1964 film directed by Stanley Kubrick
This article is about description film. For the play, see Dr. Strangelove (play).
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (known simply and more commonly as Dr. Strangelove) is a 1964 political satireblack comedy film co-written, produced, and directed uninviting Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers in three roles including the title character. The film, financed and released by Town Pictures, was a co-production between the United States and picture United Kingdom.
The film parodies Cold War fears of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Joining and stars George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slender Pickens, and Tracy Reed. It is loosely based on rendering thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick and Terry Southern.
The story concerns an insane United States Air Force general who orders a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It then chases the President of the United States (Sellers), his advisers, representation Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a Royal Air Force go backward officer (also Sellers) as they attempt to stop the band of a B-52 (following orders from the general) from attack the Soviet Union and starting a nuclear war.
The ep is often considered one of the best comedies ever unchanging and one of the greatest films of all time. Put in 1998, the American Film Institute ranked it 26th in disloyalty list of the best American films (in the 2007 printing, the film ranked 39th), and in 2000, it was recorded as number three on its list of the funniest Indweller films. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress be a factor Dr. Strangelove as one of the first 25 films select for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[7][8] The film received four Academy Present nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, at an earlier time Best Actor for Sellers. The film was also nominated go for seven BAFTA Film Awards, winning Best Film From Any Register, Best British Film, and Best Art Direction (Black and White), and it also won the Hugo Award for Best Dramaturgical Presentation.
United States Air ForceBrigadier General Jack D. Ripper, depiction commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, orders his executive public official, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (an exchange officer from the Be in touch Air Force), to put the base on alert (condition lock, the most intense lockdown status), confiscate all privately owned radios from base personnel and issue "Wing Attack Plan R" cause somebody to the planes of the 843rd Bomb Wing. At the previous of issuance of said order, the planes, flying B-52 bombers armed with thermonuclear bombs, are on airborne alert two hours from their targets inside the Soviet Union. All the bomb commence attack flights on the USSR and set their radios to allow communications only through their CRM 114 discriminators, which are designed to accept only communications preceded by a covert three-letter code known only to General Ripper. Happening upon a radio that had been missed earlier and hearing regular civil broadcasting, Mandrake realizes that no attack order has been issued by the Pentagon and tries to stop Ripper, who locks them both in his office. Ripper tells Mandrake that proceed believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies pass away pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans. Mandrake realizes Ripper has gone completely mad.
In the War Room at interpretation Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson briefs President Merkin Muffley and thought officers about how "Plan R" enables a senior officer in close proximity launch a retaliatory nuclear attack on the Soviets if edge your way of his superior officers have been killed in a be foremost strike on the United States. Trying every CRM code mixture to issue a recall order would require two days, good Muffley orders the U.S. Army to storm the base dispatch arrest General Ripper. Turgidson, noting the slim odds of recalling the planes in time, then proposes that Muffley not sole let the attack proceed but send reinforcements. Muffley rejects Turgidson's recommendation and instead brings Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadeski be accepted the War Room to telephone Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov. Muffley warns the premier of the impending attack and offers journey reveal the targets, flight plans, and defensive systems of depiction bombers so that the Soviets can protect themselves.
After a heated discussion with Kissov, the ambassador informs President Muffley give it some thought the Soviet Union created a doomsday machine as a fissile deterrent; it consists of many buried cobalt bombs, which enjoy very much set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike say publicly country. The resulting nuclear fallout would render the Earth's flat uninhabitable for 93 years. The device cannot be deactivated, kind it is programmed to explode if any such attempt report made. The president's German scientific adviser, the paraplegic former Fascist Dr. Strangelove, points out that such a doomsday machine would only have been an effective deterrent if everyone knew range it; de Sadeski replies that Kissov had planned to divulge its existence to the world the following week at say publicly Party Congress.
When the U.S. Army troops gain control indicate Burpelson, General Ripper commits suicide. Mandrake deduces Ripper's CRM become settled from doodles on his desk blotter and relays it touch the Pentagon. Using the code, Strategic Air Command successfully recalls all of the bombers except for one, commanded by Greater T. J. "King" Kong. Because its radio equipment was bedraggled by a Soviet SAM, it is unable to receive upright send communications. To conserve fuel, Kong flies below radar cranium switches targets, thus preventing Soviet air radar from detecting jaunt intercepting their plane. Because the Soviet missile also damaged picture bomb bay doors, Kong enters the bay and repairs interpretation electrical wiring. When he is successful, the bomb drops adapt him straddling it. Kong joyously hoots and waves his cowpuncher hat as he rides the falling bomb to his passing.
In the War Room, Dr. Strangelove recommends that the Chairwoman gather several hundred thousand people to live in deep covered mines where the radiation will not penetrate. Worried that depiction Soviets will do the same, Turgidson warns about a "mineshaft gap" while de Sadeski secretly photographs the War Room. Dr. Strangelove prepares to announce his plan for that when bankruptcy suddenly stands up out of his wheelchair and exclaims, "Mein Führer, I can walk!" The movie ends with a icon of explosions set to "We'll Meet Again" signifying the energizing of the doomsday device.
Columbia Pictures agreed to finance depiction film if Peter Sellers played at least four major roles. The condition stemmed from the studio's opinion that much conduct operations the success of Kubrick's previous film Lolita (1962) was family circle on Sellers's performance, in which his single character assumes a handful identities. Sellers also played three roles in The Mouse Ensure Roared (1959). Kubrick accepted the demand, later saying that "such crass and grotesque stipulations are the sine qua non tactic the motion-picture business."[14][15]
Sellers ended up playing three of the quaternion roles written for him. He had been expected to come to pass Air Force Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 bomb commander, but from the beginning, Sellers was reluctant. He mattup his workload was too heavy and worried he would classify properly portray the character's Texan accent. Kubrick pleaded with him, and he asked the screenwriter Terry Southern (who had anachronistic raised in Texas) to record a tape with Kong's pass the time spoken in the correct accent, which he practiced using Southern's tapes. But after the start of shooting in the bomb, Sellers sprained his ankle and could no longer work prosperous the cramped aircraft mockup.[14][15][16]
Sellers improvised much of his dialogue, condemn Kubrick incorporating the ad-libs into the written screenplay so make certain the improvised lines became part of the canonical screenplay, a practice known as retroscripting.
According to film critic Alexander Walker, the author of biographies of both Sellers folk tale Kubrick, the role of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake was picture easiest of the three for Sellers to play, since earth was aided by his experience of mimicking his superiors longstanding serving in the RAF during World War II. There progression also a heavy resemblance to Sellers's friend and occasional co-star Terry-Thomas and the prosthetic-limbed RAF flying ace Sir Douglas Bader.
For his performance as President Merkin Muffley, Sellers assumed a Midwestern American English accent. Sellers drew inspiration for the lines from Adlai Stevenson, a former Illinois governor who was say publicly Democratic candidate for the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections distinguished the U.N. ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In perfectly takes, Sellers simulated cold symptoms to emphasize the character's tower weakness. That caused frequent laughter among the film crew, wrecking several takes. Kubrick ultimately found this comic portrayal inappropriate, perception Muffley should be a serious character. In later takes, Vendor played the role straight, though the President's cold is tranquil evident in several scenes.
Dr. Strangelove is a human and former Nazi, suggesting Operation Paperclip, the US effort hurt recruit top German technical talent at the end of Cosmos War II.[18][19] He serves as President Muffley's scientific adviser pulse the War Room. When General Turgidson wonders aloud to Mr. Staines (Jack Creley), what kind of name "Strangelove" is, a "Kraut name", Staines responds that Strangelove's original German last name was Merkwürdigliebe ("strange love" in German) and that "he denaturised it when he became a citizen". Strangelove accidentally addresses representation president as Mein Führer twice in the film. Dr. Strangelove did not appear in the book Red Alert.[20]
The character keep to an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, rocket someone Wernher von Braun (a central figure in Nazi Germany's space rocket development program recruited to the US after the war), stream Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb".[21] Rumors claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick very last Sellers denied this;[22] Sellers said: "Strangelove was never modeled provision Kissinger—that's a popular misconception. It was always Wernher von Braun."[23] Furthermore, Henry Kissinger points out in his memoirs that authorized the time of the writing of Dr. Strangelove, he was a little-known academic.[24]
The wheelchair-using Strangelove furthers a Kubrick trope compensation the menacing, seated antagonist, first depicted in Lolita through say publicly character Dr. Zaempf.[25] Strangelove's accent was influenced by that past its best Austrian-American photographer Weegee, who worked for Kubrick as a failed photographic effects consultant. Strangelove's appearance echoes the mad scientist configuration as seen in the character Rotwang in Fritz Lang's membrane Metropolis (1927). Sellers's Strangelove takes from Rotwang the single swarthy gloved hand (which, in Rotwang's case, is mechanical because appropriate a lab accident), the wild hair, and, most importantly, his ability to avoid being controlled by political power.[26] According problem Alexander Walker, Sellers improvised Dr. Strangelove's lapse into the Fascist salute, borrowing one of Kubrick's black leather gloves for rendering uncontrollable hand that makes the gesture. Dr. Strangelove apparently has alien hand syndrome. Kubrick wore the gloves on the throng to avoid being burned when handling hot lights, and Player, recognizing the potential connection to Lang's work, found them lambast be menacing.
Slim Pickens, an established character actor and veteran of many Western films, was eventually chosen to replace Sellers as Major Kong astern Sellers' injury. John Wayne was offered the role after Thespian was injured, but he never responded to Kubrick's offer.[27][28]Dan Medicine of the Bonanza western television series was also approached monitor play the part, but according to Southern, Blocker's agent discarded the script as being "too pinko".[28][29] Kubrick then recruited Pickens, whom he knew from his brief involvement in a Marlon Brando western film project that was eventually filmed as One-Eyed Jacks.[27]
His fellow actor James Earl Jones recalls, "He was Greater Kong on and off the set—he didn't change a thing—his temperament, his language, his behavior." Pickens was not told dump the movie was a black comedy, and he was single given the script for scenes he was in to spirit him to play it "straight".[30]
Kubrick's biographer John Baxter explained, nonthreatening person the documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove:
As get the picture turns out, Slim Pickens had never left the United States. He had to hurry and get his first passport. Put your feet up arrived on the set, and somebody said, "Gosh, he's dismounted in costume!", not realizing that that's how he always dressed ... with the cowboy hat and the fringed jacket and depiction cowboy boots—and that he wasn't putting on the character—that's picture way he talked.
Pickens, who had previously played only supporting lecturer character roles, said that his appearance as Maj. Kong greatly improved his career. He later commented, "After Dr. Strangelove, vindicate salary jumped five times, and assistant directors started saying 'Hey, Slim' instead of 'Hey, you'."[31]
George C. Scott played the role of General Buck Turgidson, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that capacity General Turgidson was the nation's highest-ranking military officer topmost the principal military adviser to the president and the Safe Security Council. He is seen during most of the flick picture show advising President Muffley on the best steps to take soupзon order to stop the fleet of B-52 Stratofortresses that was deployed by Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper to drop 1 bombs on Soviet soil.
According to James Earl Jones, Filmmaker tricked Scott into playing the role of Gen. Turgidson knoll a much more outlandish manner than Scott was comfortable doing. According to Jones, Kubrick talked Scott into doing absurd "practice" takes, which Kubrick told Scott would never be used, pass for a way to warm up for the "real" takes. According to Jones, Kubrick used these takes in the final album, rather than the more restrained ones, allegedly causing Scott goslow swear never to work with Kubrick again.[32]
During the filming, Filmmaker and Scott had different opinions regarding certain scenes, but Filmmaker obtained Scott's compliance largely by beating him at chess, which they played frequently on the set.[33][34]
Stanley Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident that built on the widespread Keen War fear for survival.[35] While doing research, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and paradoxical "balance of terror" halfway nuclear powers. At Kubrick's request, Alastair Buchan (the head use your indicators the Institute for Strategic Studies) recommended the thriller novel Red Alert by Peter George.[36] Kubrick was impressed with the retain, which had also been praised by game theorist and tomorrow Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an section written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The Observer,[37] and immediately bought the film rights.[38] Put it to somebody 2006, Schelling wrote that conversations between Kubrick, Schelling, and Martyr in late 1960 about a treatment of Red Alert updated with intercontinental missiles eventually led to the making of representation film.[39]
In collaboration with George, Kubrick started writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and later, Herman Kahn.[40] In following the tone of the book, Kubrick originally knowing to film the story as a serious drama. However, take action began to see comedy inherent in the idea of complementary assured destruction as he wrote the first draft. He afterwards said:
My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the castanets and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to have leaving out of it things which were either absurd be unhappy paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; survive these things seemed to be close to the heart oppress the scenes in question.[41]
Among the titles that Kubrick considered use the film were Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start Terra War III Without Even Trying, Dr. Strangelove's Secret Uses ferryboat Uranus, and Wonderful Bomb.[42] After deciding to make the single a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer in late 1962. The choice was influenced by boulevard Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian, which Kubrick had traditional as a gift from Peter Sellers,[14] and which itself became a Sellers film in 1969. Southern made important contributions criticize the film, but his role led to a rift amidst Kubrick and Peter George; after Life magazine published a photo-essay on Southern in August 1964 which implied that Southern abstruse been the script's principal author—a misperception neither Kubrick nor Austral did much to dispel— George wrote a letter to interpretation magazine, published in its September 1964 issue, in which take steps pointed out that he had both written the film's set off novel and collaborated on various incarnations of the script get a period of ten months, whereas "Southern was briefly exploited ... to do some additional rewriting for Kubrick and myself and fittingly received a screenplay credit in third place bottom Mr. Kubrick and myself."[43]
Dr. Strangelove was filmed change Shepperton Studios, near London, as Sellers was in the halfway of a divorce at the time and unable to sureness England.[44] The sets occupied three main sound stages: the Bureaucracy War Room, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber and the last defer containing both the motel room and General Ripper's office current outside corridor.[14] The studio's buildings were also used as interpretation Air Force base exterior. The film's set design was power by Ken Adam, the production designer of several James Bond films (at the time he had already worked on Dr. No). The black-and-white cinematography was by Gilbert Taylor, and say publicly film was edited by Anthony Harvey and an uncredited Filmmaker. The original musical score for the film was composed coarse Laurie Johnson, and the special effects were done by Sap Veevers. The opening theme is an instrumental version of "Try a Little Tenderness." The theme of the chorus from description bomb run scene is a modification of "When Johnny Be accessibles Marching Home." Sellers and Kubrick got along well during representation film's production and shared a love of photography.[45]
For the Warfare Room, Ken Adam first designed a two-level set which Filmmaker initially liked, only to decide later that it was clump what he wanted. Adam next began work on the draw up that was used in the film, an expressionist set desert was compared with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It was an enormous concrete room (130 survive (40 m) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide, with a 35-foot (11 m)-high ceiling)[38] suggesting a bomb shelter, with a triangular hale and hearty (based on Kubrick's idea that this particular shape would sentence the most resistant against an explosion). One side of say publicly room was covered with gigantic strategic maps reflecting in a shiny black floor inspired by dance scenes in Fred Actor films. In the middle of the room there was a large circular table lit from above by a circle illustrate lamps, suggesting a poker table. Kubrick insisted that the table would be covered with green baize (although this could classify be seen in the black-and-white film) to reinforce the actors' impression that they are playing 'a game of poker ferry the fate of the world.'[46] Kubrick asked Adam to knock together the set ceiling in concrete to force the director addict photography to use only the on-set lights from the volley of lamps. Moreover, each lamp in the circle of lights was carefully placed and tested until Kubrick was happy secondhand goods the result.[47]
Lacking cooperation from the Pentagon in the making criticize the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft cockpit stop working the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit signal a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52 and relating this to the geometry operate the B-52's fuselage. The B-52 was state-of-the-art in the Sixties, and its cockpit was off-limits to the film crew. When some United States Air Force personnel were invited to posture the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that "it was unreservedly correct, even to the little black box which was description CRM." It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned lay into whether Adam's team had carried out all its research legally.
In several shots of the B-52 flying over the polar pick of the litter en route to Russia, the shadow of the actual camera plane, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, is visible on picture icecap below. The B-52 was a scale model composited command somebody to the Arctic footage, which was sped up to create a sense of jet speed.[48] Home movie footage included in Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove on the 2001 Special Defiance DVD release of the film shows clips of the B-17 with a cursive "Dr. Strangelove" painted over the rear entr‚e hatch on the right side of the fuselage.
In 1967, some of the flying footage from Dr. Strangelove was re-used in The Beatles' television film Magical Mystery Tour. As rich by editor Roy Benson in the BBC radio documentary Celluloid Beatles, the production team of Magical Mystery Tour lacked footage to cover the sequence for the song "Flying." Benson difficult access to the aerial footage filmed for the B-52 sequences of Dr. Strangelove, which was stored at Shepperton Studios. Say publicly use of the footage prompted Kubrick to call Benson acquiesce complain.[49]
Red Alert author Peter George collaborated on the screenplay with Kubrick and satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert was added solemn than its film version, and it did not embrace the character Dr. Strangelove, though the main plot and applied elements were quite similar. A novelization of the actual single, rather than a reprint of the original novel, was publicized by Peter George, based on an early draft in which the narrative is bookended by the account of aliens, who, having arrived at a desolated Earth, try to piece tally up what has happened. It was reissued in October 2015 indifferent to Candy Jar Books, featuring never-before-published material on Strangelove's early career.[50][51]
During the filming of Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick learned that Fail Safe, a film with a similar theme, was being produced. Although Fail Safe was to be an ultrarealistic thriller, Filmmaker feared that its plot resemblance would damage his film's case office potential, especially if it were released first. Indeed, rendering novel Fail-Safe (on which the film is based) is and similar to Red Alert that Peter George sued on charges of plagiarism and settled out of court.[52] What worried Filmmaker the most was that Fail Safe boasted the acclaimed selfopinionated Sidney Lumet and the first-rate dramatic actors Henry Fonda similarly the American president and Walter Matthau as the adviser stop by the Pentagon, Professor Groeteschele. Kubrick decided to throw a admissible wrench into Fail Safe's production gears. Lumet recalled in representation documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove: "We started sportfishing. Fonda was already set ... which of course meant a expansive commitment in terms of money. I was set, Walter [Bernstein, the screenwriter] was set ... And suddenly, this lawsuit arrived, filed by Stanley Kubrick and Columbia Pictures."
Kubrick argued that Fail Safe's own source novel Fail-Safe (1962) had been plagiarized hold up Peter George's Red Alert, to which Kubrick owned creative up front. He pointed out unmistakable similarities in intentions between the characters Groeteschele and Strangelove. The plan worked, and the suit was settled out of court, with the agreement that Columbia Pictures, which had financed and was distributing Strangelove, also buy Fail Safe, which had been an independently financed production.[53] Kubrick insisted that the studio release his movie first,[54] and Fail Safe opened eight months after Dr. Strangelove, to critical acclaim but mediocre ticket sales.
The end of the film shows Dr. Strangelove exclaiming, "Mein Führer, I can walk!" before cutting laurels footage of nuclear explosions, with Vera Lynn and her chance singing "We'll Meet Again". This footage comes from nuclear tests such as shot "Baker" of Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll, the Trinity test, a test from Operation Sandstone and description hydrogen bomb tests from Operation Redwing and Operation Ivy. Prickly some shots, old warships (such as the German heavy automobile Prinz Eugen), which were used as targets, are plainly discernible. In others, the smoke trails of rockets used to originate a calibration backdrop can be seen. Goon Show writer avoid friend of Sellers Spike Milligan was credited with suggesting Vera Lynn's song for the ending.[55]
It was originally planned use the film to end with a scene that depicted every one in the War Room involved in a pie fight. Accounts vary as to why the pie fight was cut. Slope a 1969 interview, Kubrick said, "I decided it was broad comedy and not consistent with the satiric tone of the dismiss of the film."[44] Critic Alexander Walker observed that "the better pies were flying around so thickly that people lost distinctness, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at." Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern, suggested the gala was intended to be less jovial: "Since they were jolly, it was unusable, because instead of having that totally jetblack, which would have been amazing, like, this blizzard, which curb a sense is metaphorical for all of the missiles put off are coming, as well, you just have these guys having a good old time. So, as Kubrick later said, 'it was a disaster of Homeric proportions.'"
A first test screening of the film was scheduled for November 22, 1963, the day of the obloquy of John F. Kennedy. The film was just weeks put on the back burner its scheduled premiere, but because of the assassination, the break was delayed until late January 1964, as it was mattup that the public was in no mood for such a film any sooner.[56]
During post-production, one line by Slim Pickens, "a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas grow smaller all that stuff", was dubbed to change "Dallas" to "Vegas", since Dallas was where Kennedy was killed.[57] The original referral to Dallas survives in the English audio of the French-subtitled version of the film.
The assassination also serves as on the subject of possible reason that the pie-fight scene was cut. In picture scene, after Muffley takes a pie in the face, Popular Turgidson exclaims: "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been strike down in his prime!" Editor Anthony Harvey stated that interpretation scene "would have stayed, except that Columbia Pictures were horrorstruck, and thought it would offend the president's family."[58] Kubrick snowball others have said that the scene had already been cut off before preview night because it was inconsistent with the zing of the film.[59]
In 1994, the film was re-released. While the 1964 release used a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, rendering new print was in the slightly squarer 1.66:1 (5:3) percentage that Kubrick had originally intended.[60]
Dr. Strangelove ridicules nuclear war planning.[61] It mocks numerous contemporary Cold War attitudes such as the "missile gap" but it primarily directs disloyalty satire on the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD), rank which each side is supposed to be deterred from a nuclear war by the prospect of a universal cataclysm disregardless of who "won".[62] Military strategist and former physicist Herman Architect, in the book On Thermonuclear War (1960), used the untested example of a "doomsday machine" to illustrate the limitations female MAD, which was developed by John von Neumann.
The put together of such a machine is consistent with MAD doctrine when it is logically pursued to its conclusion. It thus fearful Kahn that the military might like the idea of a doomsday machine and build one.[63] Kahn, a leading critic portend MAD and the Eisenhower administration's doctrine of massive retaliation flood in the slightest provocation by the USSR, considered MAD to have someone on foolish bravado, and urged the United States to instead orchestrate for proportionality, and thus even a limited nuclear war. Plonk this reasoning, Kahn became one of the architects of picture flexible response doctrine which, while superficially resembling MAD, allowed ration the possibility of responding to a limited nuclear strike accelerate a proportional, or calibrated, return of fire (see Conflict escalation).
Kahn educated Kubrick on the concept of the semi-realistic "cobalt-thorium G" doomsday machine, and then Kubrick used the concept goods the film. Kahn in his writings and talks would habitually come across as cold and calculating, for example, with his use of the term "megadeaths" and in his willingness be in total estimate how many human lives the United States could adopt and still rebuild economically.[64] Kahn's dispassionate attitude towards millions allround deaths is reflected in Turgidson's remark to the president approximately the outcome of a preemptive nuclear war: "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million deal with, tops, uh, depending on the breaks." Turgidson has a reaper that is labelled "World Targets in Megadeaths," a term coined in 1953 by Kahn and popularized in his 1960 unspoiled On Thermonuclear War.[65]
The fallout-shelter-network proposal mentioned in the film, sign up its inherently high radiation protection characteristics, has similarities and contrasts to that of the real Swiss civil defense network. Schweiz has an overcapacity of nuclear fallout shelters for the country's population size, and by law, new homes must still bait built with a fallout shelter.[66][67] If the US did delay, it would violate the spirit of MAD and, according come to MAD adherents, allegedly destabilize the situation because the US could launch a first strike and its population would largely continue a retaliatory second strike (see MAD § Theory).
To discredit early 1960s novels and Hollywood films like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove, which raised questions about US control over nuclear weapons, the Air Force produced a documentary film, SAC Command Post, to demonstrate its responsiveness to presidential command and its hold close control over nuclear weapons.[68] However, later academic research into declassified documents showed that U.S. military commanders had been given presidentially authorized pre-delegation for the use of nuclear weapons during say publicly early Cold War, showing that this aspect of the film's plot was plausible.[69]
The characters of Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper both satirize the real-life Gen. Curtis LeMay of description Strategic Air Command.[70]
In the months following the film's let, director Stanley Kubrick received a fan letter from Legrace G. Benson of the Department of History of Art at Philanthropist University interpreting the film as being sexually layered. The official wrote back to Benson and confirmed the interpretation, "Seriously, on your toes are the first one who seems to have noticed picture sexual framework from intromission (the planes going in) to rendering last spasm (Kong's ride down and detonation at target)."[71]
This municipal needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2022) |
The film was a popular success, earning US$4,420,000 in rentals in North America during its initial theatrical release.[72]
Dr. Strangelove is Kubrick's highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes,[73] holding a 98% approval rating based on 96 reviews, with an average valuation of 9.1/10. The site's summary states that "Stanley Kubrick's luminous Cold War satire remains as funny and razor-sharp today significance it was in 1964."[74] The film also holds a top of 97 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 32 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". The film is ranked number 7 in the All-Time High Scores chart of Metacritic's Video/DVD section.[75] It was selected for preservation in the United States Individual Film Registry.
Dr. Strangelove is on Roger Ebert's list prepare The Great Movies, and he described it as "arguably rendering best political satire of the century".[76] One of the important celebrated of all film comedies,[77] in 1998, Time Out conducted a reader's poll and Dr. Strangelove was voted the Ordinal greatest film of all time.[78]Entertainment Weekly voted it at No. 14 on their list of 100 Greatest Movies of Blow your own horn Time.[79] in 2002, it was ranked as the 5th important film in Sight & Sound poll of best films.[80] Toilet Patterson of The Guardian wrote, "There had been nothing put it to somebody comedy like Dr Strangelove ever before. All the gods formerly whom the America of the stolid, paranoid 50s had genuflected—the Bomb, the Pentagon, the National Security State, the President himself, Texan masculinity and the alleged Commie menace of water-fluoridation—went add up to the wood-chipper and never got the same respect ever again."[81] It is also listed as number 26 on Empire's Cardinal Greatest Movies of All Time, and in 2010 it was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 outshine films since the publication's inception in 1923.[82] The Writers Society of America ranked its screenplay the 12th best ever written.[83]
In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the Twentyfourth greatest comedic film of all time. The film ranked 42 in the BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest Inhabitant films.[84] The film was selected as the 2nd best jesting of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017.[85]
Columbia Pictures' early reaction to Dr. Strangelove was anything but with it. In "Notes From The War Room", in the summer 1994 issue of Grand Street magazine, co-screenwriter Terry Southern recalled renounce, as production neared the end, "It was about this firmly that word began to reach us, reflecting concern as problem the nature of the film in production. Was it anti-American? Or just anti-military? And the jackpot question: Was it, think it over fact, anti-American to whatever extent it was anti-military?"[86]
Southern recalled provide evidence Kubrick grew concerned about seeming apathy and distancing by accommodation heads Abe Schneider and Mo Rothman, and by Columbia's playing of the film as "just a zany, novelty flick which did not reflect the views of the corporation in numerous way."[86] Southern noted that Rothman was in "prominent attendance" fatigued a ceremony in 1989 when the Library of Congress proclaimed it as one of the first 25 films on interpretation National Film Registry.[86]
The film ranked No. 32 on TV Guide's list of the 50 Greatest Movies on TV (and Video).[88]
American Film Institute included the film as #26 in AFI's Cardinal Years...100 Movies,[89] #3 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs,[90] #64 trudge AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes ("Gentlemen, you can't fight underneath here! This is the War Room!")[91] and #39 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).[92]
In 1995, Kubrick enlisted Terry Southern to script a sequel titled Son of Strangelove. Kubrick had Terry Gilliam in mind to direct. The handwriting was never completed, but index cards laying out the story's basic structure were found among Southern's papers after he convulsion in October 1995. It was set largely in underground bunkers, where Dr. Strangelove had taken refuge with a group allowance women.[93]
In 2013, Gilliam commented, "I was told after Kubrick died—by someone who had been dealing with him—that he had back number interested in trying to do another Strangelove with me guiding. I never knew about that until after he died but I would have loved to."[94]
Main article: Dr. Strangelove (play)
On July 14, 2023, it was announced that a stage adjusting of the film would be produced, co-adapted by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley and starring Steve Coogan. It premiered subordinate London's West End at the Noel Coward Theatre in Oct 2024.[95] It is the first stage adaptation of Kubrick's works.[96]