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Laugh-stead'a-cry funny
by CarlosC (movies profile)
Nov 8, 2007
18
of
20 people found this review helpful
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
With that battle-cry, a maverick American general (Sterling Hayden) launches an unauthorized nucler attack against the Soviet Union, leaving it up to the President of the United States (Peter Sellers) to pick up the pieces. As the war-mongering general's rebel base is overpowered by friendly forces, the general's top aide, a British exchange officer (Peter Sellers), tries to extract meaning from his boss' mad ravings. Meanwhile, in the War Room in Washington, D.C., a sinister scientist, DR. STRANGELOVE (Peter Sellers), watches with glee from the sidelines as the President is debriefed by another general (George C. Scott), whose main concern appears to be the integrity of "the Big Board" -- the actual, electronic, strategical map that dominates the conference-room -- but, not the people and places it stands for.
The cast of characters reads like the mock-credits to a Halloween episode of THE SIMPSONS: The mad general's name is "Jack D. Ripper." A colonel's nickname, "Bat," combined with his last name, results in the unusual monicker of "Bat-Guano." But, in other respects, DR. STRANGELOVE plays-out like standard, Cold War intrigue. The storyline unfolds in three theaters of action. On the rebel base, Group Cpt. Mandrake (Sellers) tries convince Gen. Ripper (Hayden) that he is a fellow believer, but his attempts ring comically hollow ("I am a religious man, myself, Jack -- I believe in all that sort of thing"). In the War Room, Pres. Muffley (Sellers) calls Soviet Premier Kisoff (unseen) to break the news ("Now, then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with The Bomb..."). And, thousands of miles away, an American bomber scuds towards its Russian targets, with a crew that includes a very young James Earl Jones, in his first screen role.
DR. STRANGELOVE had the audacity to laugh in the face of fear. Released just two years after the atomic clock ticked a few minutes shy of nuclear-midnight during the Cuban missile crisis, STRANGELOVE expounds on the absurdity of a military equilibrium between the United States and the Soviet Union that was based on the concept of mutually-assured destruction ("M.A.D.," for all you Cold Warriors). That concept is satirized in the film by Premier Kisoff's announcement that the American sneak-attack would trigger an unstoppable Soviet "doomsday" device that would destroy the planet. The film strikes a biting tone of dark sarcasm and black humor to mock the pre-detente world order and, frankly, to spoof the American values that permitted such a two-dimensional worldview. DR. STRANGELOVE is funny, frightening, and brilliant.
(Carlos Colorado) |
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