Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
classified PGPlease note: This was screened in June 2019
Peter Sellers plays three separate roles in Stanley Kubrick’s masterful Cold War comedy in which insanity and political manoeuvrings lead to nuclear meltdown.
Set mainly within legendary production designer Ken Adam’s imposing war-room, Dr. Strangelove charts an absurd but inexorable path towards nuclear oblivion that’s triggered when an unhinged American general believes the Russians have caused his impotency. Like most people during the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick feared the very real threat of nuclear war, yet produced a masterstroke in managing to make people laugh at a subject that was disturbingly close to reality when he adapted Peter George's sci-fi novel Red Alert.
55 years after its release, Kubrick’s tour-de-force of political satire feels unnervingly prescient in the context of current global politics. A film about communication – or more accurately, the consequences of miscommunication, with its razor-sharp script it brilliantly critiques America’s fixation on military might, and lampoons the men who sit in the seats of power.