Welcome to Movie Club VII!
Obiter has chosen a "corker" of a film for our next fortnight's fun.
The 1964 film - "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is considered one of Stanley Kubrick's greatest films and a classic satire of the cold war era.
Peter Seller's multiple character performance is regarded as one of the truly classic "Tour de force" acting ventures.
The screenplay—based upon the novel Red Alert, by ex-RAF flight lieutenant Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant)—was co-written by Kubrick and George, with contributions by American satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert is a serious, cautionary tale of accidental atomic war. However, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear war so absurd that the story became a sinister macabre comedy. Once so reconceived, Kubrick recruited Terry Southern to polish the final screenplay.
Peter Sellers, who had played a small but pivotal part in Lolita, was hired to play four roles in Dr. Strangelove. He eventually played three, due to an injured leg and his difficulty in mastering bomber pilot Major "King" Kong's Texas accent. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing," but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. To overcome this problem, Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and let Sellers improvise. Coincidentally, that same year, Columbia Studios released the dramatic nuclear war thriller Fail-Safe.
The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments of the later 1960s that would become explosive only a few years after its release. It was highly irreverent to war policies of the US largely considered sacrosanct up till that time. The film earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.
Being the elder statesman that Obiter is, he has chosen a film that has only matured with age and enforces all that is pure and sacred within Movie Club.
Synopsis:
U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper goes completely and utterly mad, and sends his bomber wing to destroy the U.S.S.R. He suspects that the communists are conspiring to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people. The U.S. president meets with his advisors, where the Soviet ambassador tells him that if the U.S.S.R. is hit by nuclear weapons, it will trigger a "Doomsday Machine" which will destroy all plant and animal life on Earth.
Movie Club Queue™
27/11/08 - Falchion
11/12/08 - Ethanol
25/12/08 - Christmas break (AKA Festivus)
08/01/09 - Venkman
22/01/09 - Tigger_
What more can I say?
I have seen Dr. Strangelove many times, including at least twice at the cinema, and have bought two DVD editions of it, so I'm rather familiar with this film now. (Btw, the trailer on the DVD is a lot of fun).
Now almost everything has been written about this film, so it's hard to think of much new, but from reading several Kubrick biographies, I can reveal a few little known facts.
Such as that Kubrick was very concerned about the prospect of nuclear war, so much so that he was seriously considering moving to Australia, where it was unlikely any ICBM's would reach, and he most certainly read or saw the post-apocalyptic "On the Beach" set in Australia. Very likely he looked at the state of the 1960's Australian film industry and decided that it wasn't a suitable place to further his film career, and so decided to risk staying in the northern hemisphere. It remains one of those fascinating what if's though, such as could we have ended up seeing A Clockwork Orange set in Sydney or Melbourne, with Bruce Spence leading his pack of droogs for some ultra-violence?
In spite of Kubrick's concerns about nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove, nor his other war films (Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket) can be considered anti-war message films, whatever his feelings about war, as his interests tended to more towards the machinations of war. Consider how quickly Kubrick loses interest in the fate of the condemned soldiers in Paths of Glory, to instead focus on the political manoeuvrings of the generals. So in Dr. Strangelove, rather than the end of the world being an object of horror, it is greeted with nihilistic hilarity.
Also it is interesting to consider the verbosity of Kubrick's films, Dr. Strangelove and Lolita in particular, that have about 200-300% more dialogue than is common for a film now. This is in stark contrast to Kubrick's reputation as such a vividly visual director with long sections of 2001 being essentially silent. He was as adept with the verbal as he was with the visual. But Kubrick's generation grew up reading books, whereas the Spielbergs, Lucas's, Wachowski's, Michael Bay's, etc. grew up reading comics, or less, and apparently a shortened attention span. (In Japan and Asia this is much worse again with manga being the breeding ground for their cinematic talents.)
It seems that many directors these days come from a dogmatic position that films are to be 'pure cinema' and the less talk the better. I suspect that this pure cinema nonsense is really only due to their discomfort with language and they are much happier creating a barrage of stylish images that thematically amount to nothing, and sadly they are rewarded in this, as their audiences of course don't know any better, and Michael Bay, McG, and the rest of them move onto ever more lavish budgets. I suspect that this is the logical outcome of the idiotic 'auteur theory', pummeled into the uncritical consciousness's of film students these days, where the director is considered to be the author of the film. This is sheer nonsense, if any one person is the author of the film it is the writer, and only directors who also write the script being real authors of the completed work. While this foolishness is still taught we can continue to expect the visual to be elevated above the verbal, and a similar lack of concern for the quality of the script.
Agreement
I agree. Excellent film and the "right" choice for Movie Club.
I'd love to see the Bruce Spence version as well!