Cast: Peter Sellers

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Stanley Kubrick, one of the many copiously-bearded directors in Hollywood, was a serious, serious man. His obsessive-compulsive directorial faculties come across in his meticulously framed sequences and laboriously demanding shots. Ask Shelley Duvall. She’ll fill you up with the number of takes it took her to scream in The Shining whilst Jack Nicholson hacks the door open. This is a director who took his craft seriously, and every piece of celluloid produced transcends any genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey shattered sci-fi conventions, A Clockwork Orange revolutionised violence on-screen, and even The Shining injected a much-needed human psychology in the usual haunted-house horror fare. He pushed cinematic envelopes further. He glowered infinitely behind the lens. But was he a funny man?


Yes. Dr. Strangelove says so. His propensity for humour is ever-present here, crystallised in this crisp black-and-white celluloid, albeit a very black and devilishly sardonic one. It is intelligent, too. Perhaps one of the greatest satires captured in cinema, it satirizes the absurdity and futility of the Cold War between the US and Russia, two giant nations once arguably obsessed with nuclear warfare. The writing is bitingly cynical, the should-be terrorizing scenario of America facing a forthcoming nuclear apocalypse made side-splitting with a completely inept commander of US Air Force launches an attack on the Soviets just because he couldn’t bang his mojos. Sexual overtones and the ineptitude of men are rife here, and the incredible Peter Sellers milking it all out with his legendary three-act roles. It’s an impressive display of an actor’s versatility on-screen, whether it is the jaded, moustached Captain Mandrake, the royally-pissed President Muffley in the Pentagon, shouting to his scuffling subordinates “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” and lastly, the nutty German mad-scientist, the Nazi-salute-lashing Dr. Strangelove. If the tongue in cheek isn’t well placed enough, watch that final sequence of nuclear explosions to the tune of “We’ll Meet Again”. Its madcap humour is simultaneously frightening and hilarious.


VERDICT:

This brilliant satire of the Cold War is acid-humoured, chock-full of bile and black as pit. Hard to watch but unremorsefully uproarious. Kubrick teaches us how to be funny in the eve of Judgment Day, whilst Sellers displays a masterclass of acting to the third power.



RATING: A