Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick’s sparse body of work, 13 films over 47 years, including one glorified amateur film (1952’s Fear and Loathing) and his final unfinished work (1999’s Eyes Wide Shut), barely qualifies him for consideration in auteurist ranking. Like Orson Welles, whose signed directorial efforts number 14 (they do not include films he appeared in for other directors, narrations, or documentaries about him), Kubrick qualifies for ranking, but unlike Welles, for a number of reasons not unrelated to the economics rather than the aesthetics of old Hollywood (such as they were), does not qualify for the pantheon. The primary reason is a lack of consistency in his projected vision or attitude. Too many of his films come off as commercial digressions rather than deeply focused point-of-view cinema. Whereas it is difficult to find a seriously flawed Welles-directed film, fully a third of Kubrick’s receive a thumbs-down. His focus is simply not as sharp as Welles, with little to no wiggle room to make up for it.
As with most artists, Kubrick, like Welles, created his best work in his early, most uncompromised period, beginning with 1956’s The Killing and continuing through 1957’s monumental Paths of Glory, 1960’s Spartacus, 1962’s exquisite Lolita, 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, and concluding with 1968’s astronomical 2001: A Space Odyssey. (All except Spartacus have been screened previously in our program.)
Inconsistencies are apparent in Spartacus, a film that ultimately proved a misfit for Kubrick. It was produced by and starred Kirk Douglas, who had done similar double duty for Paths of Glory, the film that thrust the still relatively unknown Kubrick into the first rank of Hollywood producers. The sandals and robes spectacle Spartacus remains one of the least personal films in Kubrick’s oeuvre. It was made at a time when studios were trying (in vain) to compete with small-screen television by producing overblown rather than expansive hit films, such as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1957’s The Ten Commandments, William Wyler’s 1959 Ben-Hur, and George Stevens’ 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told the last generally considered to be the end of that cycle before a new, more independent cinema took hold in America and around the world. There is some notable formalization in Spartacus, especially in its battle scenes, and a stellar supporting cast that includes Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, and Tony Curtis, but it ultimately fails as either epic spectacle or personal statement. Lolita succeeds on every level where Spartacus fails. Intimate rather than grandiose, sensual rather than cynical, provocative rather than predictable, original rather than obligatory, Lolita reveals a side of Kubrick not previously seen: an obsessive preoccupation with female beauty crisscrossed with an attraction to what is socially and sexually forbidden. This was the film that, for the censors employed by the Hays Code, Hollywood’s self-censorship organization, caused problems at every turn by daring to suggest that middle-aged men may be attracted to younger women, although no one seemed to object twenty years earlier to Billy Wilder’s 1942 similarly themed The Major and the Minor. Hays and his uptight (but not upright) band of bombastic baboons felt Lolita did not project the kind of wholesomeness they insisted was the only cultural touchstone that mattered in projected American life. They so hounded Kubrick and its distributor MGM (which was eager to capitulate at every turn, fearing a loss of their investment in the film if it wasn’t approved) that he finally relocated permanently to London, where, except for a few exteriors shot in Albany, New York, Lolita was entirely filmed. Kubrick never again stepped foot inside a Hollywood soundstage, or America itself, for that matter.
Dr. Strangelove was an independent film funded in exchange for distribution rights by a leaderless Columbia Studios following the untimely death of its Weinsteinian founder, Harry Cohn. They agreed to finance the film under one condition: that it featured the then-red-hot Peter Sellers as much as possible. This was not a problem for Kubrick, who adored the British actor/comedian and had already featured him in multiple roles in Lolita. (The director’s admiration for the actor is the most serious problem with that film; Sellers’ over-the-top and overlong monologues drag the film’space like a speeding ship’s dropped anchor. Sellers was less an actor than a mimic who, today, would be more suited to a role on “Saturday Night Live” than in his quickly dated movies. While his performance in Strangelove pleased Kubrick, the star received hefty criticism from critics and, in retrospect, is one of the film’s weaker aspects. The director’s and screenwriter Terry Southern’s attempt at a Brechtian stage adaptation of a Kafka short story has too much Brecht and too little Kafka.There was nothing original in the concept of one actor playing multiple roles; Chaplin had done it in 1940’s The Great Dictator, Laurel and Hardy several times, and, most recently, in the far less well-known clever British farce, Robert Hamer’s 1948 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness performs as multiple characters.)
Made at the height of the ban-the-bomb protests and the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the widespread fear of atomic warfare hung heavily over the film (as it did the world). It was made in the wake of the 12-day standoff between a United States naval blockade and the nuclear-armed Soviet Union warships barreling toward the Cuban shore. At one point, atomic warfare seemed inevitable, and in its aftermath inspired everyone from Bob Dylan (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”) to Stanley Kubrick to reflect on the fatalistic (Dylan), and the absurdity (Kubrick) of nuclear self-extermination.
The strength of Dr. Strangelove lies in its transient relief mechanisms, which stretch from satire (Sellers) to absurdity (George C. Scott) and even Kubrick’s chronic obsession with beautiful women, here in the unlikely guise of the scantily clad Tracy Reed as “Miss Scott,” a multiple play-on-names on George C. Scott’s “General ‘Buck’ Turgidson’s” mistress. Here, Kubrick’s tongue-in-cheek message may be summed up as “There’s always room for Jello.” Perhaps finally, it is the glue that ties the final phallic shot of the film, a cowboy riding a nuclear bomb as it drops from the sky, to the death-wish antics of the film’s anarchic ensemble. Sellers’ exhaustive efforts notwithstanding, the ultimate happiness of civilization comes in the moment of the film’s final climax, which recalls nothing so much as Shelley’s poetic observation about civilizations lost and undecipherable: “Nothing beside remains.”
-Marc Eliot
Resident Film Curator
Marc’s Take: Before the Film
Marc’s Take: After the Film