Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb still stands as one of the greatest war films of all time, not in spite of what it does differently, but because of it. In the pantheon of great war films, there are no others like Dr. Strangelove. It is because of the bizarre mix of terrifying truth and Marx Brothers like one liners that the film succeeds on so many levels.
The film finds humor in the fact that nuclear war really is an absurd, logically inconsistent idea. The film targets the absurdity of nuclear war and the foolishness of the politicians who send young men to die. The brave soldiers who go to fight are not discredited, rather, the war machine that has them dying, in some situations for no reason, is made the butt of the joke.
The movie has an important statement to make, yet it never comes across as preachy. It's a sincerely, honestly funny film. The jokes are amusing on a base level of simply being good humor, but they also draw attention to the stupidity of nuclear war.
Interestingly, when Kubrick dealt with similar material some years later with Full Metal Jacket, the humor wasn't quite so overt. It would seem that, by the mid eighties, Kubrick had realized that you don't need to add Marx Brothers style jokes to make war funny, that the absurdity of armed conflict is ridiculous enough with or without any overt humor. Still, Full Metal Jacket stands as an incredibly funny movie, even if it feels much darker in tone (yet ironically, isn't quite as dark in terms of story content).
At the heart of the film would be Peter Sellers in multiple roles. These days, one star in multiple roles is usually a sign of a bad comedy, where the producers thought that a weak script could be saved with enough money to just hire one star and put him in a dozen different sizes of fat suit. Sellers was simply a master of creating characters and was allowed to create several for the film.
The primary performance here is of course Dr. Strangelove himself, the crazy former Nazi who sits in a wheelchair and whose "alien hand" will throw up a Nazi salute at the worst possible moments. It is through Strangelove that we most clearly see the link between nuclear weapons and sexual dysfunction, with Strangelove showing a tangible sense of sexual thrill at the possibility of a nuclear winter.
George C. Scott turns in an incredible performance as General Buck Turgidson. The character is much wilder, more manic than anything Scott has done. He's usually seen as this master of gruff understatement, saying more with a growly whisper than most actors say with a big speech. Kubrick actually had to trick him into going so over the top by promising that these would be "practice takes" where he could take the scene farther than it needed to go to get the kinks out! Similarly, Slim Pickens was tricked into playing it straight as Major Kong by being told it was a dramatic war film.
If you've not seen it yet, Dr. Strangelove is one of the all time great films on the subject of war, and definitely one of those to see some time in your life. It is the only statement that anyone needs to make on the silliness of war.
The film finds humor in the fact that nuclear war really is an absurd, logically inconsistent idea. The film targets the absurdity of nuclear war and the foolishness of the politicians who send young men to die. The brave soldiers who go to fight are not discredited, rather, the war machine that has them dying, in some situations for no reason, is made the butt of the joke.
The movie has an important statement to make, yet it never comes across as preachy. It's a sincerely, honestly funny film. The jokes are amusing on a base level of simply being good humor, but they also draw attention to the stupidity of nuclear war.
Interestingly, when Kubrick dealt with similar material some years later with Full Metal Jacket, the humor wasn't quite so overt. It would seem that, by the mid eighties, Kubrick had realized that you don't need to add Marx Brothers style jokes to make war funny, that the absurdity of armed conflict is ridiculous enough with or without any overt humor. Still, Full Metal Jacket stands as an incredibly funny movie, even if it feels much darker in tone (yet ironically, isn't quite as dark in terms of story content).
At the heart of the film would be Peter Sellers in multiple roles. These days, one star in multiple roles is usually a sign of a bad comedy, where the producers thought that a weak script could be saved with enough money to just hire one star and put him in a dozen different sizes of fat suit. Sellers was simply a master of creating characters and was allowed to create several for the film.
The primary performance here is of course Dr. Strangelove himself, the crazy former Nazi who sits in a wheelchair and whose "alien hand" will throw up a Nazi salute at the worst possible moments. It is through Strangelove that we most clearly see the link between nuclear weapons and sexual dysfunction, with Strangelove showing a tangible sense of sexual thrill at the possibility of a nuclear winter.
George C. Scott turns in an incredible performance as General Buck Turgidson. The character is much wilder, more manic than anything Scott has done. He's usually seen as this master of gruff understatement, saying more with a growly whisper than most actors say with a big speech. Kubrick actually had to trick him into going so over the top by promising that these would be "practice takes" where he could take the scene farther than it needed to go to get the kinks out! Similarly, Slim Pickens was tricked into playing it straight as Major Kong by being told it was a dramatic war film.
If you've not seen it yet, Dr. Strangelove is one of the all time great films on the subject of war, and definitely one of those to see some time in your life. It is the only statement that anyone needs to make on the silliness of war.
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