Source (purchased/given/borrowed/the wife's): ownDate Purchased: January 08, 2007
Original Review: N/A
Thoughts/Memories/ Remembrances: I first watched Dr. Strangelove on laserdisc, likely in early 1997, but to be honest, I don't remember watching the movie. Chances are I fell asleep while watching it. The great thing about laserdisc was there was no encoding so it was easy to export the image to a videocassette. At the time, I taped pretty much every laserdisc I rented, including this one, so if I fell asleep while watching one, I knew I had a back up so no biggie. Overall, I had a sense of disappointment, thinking it would be so much funnier (at the time I thought satire=funny), as well, to be honest, I don't think I got it. Aden has much fonder memories of the film and an open slot in a 2/$30 purchase and her input led to the acquisition of this DVD.
Re-Review: None of it, besides the legendary climactic bomb-dropping sequence, had stuck with me. I didn't remember Major Kong, or General Turgidson , Col. Mandrake, President Muffley or, really, even Strangelove himself. Some movies I watch and they stay with me, but almost nothing from my previous viewing ten years ago remained in my brain. For such a legendary movie, a Stanley Kubrick film no less, that's pretty absurd.
The film opens with a warning that the events of therein are fictional and that there are safeguards in place to prevent the central conceit from happening. The overzealous Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), tired of the slow chess-like nature of the cold war, and truly believing the party line about the evil pandemic that is communism, uses his position to give the order for a nuclear air strike on Russia and lockdown his base so that only he might call it off. Only Colonel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), an "exchange officer" from the RAF is there to try and talk him down.
Meanwhile, General Turgidson (George C. Scott) is called into the White House's war room to work with the nervous and ill-prepared President (Sellers again) and his counsel on deciding how to best handle the situation. Unfortunately, Turgidson himself is of the same school and temperament as Ripper, and his advice tends to lean more towards nuking the reds and worrying about it later. Losses will be at 10, 20 million tops.
President Muffley summons the Russian Ambassador to the war room (making Turgidson quite nervous), to hopefully assist and also for the lovely breakfast buffet. Through the Ambassador, Muffley gets in touch with a still-drunk Prime Minister of the U.S.S.R. and has an equal parts surprising and absurd discourse, (in the film's sharpest point) not at all what one would expect from theoretically bitter enemies.
In the background of the war room sits Sellers' third role, the the former Nazi scientist and now adviser Dr. Strangelove and also the most outrageous aspect of the film. A nervous, twitchy man with some sort of neurological disability, Strangelove parlays the situation into something much more down his line of study: building homo superior (through whatever means necessary). It's through Strangelove that Kubrick lets Sellers loose. It's obvious that much of all of Sellers' performances (each brilliant in their own way) are improvised, but Strangelove seems completely so, and it's a testament to the surrounding actors' professionalism that they were able to hold straight faces.
The third setting is aboard one of the 34 bombers heading out on their radio-silenced mission. They question their orders, but as all good soldiers should do, they've checked their morality before boarding the plane. They assume if the order is given then, by gum, it must be go time. Though the cowboy-hat-wearing Texan pilot, Major Kong, may seem a little eccentric and perhaps an ill fit for command, he knows the routine and he knows the chain of command, and he's willing to sacrifice every ounce of his being to perform his duty, and he'll do it with a smile on his face.
The special features reveal that Kubrick had originally intended a more serious foray into examining the nuclear arms race, the news of the day seriously affecting him to the point of obsession. It would appear that it was a few years in the making, as Kubrick developed the idea, ingesting book after book, and eventually realizing that not only would a completely serious movie be a bitter (and likely unpopular) pill but also not as memorable. Shifting gears by injecting humour and overall diminishing the severity (the tone is more of an "eh, so what if it does happen...") it might make a greater impact. People might get the humour but also pay more attention to the issue that's behind it.
Even today, broaching 20 years after the end of the cold war, Strangelove is a biting indictment against the arms race and ahead of its time in examining the political tensions between nations and surmising they weren't nearly as heavy as we were lead to believe. The political climate of today is completely different, and the threat of nuclear annihilation has been usurped by comparatively smaller-scale terrorism, but there's always room for a reminder of what was on our minds in another era, and perhaps how we dealt with it. Now that I'm old enough to get it, I get it... I get the message and the humour, I revel in the performances and nearly every line either precisely written else delivered off-the-cuff is a revelation. A satire of this calibre on todays political environment is sorely needed.
Rating (keep/sell/undecided) keep