Part of Weekend Classics
“Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he’s short of know-how.”
Stanley Kubrick’s painfully funny take on Cold War anxiety is one of the fiercest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood. The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles: Royal Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general (Sterling Hayden); the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded U.S. President Merkin Muffley, who must deliver the very bad news to the Soviet premier; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound presidential adviser with a Nazi past. Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, DR. STRANGELOVE is a subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist.
“The most shattering sick joke I've ever come across.” —Bosley Crowther, New York Times
“It's one of the greatest - and undoubtedly the most hilarious - antiwar statements ever put to film. See it before the world ends.” —Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle
“Perhaps Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy.” —Geoff Andrew, Time Out
