Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear satire is ruthlessly funny and properly frightening, with Peter Sellers finding three distinct ways to be absurd. The broadest clowning sometimes crowds the sharper jokes, but the people in charge remain horribly recognisable.
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a ferociously funny film about nuclear war, and the laughter makes the danger harder to dismiss. The people entrusted with decisions appear to enjoy the authority rather more than they understand the responsibility. Kubrick, Peter George and Terry Southern’s screenplay makes military vanity and diplomatic good manners equally useful to the comedy. There is suspense here, but we are also watching powerful men become distracted by the pleasure of sounding important.
Peter Sellers supplies three performances, as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove, and the pleasure is in how differently each man handles absurdity. Mandrake’s restraint and Muffley’s concern give the film room to breathe around its more extravagant behaviour. We laughed at Muffley’s attempts to sound reasonable, then felt uncomfortable about how reassuring we found him. Sellers makes basic decency seem a considerable qualification for high office, which tells us how far the surrounding military confidence has lowered our expectations.
George C. Scott gives General ‘Buck’ Turgidson such relish for military business that the enthusiasm itself becomes alarming. Sterling Hayden’s Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper is more rigid, and his conviction is funny until we consider what conviction permits a man in uniform to do. Both performances make the film’s disgust with warmongering easy to understand without anyone explaining the lesson. Scott occasionally pushes a reaction beyond what the joke needs, and those moments make Turgidson easier to dismiss than such a man ought to be.
Gilbert Taylor’s photography makes the war room look like a place where the men expect to be taken seriously. Ken Adam’s production design gives their deliberations enough grandeur to make the foolishness uncomfortable. Neither contribution begs for a laugh, and that restraint is crucial when the actors are so willing to supply one. The surroundings help us understand why these men might trust their own importance.
Anthony Harvey’s editing keeps the performances from becoming separate comic turns. The 95-minute running time is well judged: there is space to enjoy Sellers without allowing the whole film to become a vehicle for him. Laurie Johnson’s music gives the military proceedings a purposefulness we have little reason to share. The score’s seriousness helps the jokes, although Harvey’s timing does more to keep the danger present between them.
The film is harsher than the kind of war comedy that lets us blame everything on a single pompous officer. Kubrick, George and Southern spread the appetite for power too widely for that, and the sexual innuendo keeps exposing the childishness beneath the uniforms. We need not think every one of these men a fool to be frightened by the arrangements that put them in charge. Give it an evening when laughter does not have to make things feel better.
