Dr. Strangelove

Hollywood discovered nuclear war fifteen years ago. The Bomb has since provided stupendous finales for countless films which would have otherwise decomposed more slowly on their own.

Stanley Kubrick, producer-director-writer of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," has turned the tables. Instead of enlisting the Bomb to save an inane movie, he has created a brilliant movie to save the human race from nuclear inanity. This brief, unnerving film rips windily through a whole forest of Cold war cliches, alternately rustling branches and toppling huge trunks. See-sawing giddiness and terror, "Dr. Strangelove" leaves its audiences smiling emptily. The mood suits Kubric's purpose superbly.

That purpose, unfortunately, has been greatly obscured by overly appreciative critics. The New York Review of Books could express its raptures only by predicting the imminent eclipse of Renoir, Resnais, and Fellini. This is ludicrous. To compare Kubrick with European directors is to denigrate the achievements of both. Kubrick attempts no subtle characterization, and few cinematic tricks. Using, rather than probing, neuroses, he fills his screen with comic stereotypes, all conventionally focused in stark black and white. Except for several shots of mushroom clouds and B-52's, the movie could easily be adapted to the stage.

Like his characters, Kubrick's plot is simple--but only superficially. Actually it operates on two levels simultaneously, one hilariously fanciful, the other disturbingly realistic. It is this interplay, more than the actual tension of the story-line, that enervates the constantly laughing audiences. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a right-wing general, is convinced that the Russians are surreptitiously "sapping our bodily fluids" by flouridating drinking water. Concerned for America's "virility," Ripper orders a surprise nuclear attack on the USSR. Action alternates between the Washington War Room, where a liberal, weak-kneed President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) tries frantically to recall the planes, and a wounded B-52, whose loudly patriotic pilot, Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) urges his racially mixed crew on to Moscow with slogans of brotherhood and strains of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again."

The satire is obviously heavy handed, perhaps too much so in spots; the naming of characters is unnecessarily absurd. However, the broad farce opens Kubrick's social criticism to a wider audience than artistic subtlety could have.

Luckily, Kubrick has found actors who can inject significance, even tragedy, into the brash, punnish script. Chomping ceaselessly on a frayed cigar butt, Sterling Hayden's General Ripper represents a curious amalgam of William Holden and Groucho Marx. Yet, the character deepens magnificently, if momentarily, when Hayden stares shakily into the camera and wimpers his resolve to "keep my bodily fluids safe from women and the Reds." Somehow there is more than foolishness here. When the general stalks awkwardly into the washroom to shoot himself, a surge of pity undercuts the laughter. Hayden has almost created a Quixote; the nature of his windmill, however, makes the character more terrifying than quaint.

George C. Scott plays General Buck Turgidson who must tell President Muffley what Ripper "went and did." Scott's lines are outrageously funny, but the "Strangelove" script gives him little lee-way to improvise. About half-way through the picture, farce submerges all the intricacy Scott has infused into Turgidson. The character ends a near raving maniac, reflecting the general entropy that is engulfing the War Room.

During this pre-Doomsday chaos Peter Sellers, as Strangelove, converts an ingenious farce into a great social commentary. Playing his usual three roles, Sellers competently portrays an RAF Captain and President Muffley. But his Strangelove surpasses anything he has ever done. The doctor, a nuclear specialist and a former Nazi, sits silently in his wheelchair through eighty minutes of tension in the War Room. Then, five minutes before the world and the movie end, Strangelove bursts into sadistic glee. He spits out macabre suggestions for preserving human life in mine shafts, smiles hideously behind his dark glasses, clicks his teeth together rapidly, and finally breaks into a series of spasmodic "Heil Hitler's."

Suddenly Strangelove freezes and pauses several seconds. Then, leaping from his wheelchair, he stalks toward the open-mouthed President, screaming, "I can walk again! I can walk again!" As the voice fades unevenly, the screen dissolves into a collage of mushroom clouds puffing noiselessly into the sky. Slowly a female voice rises in the background, singing a langorous "We Shall Meet Again." By now the audience has stopped laughing; few remember the short blurb that opened the film: "The U. S. Air Force assures you that what you are to see can never happen."