Cinema: Detonating Comedy

Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The egghead President of the United States, one Mirkin Muffley, chirrups into the phone to the Soviet Premier: "Now, then, Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb? The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb. Well now, what happened is that one of our base commanders did a silly thing. He, uh, went a little funny in the head. You know, funny. He ordered our planes to attack your country . . . Let me finish, Dimitri."

In the manner of a man whose wife has backed the ranch wagon into a neighbor's prize hydrangea, Peter Sellers thus sets the tone of Producer-Director Stanley Kubrick's irreverent spectacular about nuclear war. The film is an outrageously brilliant satire—the most original American comedy in years and at the same time a supersonic thriller that should have audiences chomping their fingernails right down to the funny bone.

Two years ago Kubrick, 35, got the rights to Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert, then enlisted George and Co-Scenarist Terry Southern to help transmogrify that straightforward suspense yarn. By heightening the already striking surreality of mere humans blundering through a maze of buzzers, lighted dials, threat boards, hot lines and early warning systems toward world holocaust, Kubrick shot for a "nightmare comedy" and made it.

The onslaught begins under the opening credits. A B-52 bomber nuzzles up to a jet tanker for mid-air refueling while the sound track pours forth an unctuous ballad called Try a Little Tenderness. Cut to Burpelson Air Force Base, where General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches the offensive against Russia, then severs communications with SAC. Hayden's playing seems extremely right. His Ripper is impotent, a one-man military complex who means singlehanded to save the world from water fluoridation and other Communist plots "that threaten the purity and essence of our natural fluids." He alone knows the three-letter code signal to recall the bombers.

Soon the President and his top brass are noodling around a vast baize table at the Pentagon. Here, Sellers and George C. Scott ring in deftly shaped performances. As General "Buck" Turgidson, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Scott is the brash, boyish paradigm of technological know-how, whether he is contemplating megadeaths ("I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed") or the superstructure of his bikini-clad secretary Tracy Reed, a Miss Foreign Affairs with no top secrets.