Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1962)
For those cast into the pits of despair by recent political events -- and this being Massachusetts, we are many -- there aren't many places to seek temporary succor and forgetfulness. (Scotch doesn't count after the third straight week.) (Unless it's Laphroaig.) One of the few respites is the bitter, cleansing laughter of scorn, and that, thankfully, is on offer at the Kendall, where a brand-new print of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic ''Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is unspooling over the next week.
What? You've never seen ''Dr. Strangelove"? All right, you can wait until later this month, when
A demented general named Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has ordered American bombers to drop their nuclear payloads onto Russia, convinced that fluoridation is a Commie plot. As a plane captained by flying cowboy Major ''King" Kong soars closer to its target, various members of the armed forces and US government scramble to recall it: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), gung-ho General ''Buck" Turgidson (George C. Scott), President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), Russian Ambassador Alexei de Sadesky (Peter Bull), and the president's special adviser, Dr. Strangelove himself (Peter Sellers).
That's three Peter Sellers, and the British actor would have taken on the role of ''King" Kong, too, if he hadn't broken his leg during filming. As it was, he had his hands full basing Strangelove on, among others, an upcoming young political analyst from Harvard named Henry Kissinger. Thank co-writer Terry Southern for the wonderfully rude character names, by the way. (Did we mention Keenan Wynn's Col. ''Bat" Guano?)
Much of ''Dr. Strangelove" takes place in the Department of Defense's War Room, leading at one point to the unforgettable line, ''You can't fight in here -- this is the War Room!" Much of the film also concerns the Cold War and tensions with Soviet Russia; thus, much of it has dated. But only on the surface. The film remains the most unblinking and thus the most bleakly hilarious dissection of the political mentality that finds war a tumescent turn-on.
In fact, war is sex here, from the opening shot of two refueling airplanes copulating in midair to the gleams in everyone's eyes when the male-female ratio in the survival bunkers is raised at the end. General Ripper has launched the bombers because he blames fluoridation for his impotence. Turgidson -- is this a great Scott performance or what? -- approaches every conversation with lubricious ramrod glee, even when he's arguing that 10 million or 20 million casualties would count only as ''getting our hair mussed."
Sellers's Strangelove is just icing on an already poisoned cake, especially when he rises from his wheelchair and calls out with giddy rapture to the Fuhrer in the famous final moments, just before . . . well, if you don't know what happens, I'm not about to spoil it. Is ''Dr. Strangelove" Kubrick's best movie? Along with ''Paths of Glory," absolutely. Does the film's merry vivisection of the ways bureaucratic doublespeak is used in the service of aggression have any currency today? Brother, just turn on the news.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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