide 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 Mega-deaths". According to Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick had the round table in the War Room covered with green felt (even though the film was shot in black and white) as he wanted it to resemble a poker table, in order to emphasize that the men at the table would be gambling on the world's fate.

[edit] Reception

Dr. Strangelove was 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, it is one of the films to have received a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and it is ranked 15th top movie of all time on TopTenReviews Movies .

Roger Ebert has Dr. Strangelove in his list of Great Movies,^[18] saying it is "arguably the best political satire of the century."

[edit] Awards

The film was nominated for four Academy Awards and seven BAFTA awards of which it won four. It was nominated for the following Academy Awards: best actor (Peter Sellers), best adapted screenplay, best director and best picture, and for the following BAFTA awards: best British actor (Peter Sellers), best British screenplay, and best foreign actor (Sterling Hayden). It won the following BAFTA awards: best British art direction (B/W) (Ken Adam), best British film, best film from any source, and the UN award. In addition, the film won the best written American comedy award from the Writers Guild of America and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Kubrick himself won two awards for best director from the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists and was nominated for one by the Directors Guild of America.

[edit] Trivia

• 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).^[19]
• The photographic mural in General Ripper's office is actually a view of Heathrow Airport, London.
• The opening titles, by Pablo Ferro, proclaims, "BASE ON THE BOOK RED ALERT BY PETER GEORGE". The spelling error wasn't noticed until the final print had been made.
• "Peace is Our Profession" was the actual motto of the Strategic Air Command.
• Major Kong's B-52, The Leper Colony, is a direct tribute to the classic 1949 bomber movie 12 O'Clock High, in which "Leper Colony" is crewed by the worst airmen in the 918th Bomb Group.
• "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", a traditional Irish anti-war song shares the same tune with the American patriotic song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" also known as the "The Animals Went in Two by Two" and "The Ants Go Marching." The tune is used to accompany the B-52 flight.
• Among the nuclear explosions used for the final sequence are footage of the Trinity test, the bombing of Nagasaki, shot BAKER of Operation Crossroads, a test from Operation Sandstone, and, lastly, one of the massive hydrogen bomb tests from Operation Redwing.
• The doomsday weapon in the film (a "cobalt-thorium-G bomb") was inspired by the real idea of a cobalt bomb, conceptualized by nuclear pioneer Leo Szilard, founder of Council for a Livable World.
• The shadow of the B-17 Flying Fortress camera plane used to shoot polar terrain over Greenland for the movie can be seen on the ground in a couple of exterior shots of Major Kong's B-52 Stratofortress.
• Baseball player Dick Stuart, known as a powerful slugger but a terrible-fielding first baseman, had been known as "Stonefingers" prior to this film; afterwards, he was nicknamed "Dr. Strange-glove."
• Dame Vera Lynn, in an interview on the BBC that celebrated her 90th birthday, said when she first saw the movie, the audience laughed at the use of her singing "We'll Meet Again" against a backdrop of exploding atomic bombs. But then the audience realized it was not funny and became strangely silent.

[edit] Notes and References

[edit] See also

• List of cultural references to Dr. Strangelove
• Strangelove! A Cold War Musical
• Films that have been considered the greatest ever
• Water fluoridation
• Politics in fiction
• Alien Hand Syndrome

[edit] External links

Template:Wikiquote

• Dr. Strangelove at the Internet Movie Database
• Dr. Strangelove at Filmsite.org
• "Dr. Strangelove" at DVD Journal
• Herman Kahn's doomsday machine
• Continuity transcript
• Commentary on Dr. Strangelove
• Great Movies: Dr. Strangelove By Roger Ebert
• Critical Reviews for Dr. Strangelove at TopTenReviews Movies
• Study Guide by Dan Lindley. See also: longer version
• [6] Annotated bibliography on Dr. Strangelove from the Alsos Digital Library

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