Close Up

21 May 2017: Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove
Stanley Kubrick
1963 | 90 min | B/W | DCP

"No major director seemed better able to plug into the zeitgeist of his era (particularly in the 1960s) than Kubrick, and no film so completely captured the country's growing disaffection with the military-industrial complex as Kubrick's adaptation (with writer Terry Southern) of Peter George's political satire Two Hours to Doom. The resulting work is a chronicle, at once hilarious and frightening, of the fallout from the decision of the deranged General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) to deploy a bomber wing of the Strategic Air Command to drop the big one on Russia. The President immediately convenes his security council, which includes the eponymous Dr. Strangelove and Group Captain Mandrake. All three characters are played by the inimitable Peter Sellers." — Harvard Film Archive


Part of our retrospective on Stanley Kubrick