We screen this Stanley Kubrick classic as an accompaniment to the NT Live performance later this week. An unhinged American general orders a bombing attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop.
Starring Peter Sellers at the peak of his powers, this is a film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button. U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) goes completely insane, and sends his bombers to destroy the U.S.S.R. He thinks that the communists are conspiring to pollute the water supply of the American people. Sellers plays stiff-upper-lipped RAF officer Lionel Mandrake and also the insidiously bland President Merkin Muffley, and, most shockingly of all, the ex-Nazi wheelchair-bound scientist Doctor Strangelove. The result of Kubrick’s work is scary, hilarious and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy documentaries.
USA 1964 Stanley Kubrick 95m
