Film Forum

U.S., 1964
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens
WINNER, BAFTA Awards – Best Film, 1965
Approx. 95 min. DCP.

Fearful the Russkies are fluoridating America’s drinking water to pollute “our precious bodily fluids,” Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper unleashes those H-bomb-bearing B-52’s. And then it’s showtime, as gung-ho General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott in an Oscar®-worthy comedy tour de force: “No more than ten to twenty million people killed — tops!”), Colonel “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn), bomb-bustin’ cowboy Major T.J. “King Kong” (Slim Pickens), and President Merkin Mufflet (also Peter Sellers: “Gentlemen, this is outrageous. I have never heard of such behavior in the War Room before!”) struggle to stave off Doomsday, with the eponymous Strangelove (“Mein Fürher! I can walk!” – still Sellers) in the wings.

Reviews

“Still one of the great adolescent pranks perpetrated in movies.”
– J. Hoberman

“Devastatingly funny — and at the same time nightmarishly frightening in its accuracy. A prophetic look at the insanity of superpower politics which, like Orwell’s 1984, has entered the lexicon of modern political discourse.”
– James Monaco

“Absolutely unflinching: relentlessly perceptive of human beings to the point of inhumanity…Kubrick’s precise use of camera angles, his uncanny sense of lighting, his punctuation with close-ups and occasionally with zoom shots, all galvanize the picture into macabre yet witty reality.”
– Stanley Kauffman

“What makes the picture so funny, terrifying and horribly believable is that everyone in the film really has learned to stop worrying, as smokers do about lung cancer after living with the statistics for a bit.”
– Penelope Gilliatt