…Kubrik masterminded Dr. Strangelove, loosely basing the movie upon the book “Red Alert” (the book is a completely serious Cool War nuclear war scenario, but Strangelove is a complete and total farce) . “Strangelove” came out a year or two after the Cuban October missile crisis, a year after US President John Kennedy was assassinated as well as 2 other contemporaneous films, the gleaming and paranoid “The Manchurian Candidate” and the serious treatment of the same book, “Fail Suitable.”
Kubrik originally plot out to do a serious treatment of the book. But Kubrik found as he tried to manufacture the screenplay that he kept running into scenes that he ended up writing as satire. Recognizing the challenge, Kubrik enlisted the talents of one of the best comedic screenwriters in Hollywood, Terry Southern, to do the screenplay.
Casting the film was share genius and share hit-and-miss overjoyed accident. … Somehow Slim Pickens’ name came up and Pickens current the role of the B-52 bomber pilot. Even more ironic yet, Slim Pickens was more conservative than Dan Blocker, but Pickens never caught on during the film’s production that Dr. Strangelove was a comedy, worthy less a satire and a farce unsympathetic to the official propaganda of the cool war.
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In of itself, it was a amusing master stroke telling Pickens play the role seriously. Pickens was apparently no grand wit, so Kubrik was able to withhold Pickens completely unaware that Pickens was actually playing in a comedy, not a serious war movie (one can only hold that the humor of the state was not lost on the other cast members, including James Earl Jones who played Capt. Kong’s bombardier.. “Don’t remark Slim this is all a mountainous joke, we have to let him judge this is a steady war movie.” ) .
Other than Peter Sellers’ roles, George C. Scott (later in “Patton”) and Obliging Hayden delivered memorable performances. Both were obviously instructed to play their roles “over the top.” Kubrik instructed Scott to overact the role of the cigar-smoking, gut-slapping, martini-drinking & womanizing General Buck Turgidson (glean it? Turgid-son? ) . In the scene in the war room where Turgidson exuberantly proclaims the spectacle of a B-52 bomber evading radar by hedge-hopping, Kubrik instructed George C. Scott to deliberately overact the allotment. Kubrik had Scott re-take the scene several times, asking Scott to acquire it even more over-the-top than before. On the last acquire of that scene, Scott practically performed it as a burlesque parody, which was of course, the final rob that Kubrik actually weak.
Sterling Hayden delivered a bright performance as the psychotic Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the Air Force general who unilaterally orders the nuclear strike against the USSR. The confusion of Frosty War paranoia, paranoid psychosis and fraudulent sexual power in Hayden’s scenes is the blackest of dismal satire. Totally over the top, ludicrous and frightenlingly possible (what if one of your top military brass really went insane and over-rode all the safe-guards against nuclear war? ) . The insane babblings of General Ripper plot the film’s direction and act as its centerpiece, delivering both Kubrik’s satire of anti-communist propaganda and the air of impossible odds for the rest of the film’s characters to overcome that they might somehow avert doomsday.
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Peter Seller’s performances as the President, the British officer and Dr. Strangelove (a left-over Nazi scientist) are memorable, Sellers delivers the title role as the deranged wheelchair-bound Nazi scientist who suffers from involuntary palsied “Seig Hiels!” in his apt arm. Again sex is the valid underlying motive to yet another character and the opportunities for a sexually prodigious post-apocalyptic eugenic world brings the deranged Strangelove to a frenzied outburst of libidinal energy: “Mein Fuhrer! I can vwalk!” But as noteworthy as I savor Sellers’ roles, they seem overshadowed by the rest of the film’s characters. P>It comes probably of no surprise that the U.S. Air Force refused to attend Kubrik in shooting the movie. Having to choice, Kubrik had to resort to mocking up the B-52 flying scenes and bomber interior cabin scenes as best he could (the bomber interior was apparently such a respectable replica of the genuine thing that the FBI launched an investigation into who gave Kubrik such a detailed layout of a B-52’s flight deck) . Appropriately, the exterior B-52 flying scenes contain a funny flaw if you sight closely enough: In one scene, as the damaged bomber hedge-hops across the Siberian taiga (northern boreal forest), you can eye that the underlying shadow of the plane is actually that of a four-engine propellor aircraft and doesn’t match the profile of the overlaid B-52 model.
Suffice it to say, when the movie came out, it was not universally received or even widely understood. It was drummed by political commentators and movie reviewers who found it to be tasteless and sophomoric. The studio was very concerned about the potential a negative backlash from its release (deem that in the same year, the Manchurian Candidate was withdrawn from theaters after Kennedy was assassinated) . An internal memo described Dr. Strangelove as “a immense, sick malefic joke” and questioned the wisdom of even releasing the movie at all. After all, the movie starts off with B-52’s and tanker planes copulating during mid-flight refuelings, displays Air Force “Peace is Our Profession” billboards in the midst of a fire fight between the US Army and Air Force security, depicts two Air Force generals as complete sex-obsessed baffoons, one a psychotic and the other a braying ass, delivers a deranged Nazi scientist and finally a cowboy pilot bucking the biggest phallic bronco of his career (never mind blowing up the world) .
I can assume of few other films whose film makers so defied convention and created a sage that really turned old wisdom on its head. Dr. Strangelove keeps coming at you as one unfavorable scene after another, interspersed with segments of complete straight-faced dead-pan, piling them all on until the fateful kill. When Pickins died in 1983, CBS news anchor Dan Rather delivered the obituary replete with the out buy of Pickins riding the bomb (Perhaps DeForest Kelley topped that and made estimable on his threat to have “He’s dreary, Jim” engraved on his tombstone….) .
There are some things you unprejudiced can’t live down: Being the face that gets a large closing falling scene that leads to the waste of all life on Earth happens to be one of those things. Dreadful Slim, he’s probably suffering in a purgatory of a Liberal Methodist heaven.
In closing, I have to agree with that long-forgotten studio executive who wrote in the memo: Dr. Strangelove *IS* a astronomical, sick malefic joke. But it is one of the finest mountainous, sick malefic jokes ever created, and stands as a film masterpiece. Those who extoll the virtues of this fil
I doubt that you could imagine how great it would distress me to give a single-star rating to an edition of the film I mediate to be the singular greatest contribution to the motion recount. However, the original “40th Anniversary” edition of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To End Worrying And Fancy The Bomb is, unquestionably, requiring of such a rating. Why?, you ask.
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Because about fifteen to twenty percent of the mask image has been removed!!!
If you recall a spy, you will survey that this unusual “Special” edition of Dr. Strangelove is presented in anamorphic widescreen, with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. This, as you can gather from examining older editions of the film, is the first time the film has ever been presented in such a manner. The reason why (and you may cross-check this with the Internet Movie Database [IMDb] or any book on Stanley Kubrick worth its salt) is because Dr. Strangelove was NOT FILMED in 1.66:1. It was technically filmed with a varying aspect ratio (the reasons for which are peaceful not fully explicated, as far as I’ve seen), but, in general, it was filmed in about 1.33:1.
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So, you ask, how does a film shot in 1.33:1 salvage presented in 1.66:1? Did someone return to the novel negative and explain material previously hidden from behold, lost on every print and VHS, Beta, laserdisc and DVD copy heretofore released?
NO!
They simply slit off the top and bottom of the cloak!!!
Such things are not unprecedented. An extremely similar case is the so-called “panoramic” Gone With The Wind. The film, made in 1939 (before there was anything BUT 1.33:1, the “Academy” aspect ratio), when released in the Panavision/Technorama age of the mid-1960’s was similar chopped and changed to magically become 2.35:1. This edition was released on video and DVD a few times before, finally, it was restored to its current 1.33:1 glory.
Stanley Kubrick was absolutely illustrious for his perfectionism and auteur station in the film industry, and I cannot have that a company proposing to release a definitive “Special” edition of his greatest masterpiece would be so heartless as to unnecessarily delete a profitable fraction of the shroud.
Please avoid this unique, bastardized Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Terminate Worrying And Like The Bomb. While the few unusual extras thereon are of interest, they can easily be seen via rental from the local video store, as suplemental to the last “Special Edition” of the DVD (which, incidentally, clearly states on the assist that it is “Presented in the modern aspect ratio of approximately 1.33:1″.
Thank you,
Marc-David Jacobs
P.S. For those of you involved in seeing the dreadful editing job for yourselves, feel free to go out and rent the modern edition and the previous edition and go to seven minutes and forty-eight seconds, which is the outrageous tight shot of the B-52’s CRM-114 decoder book. As you will eye, an entire line of text on the top, and about one-and-a-half on the bottom are not completely missing.
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