First you have to applaud Peter Sellers for playing three different characters and was even nominated for Best Actor Oscar. Dr. Strangelove being there makes sense when you know about the C.I.A.’s Operation Paperclip. Also I learned the other day Aryan doesn’t mean (blonde hair blue eyed) as the word comes from the middle east as another word for Iran.
I've just learnt from reading the comments that Peter Sellers did play 3 roles! I was completely clueless! What an outstanding performance and talent, wow!
What's more unbelievable than Operation Paperclip is both the Able Archer incident or the K-19 incident (which probably helped to inspire this film) where we had first scene Stranglove-esque brushes with actual Nuclear War.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room." Fun Fact: Just so you know, there are plenty of safeguards in place for this to never ever happen. This is a comedy of the absurd. Although the US Military includes "now" when responding to this movie, there's nothing to say that this could have happened before. Double Duty Fact: Legendary Peter Sellers plays President Merkin Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and the titular Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers was paid $1 million, 55% of the film's budget. Peter Sellers improvised most of his Dr. Strangelove lines. And one of the most significant is in the final scene, when as Dr. Strangelove, exclaims: "Mein Führer! I can walk!" Medical Fact: Dr. Strangelove apparently suffers from Alien Hand Syndrome (AHS), or so known as agonistic apraxia. It's caused by damage to the corpus callosum, the nerve fibers that connect the brain's two hemispheres. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen who identified it named it Dr. Strangelove Syndrome. This was not ultimately not approved, though it is sometimes used as an alternative name. Very Realistic Fact: In the early 1960s the B-52 was cutting-edge technology. Access to it was a matter of national security. The Pentagon refused to lend any support to the film after they read the script. Set designers reconstructed the B-52 bomber's cockpit from a single photograph that appeared in a British flying magazine. When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the movie's B-52 cockpit, they said it was a perfect copy. Stanley Kubrick feared that Ken Adam's production design team had used illegal methods and could be investigated by the FBI.
Great comment as always...but one quick note regarding nuclear warhead security. Are you aware that the permissive action links were very new things in the time when this movie was made? You are definitely correct that the PALs make this scenario pretty much impossible, but it took until the 1980s for the PALs to be fully implemented...so up until then it was possible at least in theory for somebody other than the NCA to decide to launch a nuke or a few. Definitely not something like in this movie, since we did not have an airborne alert system like in the film, but some kind of smaller "unauthorized" release was possible...yes?
The whole point of the film, and the story it's based upon, is that you can't rely on safeguards, no matter how many you have, as an excuse to conduct yourself recklessly. The final sequence as the plane manages to keep thwarting its own command's increasingly desperate efforts to call it back, without even knowing to do so, is a superb lesson in how inherently unsafe a world the superpowers had built, and how no amount of safeguards can negate such fundamental, pervasive existential danger; there's *always a chance* of something going wrong that nobody anticipated. In the original, non-humourous story, it's a compound electromechanical failure; the odds of this happening are astronomically low, but crucially *not zero,* and in any sane risk/hazard analysis, any non-zero risk at all is unacceptable when the hazard is thermonuclear armageddon, the only truly safe solution is to get rid of the hazard.
You should read up on the kind of shenanigans some of the generals pulled during the Cuban Missile Crisis to try precipitating war. This absolutely could have happened if one of those people had had a sufficiently extreme breakdown while remaining functional enough to be trusted by their subordinates.
Except even in that time, when there were no devices to stop them, no US commander brought us even as close to nuclear war as the men on Submarine B-59 working with Khrushchev's ridiculous rules of nuclear engagement. LOL Thank goodness for Arkhipov being on that exact boat to stop them from their madness.
"I'm going to get those bomb doors open if it harelips everyone up Long Tree creek!" -Slim Picken's character, and then we get to Dr Strangelove (as if that's his real name).😅
Kubrick originally intended to make a serious film about this situation (watch Failsafe) but the more research he did the more absurd it seemed so he decided that he had to make it a comedy. If you ever watch it again pay attention to the subtle sexual references from the character names to the phallic symbolism of Ripper’s cigar to Major Kong straddling a large metallic object and even the opening title sequence of aerial refuelling accompanied by “show a little tenderness”. To me the underlying absurdity of the situation is that no matter how many precautions you might put in place to prevent such a disaster there’s always a chance that circumstances will find a way around them. You can fool-proof something but they keep making smarter fools.
It is always really interesting to see younger folks who do not necessarily remember living through the Cold War watch and/or react and/or talk about Dr Strangelove...I always wonder how much they will get the joke. A few notes about the movie and your reaction... You were right that the opening sequence had aircraft models against the rear projection...but it also had some footage of real aircraft in flight. For a fun fact, there are a couple of scenes where the shadow of the B-17 camera plane can be seen in the snow, instead of the correct shadow of the B-52. As you noted, Peter Sellers' one sided conversation with Soviet Premier Kissov is some of the most hilarious dialog in all of cinema history. If you watch carefully, you can see Peter Bull trying so hard and sometimes failing to keep a straight face and stay in character as the Soviet Ambassador. This movie came out in a time after it was revealed to the American public that the US had a massive superiority in nuclear weapons over the USSR, that the US had always had that massive superiority, and that they had been sold a monumental lie about the "missile gap" that it was the USSR that was superior to the US in nuclear missiles. Hence the joke near the end about a "mine shaft gap". All the footage of explosions at the end are taken from official stock film of US atomic and nuclear bomb tests in the 1940s and 1950s. As others have said...definitely check out the serious other side of the coin to this film, Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe.
Failsafe is also really good (and the film worth watching), but I think Kubrick was right to realise that the only way to truly capture the absolutely paranoid, hysterical insanity of the Cold War was by filming it as a very dark farce. Remember that when this film came out, the Cuban missile crisis had only been two years earlier!
@@tommcewan7936 I tend to agree that at the limits, Kubrick's dark humor is closer to the ultimately insane nature of global thermonuclear warfare. But Lumet's take on the subject is much more realistic, and thus far far more impactful...and that ending is one of the most chilling of any movie ever made. IMHO I guess I would say that Kubrick's film is way more out there and without limits and broadly applicable, but a big part of me thinks Lumet's more contained piece telling a more focused and specific story might actually be a bit better film in some ways...and it is certainly able to stand with Kubrick's piece as a duo. I often wonder what might have been if the order of release of the 2 films had been reversed, and Fail Safe had come out first.
One of the things one might have missed is the names, General Jack T. Ripper, Colonel Mandrake (a deadly plant), General Turgidson (swollen and distended or congested: "a turgid and fast-moving river" (of language or style) tediously pompous or bombastic: "some turgid verses on the death of Prince Albert"), Premire Kissoff, Lt. Colonel "Bat" Guano, President Merkin Muffley (look up definition of merkin), Major Kong.... And and FYI, the lipstick, nylons and such were in the survival kit to be used as bribes because obviously Soviet women wanted these things and the USSR wasn't able to produce them.... ,
After the nylon and lipstick line, Slim Pickens' character originally said, "Sh!t, a feller would have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all this stuff...", but was changed to Vegas instead due to a test screening the day of JFK's assassination.
The 3 best performances.... Mandrake The President Dr. Strangelove Yes.... all played by Peter Sellers 😂😂😂 .... followed by George C. Scott ( the gum chewing Gen. ) is a riot especially if you think of him playing Patton !
@@latenightswithsammy Not only did Sellers play those 3 roles, he was supposed to play Major Kong. Sellers sprained his leg badly and couldn't do the climbing around in the bomb bay, so they contacted Slim Pickens to play the part. Pickens was quite well known in Hollywood, having played the sidekick in a slew of B westerns. They flew him over to England for shooting on a couple of days notice. Pickens was excited, since it gave him a chance to break out of westerns and do a serious dramatic role. Kubrick didn't tell him that he was going to be in a comedy and let him play it out straight, which is one reason his performance is so realistic.
@@allenporter6586 Yes... a very powerful and straight laced funny as you can get. One of my favorite Sterling Heyden movies is called... Suddenly (1954) Staring Frank Sinatra and Sterling Heyden and some good character actors. Its a short film and a pretty good one with Sterling and Frank faced off against each other check it out if you get a chance.✌️🙂
When he first walked onto the set Slim Pickens was wearing a cowboy hat, a buck-skinned jacket, and cowboy boots. Everyone was impressed thinking he was getting into the character, but that was the way he normally dressed!
The Late, Great Peter Sellers! Amazing. Gotta love Slim Pickens. Nice small role for James Earl Jones also. Definitely a classic. George C Scott is great as well.
George C. Scott didn't know that this was going to be a comedy. He was irate when he saw the finished film and he was furious at Kubrick. I think he eventually got over it.
The survival kit is hilarious but the thinking was that those kinds of luxury items were in short supply in the Soviets, so the soldiers might buy some good will with the locals for these items. My grandparents told me that during WWII, German occupation troops in Denmark would use the same trick with varying success.
I first saw this movie when it came on TV a couple yrs after its release. I was a nerdy 12 yr old who was very aware of just how close we were to waking up one morning to the end of the world. It certainly had a big influence on me and my attitude towards those in authority to say the least. Watching these younger folks struggle with it is frustrating, but I I guess you had to live it to really understand.
Appreciate the humor here, but take a minute to think about the crew on the airplane. They had a missile go off right next to them. They lost their communications, half their control circuitry, and were loosing fuel. Hell, they couldn't even open the bomb bay door automatically. They still persevered. Despite everything going against them, they completed their mission. The film is hysterically funny but, as a veteran from the decade after this movie was made, I can see our submarine crew doing the same thing. Stanley Kubrick was not the only person from that era to see the absurdity of nuclear war. Tom Lehrer wrote a number of songs about it, like, "So long Mom./I'm off to drop the bomb./So don't wait up for me." Most of his songs are on RUclips. You might want to take a listen.
Oh ya, the music at the end is by Vera Lynn - who died only a couple of years ago at 104/103 - and was famous as a singer during ww2 (she had many hits - Bug Bunny sang her "someone's rocking my dreamboat" in a couple of 40's cartoons, she was famous for "Well meet again" and "blue birds over the white cliffs of dover" - I "discovered" her 24 yrs ago, and have a couple of her CDs - she was a fab singer. RIP.
The small banter between the President and Russian Premier wasn’t scripted but was add-libbed by Sellers. People think of Kubrick as a very stern and controlling director but he recognized genius when he saw it and went with it when it worked. Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket is a good example.
According to Shane Rimmer, Kubrick wanted the crew of the B-52 to be a cross section of America: A WASP (Rimmer), a cowboy (Pickens), a Jewish man (Goldie), and a black man (James Earl Jones).
The oral fixations depicted in the movie (Ripper's cigar, Turgetson's chewing gum) were based on General Curtis LeMay, Commander of SAC in the early 1960s who was a hawk and was always seen smoking cigars.
10:50 "That's comedic writing right there". No, it isn't. That conversation wasn't in the script like that. It was mostly improvised and Kubrik was smart enough let Sellers going.
Although he always planned to shoot the movie in black and white, Stanley Kubrick had the table of the War Room covered in green felt like a huge poker table to create the subliminal message that the people in the War Room were "gambling" with the fate of the world.
No one ever mentions that the President is an Adlai Stevenson clone and Gen Ripper is a shoo-in for Gen Douglas MacArthur. It's also likely that Dr Strangelove is Jewish with dyed blonde hair to pass as German.
The business about fluoridation comes from real life. At the time, right-wing extremists (particularly the John Birch Society) claimed that fluoridation of the water supply was a communist plot to weaken the U.S. Even today there are a few people who believe this. The city of Portland, Oregon still hasn't fluoridated its water. George C. Scott, who played General Buck Turgidson, was a serious method actor who wanted to play the role with subtlety, while Kubrick wanted an over-the-top performance. Kubrick convinced Scott to play it big in what he assured Scott were only rehearsal takes, then went ahead and used those takes in the movie. Scott was furious, and said he would never work with Kubrick again. Later he came around and admitted it was one of his favorite performances. The bit where Turgidson took a fall wasn't scripted. Scott tripped and took a tumble, but kept going in character, and Kubrick decided to keep it in the movie. The character of Dr. Strangelove was based on several different people in real life. One of them was Werner von Braun, a scientist who had helped Germany develop the V2 rockets that were used against Britain during World War II. After the war, von Braun came to the U.S. and worked with the American military on our missile and satellite programs. His work for the U.S. was controversial, since some people saw him as a closet Nazi. That's why Dr. Strangelove's out-of-control arm kept giving the Nazi salute, and why he said, "My Fuehrer, I can walk!" Kubrick originally wanted to end the movie with a pie fight in the war room. You can see a bunch of pies along with all the other food in there. Fortunately, Kubrick decided against this idea. Stanley Kubrick filmed the scenes with Slim Pickens (who played Major "King" Kong) separately from the rest of the movie, and rumor has it that he never told Pickens it was a comedy. At one point in the movie, President Muffley says the U.S. has a no-first-use policy with regards to nuclear weapons. It's not true. The U.S. has never had such a policy, or made any official statement that would suggest we have such a policy.
Two best sellers turned into two movies, one of which was Dr Stragelove. The Book was Red Alert. the second book was, Fail Safe. both covered the same idea; a breach in the fail safe system. Al alternate movie, Fail Safe. 1964 with Henry Fonda. was faithful to the Novel. Try watching it as a contrast. The Kubrick film seemed schizophrenic. The assault on the base looked like a different movie. Sellers of course was the source for the films direction taking three lead roles., a bold move, taking a serious novel and making it slapstick. Interesting.
In order to understand the humor in this one needs to understand that this was made at the height of the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only two years ago. Red China had just successfully tested an atomic bomb. Needless to say there was a lot of public paranoia.
Peter Sellers and George C. Scott were two of the most volatile actors in Hollywood, both known to intimidate directors and try to deviate from the planned script. A student of psychology, Kubrick kept both actors constantly occupied by having Sellers play four different parts (he was also supposed to play the pilot of the B-52 but backed off saying he was having enough trouble with the three he already was playing ) and having a running chess game with Scott in between takes. Scott was an avid chess player, but Kubrick was superior and kept beating him.
I just watched your review of "FAIL SAFE" and want to suggest you watch "The Mandurian Candidate". At the time (1960s) the B-52s systems and procedures were Top Secret so the Air Force (through the FBI) contacted the production company, asking where did they get the equipment designs and procedures depicted aboard the B-52 bomber? Another suspenseful movie is "Seven Days in May" I suggest you review.
The odd items such as stockings and lipstick in the survival kit were for bartering or bribery should they be shot down. I'm suppose that during WW2 with all the exteme shortages in Europe, bartering gave well supplied allied soldiers an advantage in handling hostile civilian populations. In reality, U2 pilots (who would overfly Soviet territory to spy) were issued a kit with gold rings, watches and Russian rubles, in addtion to basic survival gear.
The lipsticks & stockings would probably be highly desirable items in 1960s Russia; the demands of the Cold War strained the Soviet economy such that domestic luxury items were always in very short supply. Of course, you'd probably not be able to *wear* them even if you got them, or everyone would know it was you who'd harboured the fugitives.
9:45 - The original track said: ''...a pretty good night in Dallas'' but it was overdubbed with ''Vegas'' because of the recent assassination of JFK. The dubbed versions (foreign) of the film kept Dallas. Fact: things like lipstick and nylons were included in army survival kits as exchange money for food, shelter, aid etc. 24:14 - That scene is made of small cuts because everybody was cracking-up at Peter Sellers' antics, all improvised and different for each take. Even in the final cut you can see actors cracking a smile behind him. The black glove he wears is Kubrick's: Sellers having ridiculed them as pompous he grabbed one just before shooting and used it as a prop. George C. Scott was actually pretty mad at Kubrick when he saw the movie, thinking he looked like a clown. Shooting multiple takes Kubrick always asked Scott to do one last, completely over-the-top take...and those are all the ones he kept. Kubrick wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern (a name to remember), at one point asking themselves: ''Are we turning this into a comedy?''
The nylon stockings and lipstick thing was an experience from WW2. You could buy a lot of local help from women impoverished by the war. And Soviet women were still poor af in the mid-60s.
None of my business, but I have a pretty good ear, do I note an Irish accent Sir? ?? I'm not Irish, just have a good ear, I'm an American for full disclosure.
Not plane models but the real thing. This movie is 1964, so made in 62-63. He is thinking in todays movies with special effects not there then. Stopped listening at that point. Just listen reviewers it's before your time. Most don't know about operation paper clip or recognize German salute.
The meaning of the subtitle is probably to simply accept something unpleasant that is present in our everyday lives. A modern equivalent would be "How to Stop Worrying and Love Trump."
According to Shane Rimmer, Kubrick wanted the crew to be a cross section of America: A WASP (Rimmer), a cowboy (Pickens), a Jewish guy (Goldie), and a black man (Jones).
My great uncle Peter (Bull) played the russian ambassador. Wish I had taken more interest in his career before he died .
He was great in this film!
He was also in THE AFRICAN QUEEN.
He couldn’t keep a straight face when Sellers was Strangelove. What fun. It must have been hilarious to be part of this production.
First you have to applaud Peter Sellers for playing three different characters and was even nominated for Best Actor Oscar.
Dr. Strangelove being there makes sense when you know about the C.I.A.’s Operation Paperclip.
Also I learned the other day Aryan doesn’t mean (blonde hair blue eyed) as the word comes from the middle east as another word for Iran.
I've just learnt from reading the comments that Peter Sellers did play 3 roles! I was completely clueless! What an outstanding performance and talent, wow!
What's more unbelievable than Operation Paperclip is both the Able Archer incident or the K-19 incident (which probably helped to inspire this film) where we had first scene Stranglove-esque brushes with actual Nuclear War.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."
Fun Fact: Just so you know, there are plenty of safeguards in place for this to never ever happen. This is a comedy of the absurd. Although the US Military includes "now" when responding to this movie, there's nothing to say that this could have happened before.
Double Duty Fact: Legendary Peter Sellers plays President Merkin Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and the titular Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers was paid $1 million, 55% of the film's budget. Peter Sellers improvised most of his Dr. Strangelove lines. And one of the most significant is in the final scene, when as Dr. Strangelove, exclaims: "Mein Führer! I can walk!"
Medical Fact: Dr. Strangelove apparently suffers from Alien Hand Syndrome (AHS), or so known as agonistic apraxia. It's caused by damage to the corpus callosum, the nerve fibers that connect the brain's two hemispheres. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen who identified it named it Dr. Strangelove Syndrome. This was not ultimately not approved, though it is sometimes used as an alternative name.
Very Realistic Fact: In the early 1960s the B-52 was cutting-edge technology. Access to it was a matter of national security. The Pentagon refused to lend any support to the film after they read the script. Set designers reconstructed the B-52 bomber's cockpit from a single photograph that appeared in a British flying magazine. When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the movie's B-52 cockpit, they said it was a perfect copy. Stanley Kubrick feared that Ken Adam's production design team had used illegal methods and could be investigated by the FBI.
Great comment as always...but one quick note regarding nuclear warhead security. Are you aware that the permissive action links were very new things in the time when this movie was made? You are definitely correct that the PALs make this scenario pretty much impossible, but it took until the 1980s for the PALs to be fully implemented...so up until then it was possible at least in theory for somebody other than the NCA to decide to launch a nuke or a few. Definitely not something like in this movie, since we did not have an airborne alert system like in the film, but some kind of smaller "unauthorized" release was possible...yes?
The whole point of the film, and the story it's based upon, is that you can't rely on safeguards, no matter how many you have, as an excuse to conduct yourself recklessly. The final sequence as the plane manages to keep thwarting its own command's increasingly desperate efforts to call it back, without even knowing to do so, is a superb lesson in how inherently unsafe a world the superpowers had built, and how no amount of safeguards can negate such fundamental, pervasive existential danger; there's *always a chance* of something going wrong that nobody anticipated. In the original, non-humourous story, it's a compound electromechanical failure; the odds of this happening are astronomically low, but crucially *not zero,* and in any sane risk/hazard analysis, any non-zero risk at all is unacceptable when the hazard is thermonuclear armageddon, the only truly safe solution is to get rid of the hazard.
In awe of the fact that most of Dr. Strangelove lines were improvised, wow!
You should read up on the kind of shenanigans some of the generals pulled during the Cuban Missile Crisis to try precipitating war. This absolutely could have happened if one of those people had had a sufficiently extreme breakdown while remaining functional enough to be trusted by their subordinates.
Except even in that time, when there were no devices to stop them, no US commander brought us even as close to nuclear war as the men on Submarine B-59 working with Khrushchev's ridiculous rules of nuclear engagement. LOL Thank goodness for Arkhipov being on that exact boat to stop them from their madness.
"I'm going to get those bomb doors open if it harelips everyone up Long Tree creek!" -Slim Picken's character, and then we get to Dr Strangelove (as if that's his real name).😅
Kubrick originally intended to make a serious film about this situation (watch Failsafe) but the more research he did the more absurd it seemed so he decided that he had to make it a comedy. If you ever watch it again pay attention to the subtle sexual references from the character names to the phallic symbolism of Ripper’s cigar to Major Kong straddling a large metallic object and even the opening title sequence of aerial refuelling accompanied by “show a little tenderness”. To me the underlying absurdity of the situation is that no matter how many precautions you might put in place to prevent such a disaster there’s always a chance that circumstances will find a way around them. You can fool-proof something but they keep making smarter fools.
Indeed, a very (very) unique take on a serious historical event.
It is always really interesting to see younger folks who do not necessarily remember living through the Cold War watch and/or react and/or talk about Dr Strangelove...I always wonder how much they will get the joke.
A few notes about the movie and your reaction...
You were right that the opening sequence had aircraft models against the rear projection...but it also had some footage of real aircraft in flight. For a fun fact, there are a couple of scenes where the shadow of the B-17 camera plane can be seen in the snow, instead of the correct shadow of the B-52.
As you noted, Peter Sellers' one sided conversation with Soviet Premier Kissov is some of the most hilarious dialog in all of cinema history. If you watch carefully, you can see Peter Bull trying so hard and sometimes failing to keep a straight face and stay in character as the Soviet Ambassador.
This movie came out in a time after it was revealed to the American public that the US had a massive superiority in nuclear weapons over the USSR, that the US had always had that massive superiority, and that they had been sold a monumental lie about the "missile gap" that it was the USSR that was superior to the US in nuclear missiles. Hence the joke near the end about a "mine shaft gap".
All the footage of explosions at the end are taken from official stock film of US atomic and nuclear bomb tests in the 1940s and 1950s.
As others have said...definitely check out the serious other side of the coin to this film, Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe.
Failsafe is also really good (and the film worth watching), but I think Kubrick was right to realise that the only way to truly capture the absolutely paranoid, hysterical insanity of the Cold War was by filming it as a very dark farce. Remember that when this film came out, the Cuban missile crisis had only been two years earlier!
@@tommcewan7936 I tend to agree that at the limits, Kubrick's dark humor is closer to the ultimately insane nature of global thermonuclear warfare. But Lumet's take on the subject is much more realistic, and thus far far more impactful...and that ending is one of the most chilling of any movie ever made. IMHO
I guess I would say that Kubrick's film is way more out there and without limits and broadly applicable, but a big part of me thinks Lumet's more contained piece telling a more focused and specific story might actually be a bit better film in some ways...and it is certainly able to stand with Kubrick's piece as a duo. I often wonder what might have been if the order of release of the 2 films had been reversed, and Fail Safe had come out first.
So excited to see Lumet's Fail Safe now!
One of the things one might have missed is the names, General Jack T. Ripper, Colonel Mandrake (a deadly plant), General Turgidson (swollen and distended or congested:
"a turgid and fast-moving river" (of language or style) tediously pompous or bombastic: "some turgid verses on the death of Prince Albert"), Premire Kissoff, Lt. Colonel "Bat" Guano, President Merkin Muffley (look up definition of merkin), Major Kong....
And and FYI, the lipstick, nylons and such were in the survival kit to be used as bribes because obviously Soviet women wanted these things and the USSR wasn't able to produce them....
,
Thank you for this!
After the nylon and lipstick line, Slim Pickens' character originally said, "Sh!t, a feller would have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all this stuff...", but was changed to Vegas instead due to a test screening the day of JFK's assassination.
The 3 best performances....
Mandrake
The President
Dr. Strangelove
Yes.... all played by Peter Sellers 😂😂😂
.... followed by George C. Scott ( the gum chewing Gen. ) is a riot especially if you think of him playing Patton !
Add in Sterling Hayden as Gen. Jack T. Ripper, he was a staple in Film Noir.
It's news to me: So shocked that these 3 outstandingly hilarious roles were actually played by one actor! Outstanding!
@@latenightswithsammy Not only did Sellers play those 3 roles, he was supposed to play Major Kong. Sellers sprained his leg badly and couldn't do the climbing around in the bomb bay, so they contacted Slim Pickens to play the part. Pickens was quite well known in Hollywood, having played the sidekick in a slew of B westerns. They flew him over to England for shooting on a couple of days notice. Pickens was excited, since it gave him a chance to break out of westerns and do a serious dramatic role. Kubrick didn't tell him that he was going to be in a comedy and let him play it out straight, which is one reason his performance is so realistic.
@@allenporter6586 Yes... a very powerful and straight laced funny as you can get.
One of my favorite Sterling Heyden movies is called...
Suddenly (1954)
Staring Frank Sinatra and Sterling Heyden and some good character actors.
Its a short film and a pretty good one with Sterling and Frank faced off against each other check it out if you get a chance.✌️🙂
When he first walked onto the set Slim Pickens was wearing a cowboy hat, a buck-skinned jacket, and cowboy boots. Everyone was impressed thinking he was getting into the character, but that was the way he normally dressed!
The Late, Great Peter Sellers! Amazing. Gotta love Slim Pickens. Nice small role for James Earl Jones also. Definitely a classic. George C Scott is great as well.
What a stellar cast!
George C. Scott didn't know that this was going to be a comedy. He was irate when he saw the finished film and he was furious at Kubrick. I think he eventually got over it.
REALLY!?! Even with all the Wrigley's Chewing Gum? Surely he must have known, his performance (just in chewing) was hilarious 😅
The survival kit is hilarious but the thinking was that those kinds of luxury items were in short supply in the Soviets, so the soldiers might buy some good will with the locals for these items.
My grandparents told me that during WWII, German occupation troops in Denmark would use the same trick with varying success.
I first saw this movie when it came on TV a couple yrs after its release. I was a nerdy 12 yr old who was very aware of just how close we were to waking up one morning to the end of the world. It certainly had a big influence on me and my attitude towards those in authority to say the least. Watching these younger folks struggle with it is frustrating, but I I guess you had to live it to really understand.
I appreciate you writing this, very reflective.
Appreciate the humor here, but take a minute to think about the crew on the airplane. They had a missile go off right next to them. They lost their communications, half their control circuitry, and were loosing fuel. Hell, they couldn't even open the bomb bay door automatically. They still persevered. Despite everything going against them, they completed their mission. The film is hysterically funny but, as a veteran from the decade after this movie was made, I can see our submarine crew doing the same thing.
Stanley Kubrick was not the only person from that era to see the absurdity of nuclear war. Tom Lehrer wrote a number of songs about it, like, "So long Mom./I'm off to drop the bomb./So don't wait up for me." Most of his songs are on RUclips. You might want to take a listen.
Thank you for sharing this, and the references Paul :)
Oh ya, the music at the end is by Vera Lynn - who died only a couple of years ago at 104/103 - and was famous as a singer during ww2 (she had many hits - Bug Bunny sang her "someone's rocking my dreamboat" in a couple of 40's cartoons, she was famous for "Well meet again" and "blue birds over the white cliffs of dover" - I "discovered" her 24 yrs ago, and have a couple of her CDs - she was a fab singer. RIP.
The small banter between the President and Russian Premier wasn’t scripted but was add-libbed by Sellers. People think of Kubrick as a very stern and controlling director but he recognized genius when he saw it and went with it when it worked. Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket is a good example.
Incredible talent and direction, amazing!
Peter sellers played like 3 different characters in movie😊
Apparently he was originally slated to play Major Kong as well, but he wasn't confident he could do the Texan accent well enough.
According to Shane Rimmer, Kubrick wanted the crew of the B-52 to be a cross section of America: A WASP (Rimmer), a cowboy (Pickens), a Jewish man (Goldie), and a black man (James Earl Jones).
Should be required viewing. Scary, funny, insightful. Will we survive?
So true!
In my own mental canon, Dr.Strangelove is an alternate take on how Fallout happened.
The oral fixations depicted in the movie (Ripper's cigar, Turgetson's chewing gum) were based on General Curtis LeMay, Commander of SAC in the early 1960s who was a hawk and was always seen smoking cigars.
10:50 "That's comedic writing right there".
No, it isn't. That conversation wasn't in the script like that. It was mostly improvised and Kubrik was smart enough let Sellers going.
So impressed reading after-the-fact that so much of the lines were improvised
Although he always planned to shoot the movie in black and white, Stanley Kubrick had the table of the War Room covered in green felt like a huge poker table to create the subliminal message that the people in the War Room were "gambling" with the fate of the world.
No one ever mentions that the President is an Adlai Stevenson clone and Gen Ripper is a shoo-in for Gen Douglas MacArthur. It's also likely that Dr Strangelove is Jewish with dyed blonde hair to pass as German.
The business about fluoridation comes from real life. At the time, right-wing extremists (particularly the John Birch Society) claimed that fluoridation of the water supply was a communist plot to weaken the U.S. Even today there are a few people who believe this. The city of Portland, Oregon still hasn't fluoridated its water.
George C. Scott, who played General Buck Turgidson, was a serious method actor who wanted to play the role with subtlety, while Kubrick wanted an over-the-top performance. Kubrick convinced Scott to play it big in what he assured Scott were only rehearsal takes, then went ahead and used those takes in the movie. Scott was furious, and said he would never work with Kubrick again. Later he came around and admitted it was one of his favorite performances.
The bit where Turgidson took a fall wasn't scripted. Scott tripped and took a tumble, but kept going in character, and Kubrick decided to keep it in the movie.
The character of Dr. Strangelove was based on several different people in real life. One of them was Werner von Braun, a scientist who had helped Germany develop the V2 rockets that were used against Britain during World War II. After the war, von Braun came to the U.S. and worked with the American military on our missile and satellite programs. His work for the U.S. was controversial, since some people saw him as a closet Nazi. That's why Dr. Strangelove's out-of-control arm kept giving the Nazi salute, and why he said, "My Fuehrer, I can walk!"
Kubrick originally wanted to end the movie with a pie fight in the war room. You can see a bunch of pies along with all the other food in there. Fortunately, Kubrick decided against this idea.
Stanley Kubrick filmed the scenes with Slim Pickens (who played Major "King" Kong) separately from the rest of the movie, and rumor has it that he never told Pickens it was a comedy.
At one point in the movie, President Muffley says the U.S. has a no-first-use policy with regards to nuclear weapons. It's not true. The U.S. has never had such a policy, or made any official statement that would suggest we have such a policy.
The more comments I read, the more I'm impressed with Kubrick's boldness with this picture, wow! Thank you for sharing all this :)
Classic! Thanks Sammy ! Also check out “Failsafe” about the same subject but a serious movie, excellent!
Henny Fonda (The President) is excellent in Fail Safe !
For sure! I know there's also a film by the same name that came out in 2000, is that also worth watching?
@@latenightswithsammy haven’t seen that one but the Henry Fonda movie is a must watch, thanks Sammy!
Although the rest of Peter Sellers's dialogue as the president was scripted, his riff about being just as sorry as Kissoff was improvised.
Two best sellers turned into two movies, one of which was Dr Stragelove. The Book was Red Alert. the second book was, Fail Safe. both covered the same idea; a breach in the fail safe system. Al alternate movie, Fail Safe. 1964 with Henry Fonda. was faithful to the Novel. Try watching it as a contrast. The Kubrick film seemed schizophrenic. The assault on the base looked like a different movie. Sellers of course was the source for the films direction taking three lead roles., a bold move, taking a serious novel and making it slapstick. Interesting.
Indeed, a very interesting take
In order to understand the humor in this one needs to understand that this was made at the height of the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only two years ago. Red China had just successfully tested an atomic bomb. Needless to say there was a lot of public paranoia.
What a time to release such a picture ...
Peter Sellers and George C. Scott were two of the most volatile actors in Hollywood, both known to intimidate directors and try to deviate from the planned script. A student of psychology, Kubrick kept both actors constantly occupied by having Sellers play four different parts (he was also supposed to play the pilot of the B-52 but backed off saying he was having enough trouble with the three he already was playing ) and having a running chess game with Scott in between takes. Scott was an avid chess player, but Kubrick was superior and kept beating him.
might as well not worry for a while, before you dont worry for sure
I just watched your review of "FAIL SAFE" and want to suggest you watch "The Mandurian Candidate".
At the time (1960s) the B-52s systems and procedures were Top Secret so the Air Force (through the FBI) contacted the production company, asking where did they get the equipment designs and procedures depicted aboard the B-52 bomber?
Another suspenseful movie is "Seven Days in May" I suggest you review.
Excited to watch, "The Mandurian Candidate!" Thanks for writing in and sharing these recommendations :)
James Earl Jones, who just died is one of those on the plane. Should be able to reconize his voice.
Lipsticks & nylons are hard too find during wartime (then). If behind enemy lines you can use them to bribe or barter.
The odd items such as stockings and lipstick in the survival kit were for bartering or bribery should they be shot down. I'm suppose that during WW2 with all the exteme shortages in Europe, bartering gave well supplied allied soldiers an advantage in handling hostile civilian populations. In reality, U2 pilots (who would overfly Soviet territory to spy) were issued a kit with gold rings, watches and Russian rubles, in addtion to basic survival gear.
The lipsticks & stockings would probably be highly desirable items in 1960s Russia; the demands of the Cold War strained the Soviet economy such that domestic luxury items were always in very short supply. Of course, you'd probably not be able to *wear* them even if you got them, or everyone would know it was you who'd harboured the fugitives.
Ahhh, very interesting! Bribery didn't even cross my mind, but, as you explained it, it makes total sense why it'd be crucial in such scenarios.
9:45 - The original track said: ''...a pretty good night in Dallas'' but it was overdubbed with ''Vegas'' because of the recent assassination of JFK. The dubbed versions (foreign) of the film kept Dallas.
Fact: things like lipstick and nylons were included in army survival kits as exchange money for food, shelter, aid etc.
24:14 - That scene is made of small cuts because everybody was cracking-up at Peter Sellers' antics, all improvised and different for each take. Even in the final cut you can see actors cracking a smile behind him. The black glove he wears is Kubrick's: Sellers having ridiculed them as pompous he grabbed one just before shooting and used it as a prop.
George C. Scott was actually pretty mad at Kubrick when he saw the movie, thinking he looked like a clown. Shooting multiple takes Kubrick always asked Scott to do one last, completely over-the-top take...and those are all the ones he kept.
Kubrick wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern (a name to remember), at one point asking themselves: ''Are we turning this into a comedy?''
INHERIT THE WIND is a huge cultural and historic film 1960-Spencer Tracey and entire cast is stellar IT IS NOT TO MBE MISSED
Slim Pickens. Greatest character actor ever.
I watched other reactions to this movie, but yours is the first reaction that has made me want to buy it on Blu-ray, and I have...!
Fun fact: Kubrick was such a perfectionist that he actually had several hydrogen bombs detonated at strategic locations in the northern hemisphere.
George C. Scott's prat fall was not planned.
Definitely one of my favorite movies. So many take aways from this.
For sure! Excited to rewatch this sometime soon and see what I missed :)
aaah.... actually..... you seem to 'make fun' of everything in the movie. would you not take offense to my asking, "Where are you from!!?!"
My all time favorite movie
So eager to re-watch it, really enjoyed the film's brand of humour :)
The nylon stockings and lipstick thing was an experience from WW2. You could buy a lot of local help from women impoverished by the war. And Soviet women were still poor af in the mid-60s.
Thank you for this :)
When did you decide to be John Landis' stunt double.
😂😂😂
Failsafe is also a great movie released at the same time.
Excited to get to that one :)
Watch the movie Failsafe with Henry Fonda. This movie is kind of a spoof of that film.
Watched it right after this picture. The episode is up on the channel :)
None of my business, but I have a pretty good ear, do I note an Irish accent Sir?
??
I'm not Irish, just have a good ear, I'm an American for full disclosure.
Not plane models but the real thing. This movie is 1964, so made in
62-63. He is thinking in todays movies with special effects not there
then. Stopped listening at that point. Just listen reviewers it's before
your time. Most don't know about operation paper clip or recognize German salute.
The meaning of the subtitle is probably to simply accept something unpleasant that is present in our everyday lives. A modern equivalent would be "How to Stop Worrying and Love Trump."
There's only one black guy onthe goddamn PLANE!!!😮
Yeah, but the "one black guy" is James Earl Jones!
According to Shane Rimmer, Kubrick wanted the crew to be a cross section of America: A WASP (Rimmer), a cowboy (Pickens), a Jewish guy (Goldie), and a black man (Jones).
Which Joke Shop did you buy that nose and glasses from?
😂