Dr. Strangelove

January 1964, only two months after the JFK assassination, didn’t seem like a great moment to open a comedy in America’s theaters. Yet it was immediately famous, or notorious, or both—Hollywood publicists can spin it either way—for being a comedy about nuclear war. It was successful, not a major hit, but it has undeniably had an enduring brand, and it put Stanley Kubrick on the pop culture map. Dr. Strangelove’s fame has long since spread everywhere, its name still used as shorthand in French, Farsi, Chinese and Hindi, for big power nuclear brinksmanship and Great Game statecraft that goes catastrophically wrong.

Before Dr. Strangelove opened, years before I’d ever heard of Stanley Kubrick, I read the deadly serious book that Strangelove was based on, 1958’s Red Alert by Peter George, a Scholastic Books paperback that also carried the novel’s original (UK) title, the more emphatic Two Hours to Doom. World War III was a subject on everyone’s minds. A far more famous book, 1962’s Fail Safe, topped the New York Times bestseller list, and its film adaptation, starring Henry Fonda, was much anticipated. By contrast, no one knew or expected much about the upcoming movie of Red Alert. It seemed like an odd choice from the director of Spartacus and Lolita.

Lolita is where Kubrick first worked with Peter Sellers, who’d come out of nowhere to become one of Britain’s most in-demand actors. Early on, Kubrick intended to have Sellers play four distinct characters: a stiffly formal RAF officer; the ineffectual, Adlai Stevenson-like US president; Doctor Strangelove, a sinister European-born top policy advisor; and the brash, macho USAF bomber commander, Major “King” Kong. But Sellers got injured and wasn’t going to be able to clamber through the narrow hatches of the claustrophobic B-52 set or straddle an H-bomb. So Slim Pickens, a character actor who’d played in Westerns, took over Kong, and Peter Sellers would play “merely” three parts.

As a notoriously cost-conscious filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick ruefully joked, “The great thing about Peter is it’s like getting three actors for the price of six.”

The iconic War Room set is actually the second version that designer Ken Adam created for Stanley’s approval. First, he drew exactly the kind of grand, overwhelming headquarters of battle command that Kubrick wanted, with a shadowy balcony of control consoles. He loved it. Then, characteristically, it became “But Ken, what will I do with all of those extras up there? And the expense!” Adam reworked it into the triangular bunker we know today.

Kubrick had a brilliant knack for finding real-life justifications for startling images. That high-peaked ceiling meant the round table had to be lit by a ring of lights suspended overhead, part of what makes that set so memorable. A hefty part of the rest comes from the way the Big Board’s backward slant makes it seem like the fate of the world is literally looming over everyone at the table. Again, Kubrick insisted on visible practical justification; the map images are projected upwards at that angle, and the slanted projection light beams add backlit visual flair to the background.

Other than the War Room, Dr. Strangelove’s most famous scene is the final ten miles of the B-52’s bomb run on Kotlass, a remote Soviet ICBM base. One of the legal points of contention between the two doomsday movies was a key similarity: an unauthorized attack on the Soviet Union is mostly canceled, with America assisting the Soviets in shooting down our own airmen to try to prevent WWIII. But one plane manages to survive. Every attempt is made to recall it. That’s the central drama of both films.

In Strangelove, the attack was a deliberate act by a rogue general, a central plot point; In Fail Safe, it’s caused by a trivial technical flaw that no one catches in time. The Air Force broadcasts the voice of one of the pilot’s wives pleading with him to turn back. But with wrenching reluctance, he switches off the radio, having been trained that the voice could be faked or coerced. It’s effective drama.

Which Strangelove ignores and blows right past. In typical Kubrick tech-laced irony, the CRM-114, a radio security device, self-destructs as a safety measure against capture, so the bomber is incapable of receiving the recall. (Attempted communication with someone who cannot or will not respond is a common situation in Kubrick films. See also: HAL 9000.)

In Kubrick movies, the more seemingly perfect the plan, the greater certainty that it will go badly wrong, often killing its participants: consider the holdup men in The Killing, the WWI French army attacking the Germans in Paths of Glory, Spartacus’ slave army against the Roman Empire, 21^st century astronauts entrusted to an infallible computer—and a USAF bomber crew, conscientiously following an elaborate checklist with synchronized caution. James Earl Jones was in his first film role as the bombardier.

When executives at Columbia Pictures finally saw what they’d be selling to the public, they were…nervous at first. Comedy in uniform wasn’t new, but this one seemed, especially to many theater owners in more conservative parts of America, to be outright insulting. Granted, sure, it made savage fun of everyone in the movie: the military, the politicians, the Americans, the British, the Russians, and implicitly, all of us out here who blissfully think terrifying foul-ups can’t happen. The company gulped and stuck with the film, highlighting it in advertising as being wacky and surreal rather than anti-war, let alone anti-American.

How did the competitors do once they finally reached their audiences? While Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove were very different films, of course they were regarded as head-to-head rivals for the subject matter alone, as if they were in a race to get to the screen, and at least in Kubrick’s mind, they were. Opposing sets of threatened lawsuits between the two teams were quietly settled or dropped when Columbia Pictures bought the independently made Fail Safe, so now both apocalyptic nuclear war pictures would be released by the same studio in the same year.

Both sides had points to make. Red Alert came out four years before (the book) Fail Safe, so Peter George and his publisher prepared a suit over some striking similarities. Later, the Fail Safe team raised an eyebrow at changes in Strangelove’s storyline that weren’t in Red Alert, but resemble characters in Fail Safe, like nuclear war theorist Dr. Strangelove himself, who doesn’t even appear in George’s novel, let alone as one of the major characters. However, Fail Safe did have just such a central character, Prof. Groteschele, loosely based on Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960), at the time the authoritative highbrow treatise on the near inevitability of World War III.

Fail Safe, quite a decent, serious thriller, with a very different War Room visual style that had great virtues of its own, has always been the critical runner-up in a direct comparison, a fact that caused lasting regret, even bitterness for its director, Sidney Lumet.

Though Dr. Strangelove is the critics' darling of the two, both films found that box office for the end of the world turned out tepid to fair. Another black-and-white thriller of that year with a vaguely apocalyptic Washington setting, Seven Days in May, had its own controversial anti-military political edge, but did somewhat better.

We always think of Stanley Kubrick in his role as a director, but he himself always liked to emphasize the creative control he also exercised as a producer, someone who could express sets of ideas in iconic form that would come along at just the right time, seize the public imagination and become the lasting image of…you name it: film noir racetrack robberies; World War I in the trenches; the Roman army in battle; or stumbling into nuclear war.

As of this writing, these films are 62 years old. If you’ve heard of them, you know roughly what they’re about. On the off chance you haven’t seen one or the other, I haven’t spelled out all of the specifics of the two plots, and they do differ in significant details. In the comments, everyone, please feel free to discuss spoilers.

Doomsday movie virgins, you are warned. If you wish, duck out around here to catch up on YouTube, but please come on back.