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Summary: Mein Fuhrer, I Can Walk!
Review: Dr. Strangelove is a masterpiece, pure and simple, and still ranks as my favorite movie of all time (I've seen it eighteen times). It is extremely funny, but also scary and unsettling. Its crazy plot doesn't seem all that implausible, and despite the Cold War motif, still seems eerily relevant today. Indeed, the idea of one loony trying to kill millions with weapons of mass destruction seems straight out of today's headlines. The script is spare and brilliant: as another reviewer put it, there is not one wasted line. The pacing is taut and the acting, superb. Peter Sellers was terrific in each of the three roles he played. George C. Scott was also excellent, and Sterling Hayden is awsome as one of my favorite film nut-jobs. This film represents the great Stanley Kubrick at the apex of his talents as a director, and along with another of his films: "A Clockwork Orange" is arguably the greatest black comedy ever made. Dr. Strangelove is a "must own" for any serious film lover.
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Summary: The lighter side of Armagetton! A true classic!
Review: "Dr Strangelove or:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" may be the only comedy ever made about neculear war. This 1962 satire of Cold War politics is witty and sharp, and is almost as funny as it was insightful. If you are left of center in your politics it is espitially entertaining. It savagely attacks the Cold Warrior mentality and makes a statement about the arms race in a way you proably would not expect from a movie of it's era, while staying light and funny.An Air Force general, convinced that his impotence is due to a commie plot to make americans weak and impure (the flouridation of water), decides to put together his own first strike so the US will have to follow and wipe out the Russians. The movie chronicles the President (Sellars), the General's Brittish aide (Sellars) and others try to stop the destruction of the world. Other charachters include a twisted Nazi scientist, Dr. Strangelove (Sellars), the bomber crew (including James Earl Jones and Slim Pickens), and the archetypical Cold Warrior (Scott) who advises the president it is all a great idea. I could write a hundred pages and not convey how much this is worth seeing. If you like good black comedy, if you think the Cold War was absurd, or if you just like good films, this is a classic and should not be missed. Hope you love it! Peter Sellars plays 3 parts. George C Sott and James Earl Joenes are in it. Stanley Kubrick directed it... can't miss... END
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Summary: Dr. Strangelove!
Review: It's soo funny, I highly recomend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Still Hysterical and meaningful
Review: Still hysterical and meaningful... This is not the stuff that Hollywood is made of anymore. Subversive and discontented. Pointed but funny. Well acted, uncompromising and completely focused on the end result. Sounds weird? By today's standards it is weird. I also think it's virtually perfect. There are a whole bunch of people who will watch this and just scratch their heads. Coming away un-moved and un-concerned. That's okay because people watch really horrible sitcoms and use words like "brilliant"... There's something for everybody Dr. Strangelove is a really funny movie, perhaps requiring a few moments to "get the hang of" and time to acquire a taste for. I hope a few more people give it that chance. Peter Sellers as Lionel Mandrake is so funny I can hardly sit still when I watch him. He also nails the President character and without requiring a mention as Dr. Strangelove he's just so right on the money. I'm a huge fan of this movie..
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Summary: A black comic masterpiece. A vast monumental farce.
Review: ...Kubrik masterminded Dr. Strangelove, loosely basing the movie upon the book "Red Alert" (the book is a completely serious Cold War nuclear war scenario, but Strangelove is a complete and total farce). "Strangelove" came out a year or two after the Cuban October missile crisis, a year after US President John Kennedy was assassinated as well as 2 other contemporaneous films, the brilliant and paranoid "The Manchurian Candidate" and the serious treatment of the same book, "Fail Safe." Kubrik originally set out to do a serious treatment of the book. But Kubrik found as he tried to develop the screenplay that he kept running into scenes that he ended up writing as satire. Recognizing the challenge, Kubrik enlisted the talents of one of the best comedic screenwriters in Hollywood, Terry Southern, to do the screenplay. Casting the film was part genius and part hit-and-miss happy accident. ... Somehow Slim Pickens' name came up and Pickens accepted the role of the B-52 bomber pilot. Even more ironic yet, Slim Pickens was more conservative than Dan Blocker, but Pickens never caught on during the film's production that Dr. Strangelove was a comedy, much less a satire and a farce unsympathetic to the official propaganda of the cold war. In of itself, it was a comic master stroke telling Pickens play the role seriously. Pickens was apparently no great wit, so Kubrik was able to keep Pickens completely unaware that Pickens was actually playing in a comedy, not a serious war movie (one can only assume that the humor of the situation was not lost on the other cast members, including James Earl Jones who played Capt. Kong's bombardier.. "Don't tell Slim this is all a big joke, we have to let him think this is a real war movie." ). Other than Peter Sellers' roles, George C. Scott (later in "Patton") and Sterling Hayden delivered memorable performances. Both were obviously instructed to play their roles "over the top." Kubrik instructed Scott to overact the role of the cigar-smoking, gut-slapping, martini-drinking & womanizing General Buck Turgidson (get it? Turgid-son?). In the scene in the war room where Turgidson exuberantly proclaims the spectacle of a B-52 bomber evading radar by hedge-hopping, Kubrik instructed George C. Scott to deliberately overact the part. Kubrik had Scott re-take the scene several times, asking Scott to make it even more over-the-top than before. On the last take of that scene, Scott practically performed it as a burlesque parody, which was of course, the final take that Kubrik actually used. Sterling Hayden delivered a brilliant performance as the psychotic Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the Air Force general who unilaterally orders the nuclear strike against the USSR. The confusion of Cold War paranoia, paranoid psychosis and false sexual power in Hayden's scenes is the blackest of black satire. Totally over the top, ludicrous and frightenlingly possible (what if one of your top military brass really went insane and over-rode all the safe-guards against nuclear war?). The insane babblings of General Ripper set the film's direction and act as its centerpiece, delivering both Kubrik's satire of anti-communist propaganda and the air of impossible odds for the rest of the film's characters to overcome that they might somehow avert doomsday. Peter Seller's performances as the President, the British officer and Dr. Strangelove (a left-over Nazi scientist) are memorable, Sellers delivers the title role as the deranged wheelchair-bound Nazi scientist who suffers from involuntary palsied "Seig Hiels!" in his right arm. Again sex is the real underlying motive to yet another character and the opportunities for a sexually prodigious post-apocalyptic eugenic world brings the deranged Strangelove to a frenzied outburst of libidinal energy: "Mein Fuhrer! I can vwalk!" But as much as I enjoy Sellers' roles, they seem overshadowed by the rest of the film's characters. P>It comes probably of no surprise that the U.S. Air Force refused to assist Kubrik in shooting the movie. Having to choice, Kubrik had to resort to mocking up the B-52 flying scenes and bomber interior cabin scenes as best he could (the bomber interior was apparently such a good replica of the real thing that the FBI launched an investigation into who gave Kubrik such a detailed layout of a B-52's flight deck). Appropriately, the exterior B-52 flying scenes hold a comic flaw if you look closely enough: In one scene, as the damaged bomber hedge-hops across the Siberian taiga (northern boreal forest), you can see that the underlying shadow of the plane is actually that of a four-engine propellor aircraft and doesn't match the profile of the overlaid B-52 model. Suffice it to say, when the movie came out, it was not universally received or even widely understood. It was drummed by political commentators and movie reviewers who found it to be tasteless and sophomoric. The studio was very concerned about the potential a negative backlash from its release (consider that in the same year, the Manchurian Candidate was withdrawn from theaters after Kennedy was assassinated). An internal memo described Dr. Strangelove as "a huge, sick malefic joke" and questioned the wisdom of even releasing the movie at all. After all, the movie starts off with B-52's and tanker planes copulating during mid-flight refuelings, displays Air Force "Peace is Our Profession" billboards in the midst of a fire fight between the US Army and Air Force security, depicts two Air Force generals as complete sex-obsessed baffoons, one a psychotic and the other a braying ass, delivers a deranged Nazi scientist and finally a cowboy pilot bucking the biggest phallic bronco of his career (never mind blowing up the world). I can think of few other films whose film makers so defied convention and created a story that really turned conventional wisdom on its head. Dr. Strangelove keeps coming at you as one outrageous scene after another, interspersed with segments of complete straight-faced dead-pan, piling them all on until the fateful end. When Pickins died in 1983, CBS news anchor Dan Rather delivered the obituary replete with the out take of Pickins riding the bomb (Perhaps DeForest Kelley topped that and made good on his threat to have "He's dead, Jim" engraved on his tombstone....). There are some things you just can't live down: Being the face that gets a great closing falling scene that leads to the end of all life on Earth happens to be one of those things. Poor Slim, he's probably suffering in a purgatory of a Liberal Methodist heaven. In closing, I have to agree with that long-forgotten studio executive who wrote in the memo: Dr. Strangelove *IS* a huge, sick malefic joke. But it is one of the finest huge, sick malefic jokes ever created, and stands as a film masterpiece. Those who extoll the virtues of this fil
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Summary: "But....but...he'll see the Big Board!"
Review: Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the most biting and hard-hitting commentaries about the U.S.-Soviet arms race, overdependence on technology, the can-do philosophy of the Air Force, and the sheer lunacy of MAD, the apt acronym for the term Mutual Assured Destruction -- which was the Cold War diplo-speak that meant "you nuke our country, we'll nuke yours." Normally one wouldn't think the possibility of nuclear annihilation would be the wellspring for a comedy, just as most people today wouldn't think the Holocaust is fodder for satire. Yet when Stanley Kubrick set out to do a straightforward dramatic film based on novelist Peter George's "Red Alert," a novel about an "accidental" nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by the United States, the more research and contemplation the director and co-screenwriter did on the subject of nuclear deterrence and all the nitty gritty of nuclear warfare, the more insane the whole theme seemed. So Kubrick -- no doubt aware that a similarly themed film (Fail-Safe) was underway -- gave in to his impulses and switched gears from drama to "dark" comedy. Kubrick sets the tone right from the main title sequence. As the credits (and you have to see these yourself) roll, we see footage of a B-52 Stratofortress being refueled by a KC-135A aerial tanker. In the background, the very romantic strains of "Try a Little Tenderness" gives this aerial ballet an almost grotesque ironic counterpoint. Love music? In a scene depicting a nuclear bomber being refueled as it heads toward its fail-safe point? Things get going, though, when Royal Air Force liaison officer Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) gets an unexpected phone call from Burpleson AFB's B-52 wing commander, Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), ordering to impound all privately owned radios and to order the B-52s already on deterrence patrol to leave their fail-safe points and to implement Wing Attack Plan R. Befuddled but obedient, Mandrake complies, setting off Gen. Ripper's plan to launch an unauthorized attack against the Soviet Union. Dr. Strangelove follows three story threads, each getting loopier as the world hurtles closer and closer to annihilation: First, there is hapless Group Capt. Mandrake's reaction to his discovery of Ripper's real plot and the loony logic of the general's motives. The Soviet Union hasn't started a war, Ripper says, but has been messing around with Americans' natural fluids since 1946 -- the same year fluoridation began to be implemented in earnest. Second, there is President Merkin Muffley's (Peter Sellers again) stunned reaction when he is summoned to the Pentagon's War Room along with the Soviet ambassador, where his increasingly pathetic attempts to defuse the crisis run into various stumbling blocks, including the hawkish demeanor of Air Force General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), the dissembling of the ambassador (Peter Bul), the vagaries of long distance telephone service, the bizarre machinations of one of his senior advisors, Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers yet again), and the inebriated state of the Soviet Premier. Third, there is the sheer pluck of Air Force Maj. T.J. Kong( Slim Pickens), who, upon getting the orders to implement Wing Attack Plan R, doffs his flight helmet and puts on a cowboy hat, peppering his orders and pep talk with slangy cowboy terms. He, too, is a bit loony, yet he and his crew (which includes James Earl Jones in his first film appearance) overcome every obstacle thrown at them on their way to their target. Kubrick peppers his film with sight gags (nuclear bombs with Dear John and Hi There! stenciled on their warheads, a buffet counter in the war room) and punny names (Keenan Wynn's paratrooper character, one who fears retribution from the Coca-Cola company more than the prospect of an unstopped nuclear war, is named Bat Guano), and his use of music in an ironic counterpoint to the visuals ("Try a Little Tenderness" in the aforementioned title sequence, a hummed rendition of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" over Major Kong's toe-to-toe with the Rooskies speech, and Vera Lynn's famous rendition of "We'll Meet Again" as the crisis comes to a stark close) puts an end to the misconception of the director as being cold and unfunny.
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Summary: More respect gentlemen; we are in the War Hall!
Review: What kind of movie. Brilliant, demential, cynical, dynamical, perfect, ironical with a dazzling script, excellent camara direction and a superb cast.
If not for Kind hearts and cornets (1950) this would be the greatest black comedy ever made.
Kubrick broke all the previous forecast and established this film like an authentical landmark.
Sellers in his best triple performance. George C Scott and Sterling Hyden are really amazing.
A MASTERPIECE.
What are you waiting for acquiring it?
Mein führer I can walk!
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Summary: It doesn't get any better than this!
Review: Comedy, like technology, just can't be un-invented - once it's known to exist, it exists. The best stuff spreads quickly, ad nauseum, and this assuredly is a classic comedy. In typical u.s.-style, we didn't just one-up the competition, we ten-upped them to the point where their comedy/technology was rendered quote/unquote laughable. So to speak. Peter Sellers was one of the best, and he certainly knew how to leverage comedy. :-) A comedy about the ugliest cold-war techs, heck, why not?
Rating:
Summary: CLASSIC KUBRICK
Review: In 1964 the first of the "bomb" movies came out. Kubrick further earned his place in the pantheon of film greats with his all-time classic "black comedy," "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Love the Bomb". Explaining how a movie that ends in the world obliterated by nuclear (actually hydrogen) holocaust is a comedy leads me to suggest watching it. Only then you will know. The iconoclastic Kubrick made an iconoclastic film starring the extraordinary Peter Sellers in three roles. He plays the President, a lily-livered liberal in the mold of Adlai Stevenson. He plays Mandrake, a British Royal Air Force officer, and he plays Dr. Strangelove, an ex-Nazi scientist based on Werner von Braun, although some of have suggested that they see in the madman Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was not well known when the script by Terry Southern (who later wrote "Easy Rider" but died destitute) was turned in.
The premise is that an Air Force General, Jack Ripper (most of the characters are given descriptive names), played by the Communist bohemian and Sausalito weed smoker Sterling Hayden, goes mad. He is convinced that because water is fluoridated the Communists have conspired to deprive red-blooded Americans of their "essence," their "vital bodily fluids"...their semen. For this obviously stupid (believed only by right wing wackos) reason, Ripper overrides Air Force protocol and orders his nuclear attack wing to bomb Russia back to the stone age. Of course this is meant to show that the military is filled with lunatic fringe elements with their hands on the button. In an interesting bit of terminology, the words Soviet Union are never uttered, only Russia, presumably to "humanize" all those agrarian reformers. Thought I hadn't caught that, huh? Anyway, real-life pacifist George C. Scott, playing General Buck Turgidson, discovers Ripper's plan. He is another Curt LeMay take-off, bombastic and filled to the brim with sexual testosterone that seemingly can only be released by his bikini-clad girl Friday, or by bombing the Russkies to smithereens.
A plan is hatched to inform the Communists how to shoot down the wing, in order to prevent nuclear holocaust. Turgidson thinks that is a terrible idea and that as long as the boys are on their way, they should drop their payload on the bastards. The Russian Ambassador, however, puts a crimp in those plans by informing the President that this would set off a Doomsday Machine, guaranteed to destroy all life on Earth. Turgidson laments the fact that there is a "gap" between the Soviet possession of such a device, which the Americans lack, no doubt due to liberal malfeasance. Forced by the Doomsday scenario to avoid holocaust, the Americans and Russians work together to shoot down all the U.S. planes, save one. Meanwhile, Ripper kills himself and his aide de camp, Mandrake/Sellers, discovers the recall code. But the last plane, piloted by good ol' boy Slim Pickens, is as Turgidson/Scott describes, wily enough to evade radar, while damage from a heat-seeking missile has rendered it unable to receive the recall. They make their run. Pickens makes his cowboy speech about going "toe to toe, nuclear combat with the Russkies" and emphasizes the crew, including a young James Earl Jones, is due commendations "regardless of race, color or creed." With Pickens personally releasing and riding his bomb into a Valhallic destiny, the deed is done, leaving the Doomsday shroud to envelop the Earth. All is not lost, however, because Dr. Strangelove/Sellers, messianically saluting the President as "mein Fuhrer," describes how mineshafts can be converted into underground government societies for the next 100 years. The boys all smile when Strangelove says that in order to further the human race through procreation, many more attractive women than men would have to be recruited to do "prodigious sexual work." Unfortunately, monogamy would have to be a thing of the past. The end.
"Dr. Strangelove" may be one of the 10 greatest movie ever made, but its comic message was clear: The military is not to be trusted, nuclear weapons serve no good purpose, and the Soviets are likely to be victims of our aggression. Like a number of movies, however, its political message is stilted. Reagan said it was his favorite(...)
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Comedy And A Movie That Inspires Thought
Review: Only mastery of ironic humor can make the world being destroyed by nuclear weapons one of the most funny and provocative movie experiences of my life. It's all the more amazing when I consider the fact that the U.S. was in the thick of the Cold War when this film was released. How could it not be silly to see these immature men who lead a big world playing with their very big toys? The lives of millions are at stake but they're just not capable of really taking it seriously. It takes so long for the concept to dawn on them that even their narrow and selfish interests are impinged upon by nuclear disaster and all the while, Dr. Strangelove watches from the shadows where his presence is evidenced by little more than the gleaming of his spectacles. He comes out when the time is right to regale us with his nerdy German accent and to usher in a new era. The 'manly men' of the movie normally touted as heroes are portrayed as stupid and sexually deranged. In fact, the whole mess starts with a general who has gone impotent and comes to what is in his mind, a logical conclusion as to why it happened. So in the end, those long missiles and giant bombs turn out to be phallic symbols compensating for an aging man's personal insecurities! The humor in this film can be subtle at times and the dialogue is just wonderful. The viewer has to pay close attention to catch it all and the rewards are great indeed. It certainly makes the viewer think about how small humanity really is and how petty and egotistical we can be. Dr. Strangelove works on multiple levels and it is eminently worthwhile to see it and see it again.
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