Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Our Premium Pick series invites out Premium members to turn their hands to programming. This month’s film was suggested by Steven Savitt, who says Dr Strangelove is “as funny as ever, but even more terrifying.”

Based (rather loosely) on a serious novel about nuclear brinksmanship, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece went in another direction. The more seriously Kubrick thought about it, the more the subject tipped into satire and black comedy (“If the modern world could be summed up in a single word it would be absurd,” he wrote in his notes. “The only truly creative response to this is the comic vision of life.”)

Enlisting visiting Esquire journalist Terry Southern to help him, the director added the Strangelove character (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers) and deftly traced in a lubricious arc of sexual innuendo, which may or may not have flown over the heads of the MPAA.

Strangelove holds up so well because it still has the spine of a suspense film, and if you think its assault on the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction is out-moded you haven’t kept abreast of US Defense spending. When President Reagan took office he was dismayed to find there was no War Room — and ordered one built forthwith, based on the design in the film.