1964 war/comedy, dir. Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott:
IMDb. After the bombs fall,
only three people are left alive… and they can't get on.
I should admit up front: I'm no longer a person who can enjoy
this film. Partly that's because I find it hard to watch Peter Sellers
without remembering what a truly vile person he was to everyone who
knew him, but partly it's because I find it difficult to enjoy most
humour anyway, particularly the sort that has a person doing something
that seems entirely reasonable to him but which the audience is
primed to find funny.
In that respect I think President Muffley is the most successful of
Sellers' roles here, based loosely on Adlai Stevenson; Mandrake is too
obviously drawn as parody of his superiors from his RAF days, and
Strangelove is just too broad for my taste. He's a mixture of a bit
von Braun, von Neumann, Herman Kahn (he of the the "winnable nuclear
exchange", which also proposed the "Doomsday Machine" mostly as a
thought experiment) and Edward Teller. Honestly I find him less
impressive than Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Of course, after the success of Sellers' multiple roles in Lolita
and The Mouse That Roared, the studio originally wanted him in
four roles, also as Major Kong; he apparently tried to learn the
accent, but claimed he'd twisted his ankle and couldn't work in the
cockpit set. (It might even be true. But since the only witness was
Sellers himself, one can't say.)
And he wasn't the only habitual liar on the set. Quite a few American
actors turned down parts because the film didn't fit with their
right-wing images. Kubrick encouraged George C. Scott to shoot
"practice takes" in which he'd overplay to get into character, then
ended using those rather than the "real takes" in the edit; Scott
swore never to work with Kubrick again. Meanwhile Slim Pickens was
simply not told that the film was a comedy, and only got the script
pages for the scenes he was in. (But since his career took off hugely
after this, I imagine he found it in his heart to forgive.)
The aerial shots are clearly very expensive, but perhaps because
there's clearly so much effort put into them, I notice the problems:
they're composited from actual aerial footage (shot for the purpose
from a converted B-17) and the model of the B-52, but all too often
they aren't quite aligned, so they appear to show the aircraft flying
wildly off its heading and pitch. (Which is a thing that can happen of
course, but usually only shortly before a crash.)
A thing that may not have been known at the time is that Jack D.
Ripper is less an invention than a parody: General Thomas Power was
head of Strategic Air Command from 1957 to 1964, Curtis LeMay's
hand-picked successor, and everyone seems to have been in agreement
that if he looked at the world situation and thought that today was a
good day to win a nuclear war, he would start one. (He is the
specific reason why the Permissive Action Link, the system that
requires a Presidential release to deploy a live warhead, was
invented.)
(Yeah, here is the One Female Character. In a bikini, of course, and
only for one scene.)
Thinking of people who changed their name from something German, Klaus
Hugo George Fritz Adam had changed it to Ken Adam shortly before he
joined the RAF as one of three German pilots flying with them during
the war. (And another was his brother.) He's probably best known for
the good Bond villain lairs (at this point he'd done Doctor No and
he skipped From Russia With Love to work on the War Room set),
though his first major credit is Production Designer on Night of the
Demon.
There are lovely bits. But I find it hard to enjoy now.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.