Stanley Kubrick’s black comic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opens in theaters to both critical and popular acclaim. The movie’s popularity was evidence of changing attitudes toward atomic weapons and the concept of nuclear deterrence.
The movie focused on the actions of a rogue U.S. officer who believes that communists are threatening the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans. Without authorization, he issues orders to U.S. bombers to launch atomic attacks against the Soviet Union. When it becomes evident that some of the bombers may actually drop their atomic payloads, American President Merkin Muffley frantically calls his Soviet counterpart.
The Russian leader informs Muffley that an atomic attack on the Soviet Union will automatically unleash the terrible “doomsday machine,” which will snuff out all life on the planet. Muffley’s chief foreign policy advisor, Dr. Strangelove, reassures the president and chief officials that all is not lost: they can, he posits, survive even the doomsday machine by retreating to deep mineshafts.
Close scrutiny of the Dr. Strangelove character indicated that he was probably a composite of three people: Henry Kissinger, a political scientist who had written about nuclear deterrence strategy; Edward Teller, a key scientist in the development of the hydrogen bomb; and Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who was a leading figure in missile technology.
Little scrutiny was needed, however, to grasp Kubrick’s satirical attacks on the American and Russian policies of nuclear stockpiling and massive retaliation. The film’s jabs at some of the sacred core beliefs of America’s defense strategy struck a chord with the American people. Particularly after the frightening Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962–when nuclear annihilation seemed a very real possibility–the American public was increasingly willing to question the nation’s reliance on nuclear weapons.
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“Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!”
Peter Sellers = comedy gold.
So, Dr. Strangelove, a movie that featured the president of the United States as a prominent character, premiered in January 1964 because of an emergency delay of its original premiere date. Can anyone guess what that date was?
Yup… November 22, 1963.
You can’t make shit like that up… nobody would believe it.
There was also an emergency voice-over pickup that had to be done and if you watch closely you can see it. After Major Kong reeds the “Survival Kit Contents Check” he says “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”
The original line was, of course, “A fella could have a pretty good weekend in DALLAS with all that stuff.”
“Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn
And how she said that we would meet again…some sunny day?”
– Pink Floyd