Stanley Kubrick read more than forty books about nuclear war before he made this film, and what he concluded was that nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd. That conclusion is the movie. It is the funniest film ever made about the end of the world, and the most frightening, and sixty years after its release it has not stopped being either one.
The premise is simple and terrifying. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper — played by Sterling Hayden with a cigar lodged permanently in his jaw and a sexual paranoia so complete it has become a geopolitical philosophy — has gone quietly insane at Burpelson Air Force Base and ordered a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. The planes are in the air. The recall code is known only to Ripper. And the machines of war, designed with elaborate redundancy to prevent exactly this accident, are working exactly as intended. Nobody can stop them. The comedy begins there and does not stop until everything is on fire.
Peter Sellers plays three roles, each with a different accent and a different relationship to the catastrophe unfolding around him. As Group Captain Lionel Mandrake — a British RAF officer attached to Ripper’s base — he is all nervous civility, trying to reason with a madman using the tools of military politeness while the world ends around him. As President Merkin Muffley, he is the conscientious liberal intellectual rendered useless by a situation that exists precisely because conscientious liberal intellectuals believed the machines would hold. His phone call to the Soviet Premier — “Hello, Dmitri? Yes, this is Merkin Muffley. Yes, fine. And you?” — is one of the great comic performances in the history of cinema, a one-sided conversation with a drunk that Sellers improvised almost entirely.
And as Dr. Strangelove himself, the former Nazi weapons scientist now advising the American government, he creates something genuinely unsettling — a man whose right arm keeps trying to give a Nazi salute against his will, whose excitement at the prospect of nuclear annihilation keeps breaking through the professional veneer he is barely maintaining. Three completely realized characters. One actor. Sellers was originally signed to play a fourth role as well — Major T.J. Kong — but broke his ankle before filming and was replaced by Slim Pickens.
George C. Scott had a reputation as a serious dramatic actor and was furious that Kubrick kept asking him to play General Buck Turgidson bigger and broader than he felt was right. He agreed to broad takes only as rehearsals, intending his restrained performances to be the ones used in the final cut. Kubrick used the broad ones. Scott was angry about it for years afterward. He was wrong. Turgidson is one of the great comic performances of the decade — a man so thoroughly militarized that he can calculate acceptable nuclear casualties the way a businessman calculates quarterly losses, cheerfully, with a touch of optimism. “No more than ten to twenty million killed, tops,” he reports to the President. “Depending on the breaks.” Scott makes you laugh and then makes you notice you laughed, which is exactly what the film requires.
Kubrick shot the film at Shepperton Studios outside London in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the specific nightmare it depicts — a rogue military commander with the authority and the means to start a nuclear war without civilian oversight — was understood by everyone in the audience to be not entirely fictional. The War Room set, designed by Ken Adam, is one of the great movie sets: a vast circular space with a round table of green baize under a cone of light, the world’s military and political leadership looking small against the surrounding darkness.
There was an alternate ending in which the Russians and Americans engaged in a massive custard pie fight across that War Room floor. Kubrick ordered 3,000 pies. He shot it. He cut the scene because he felt it made the film look too farcical — that after a nuclear bomb actually explodes, audiences needed to sit with what that meant rather than laugh again. The cut was the right call.
There is a Dallas connection worth noting. The film’s original premiere was scheduled for November 22, 1963. The premiere was cancelled that afternoon, and the release was pushed back to January 29, 1964. A line in the film that mentioned Dallas was overdubbed to say “Vegas” instead — the only edit Kubrick made to the picture after Kennedy was shot. He felt, correctly, that the word Dallas had acquired a weight it could not carry in a comedy.
Slim Pickens, as Major T.J. “King Kong,” rides a nuclear bomb out of a B-52 at the end of the film, waving his cowboy hat like a rodeo rider. Pickens played the scene straight, having been told by Kubrick only that he was playing a patriotic military man in a war picture. He never knew it was a comedy. Which is precisely why it works. The image — a man on a bomb, waving his hat, going down with a grin — is so American, so cheerful, so completely in love with the thing that will kill everyone, that it has become one of the defining images of twentieth century cinema.
The film made $9.7 million on a budget of $1.8 million. It received four Academy Award nominations — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Sellers. The American Film Institute placed it third on its list of the funniest American films ever made. It was among the first 25 films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1989, deemed culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.
None of these facts tell you what it’s actually like to watch it, which is to feel the ground shift slightly — to laugh and then wonder what you are laughing at, and to realize that the answer is the same thing everyone in the film is laughing at: the certainty that it could never really happen, combined with the growing suspicion that it already has.
