On Wednesday, 30 March, at 6:31pm, the Phnom Penh Film Club will share in Stanley Kubrick’s timelessly and exuberantly subversive cold-war satire from 1964, *Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*, starring Sterling Hayden, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, Slim Pickens, and Peter Sellers.
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Movies that contain a single iconic image or monologue have an unfair burden in the competition for new audiences, in that many people who haven’t seen the movie have seen the image or the monologue and filled their own movie in around it—complete with their own expectations about what the rest of the film is going to be like. This is bad enough when the iconic image is so consistent with the rest of the picture that people feel they don’t “have” to see it anymore (which see, *Alien*), but the real trouble begins and people really start short-changing themselves when the durable takeaway from the film is wholly non-representative of the rest of the picture.
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Such is the case with Slim Pickens’ unforgettable, unintentional, un-regretted, but entirely out-of-context ride aboard a recently-dropped nuclear bomb near the conclusion Dr. Strangelove—a vignette parodied so many times that, upon recently showing the original to a friend of mine, he suggested that the filmmakers were copying from someone else. And friends, neighbors, well-wishers, if you hear me say nothing else in these pages, hear me say this: The rest of this movie is nothing like that image, whatsoever.
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Adapter-director Stanley Kubrick channels the best inspirations of the finest war-epic directors to craft this hilarious social commentary on the absurdity of the Cold War. But he doesn’t stop with war directors, either: From Fritz Lang to Truffaut, Kubrick salts appropriately obscure nods to some of the best choices for characterization and framing at his disposal, borrowing mad scientist Rotwang from Lang’s Metropolis, and the notion of the unseen, through-the-window gunfire from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player—together with countless other examples that have established this picture as a favored re-watch among students of the medium and avid amateur film-buffs alike.
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Ultimately a character-piece (despite all appearances to the contrary), Dr. Strangelove tells the unnervingly credible story of an Air Force base at which the commander in charge, Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has slipped quietly into madness and, in consequence, ordered a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by his bombers, led by Maj. T.J. “King” Kong (Pickens). When word of the rogue attack-order makes its way to the darkest basement lair of Washington (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!”), the job of breaking the news falls to Joint Chiefs representative Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). All is as we might expect for such a scene, but for the small problem that Turgidson is finding himself distressingly torn about whether or not the government should bother trying to recall the bombers, anyway.
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In just one of the astounding statements that he made over his tragically shortened career, Peter Sellers grabs this movie by the throat and bashes it against every wall in the room with his coolly resolute fulfillment of not one or two but three completely separate parts—with performances so distinct in character, mood and accent that the same friend of mine refused to believe that they were all the same actor until I proved it on IMDB.
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We meet him for the first time in the personage of Ripper’s NATO observer Lionel Mandrake, desperately trying to coax the recall codes from his nutty C.O. while army soldiers outside the building are trying with equal desperation to kill the both of them and take the base. Not long after—when Turgidson can finally hang up from the incessant phone calls of his bored and lonely secretary for long enough to sort-out his briefing—the President to whom he delivers it turns out to be Sellers again. Presently Sellers-as-President finds himself mired in an impossible telephone conversation of his own with the Soviet Premiere, who is drunk on the other end and oscillating wildly between not comprehending or believing what he’s being told, and accusing the Sellers character of having been discourteous with him.
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When Kong and his crew are nearly shot-down by a Soviet air defense missile and their recall radio is shorted-out in the process, the grim reality of the situation prompts those in attendance in the War Room to begin marshaling their resources to prepare for the worst. It is then that we encounter Sellers in his third and greatest role: the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist of the title, a man whose fixation on the subsequent breeding behavior of those few humans who might survive the conflagration serves as a fitting red ribbon on the arabesque appetites and unfathomable defects of these people in whom all of our lives have been (and incidentally remain) continually entrusted.
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This is, in the end, the simple genius of Kubrick’s adaptation of Peter George’s deadly serious book (itself called Red Alert). To make the film’s message digestible for a fatalistically desensitized, post-Cuban-missile-crisis audience, Kubrick knew he’d have to sneak up on them with the gravity of the situation. And to sneak up on them, he chose consciously to mold the very straight original text into an absurd comedy in which people behaved in ways so wacky and incomprehensible that the grim horror of the thing could hide from our jaded cynicism in plain view. Oh and one more thing: As comedies go, it's very difficult to conjure as successful an example of its genre--in that on top of everything else, it's actually funny.
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I hope everyone will plan to join us on Wednesday for this rollicking yet razor-sharp cavalcade of military-bureaucratic ineptitude and existential statecraft gone horribly wrong. Goodness knows we could all use a laugh or two about those very things, right about now.
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