still a taut and humorous drama that's driven by sharp satire, career performances, and black-and-white images that perfectly complement the good guy/bad guy mentality of the era
Just when you thought it was safe to put that Special Edition high up on the "keeper" shelf, along comes Columbia TriStar with another Special Edition of "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." If you're building a definitive classic film collection and don't already own the one that ranks #3 on the American Film Institute's list of greatest comedies, you need to get this, plain and simple. But if you already own the first Special Edition of "Dr. Strangelove" and are wondering whether you should get the 40th Anniversary two-disc version, you've got a tough decision to make. There's both good and bad news about the new two-disc set.
For one thing, I'm not convinced that the new transfer and audio mix is superior. The previous special edition was offered in the original theatrical aspect ratio of approximately 1.33:1, while the anniversary edition offers 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen remastered in High Definition. I froze the frames in more than a few spots to compare them and was disappointed that the new widescreen version omits detail. Gone is the shadowy edge at the bottom throughout the film, which, admittedly, looked rough and raw in previous DVDs. But a lot of the detail is also missing in action. Example #1: Consider the scene where George C. Scott's character is in the bathroom while his secretary stretches out under a sun lamp. Some of the bed is cut off at the bottom, but slightly more of her shoes are shown far right. In that particular case, it's not a bad trade-off. But Example #2? Consider the first war room scene, where Scott's character breaks the news to the President that a crazed general has locked himself inside Burpelson Air Force Base and has dispatched warplanes to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union. In the old version, in an up-angle shot of Scott, you saw most of the desk in front of him and a stack of books with one title, "World Targets in Megadeaths," on top. In the new version, only "Megadeaths" is visible. The other words (and books) are cut off. There are many such examples, and purists will find it annoying that Sony, apparently responding to the market shift to widescreen televisions, remastered the original print to better fit those screens without edge distortion. But I compared scene after scene with the old version viewed at 4:3 "expanded" mode and the new one at 16:9, and to my eye there was little, if any, difference in distortion. Though the new version is also remastered in High Definition, I also did not notice an appreciable difference in sharpness or contrast. If anything, some scenes actually appear murkier. The new edition is listed at 95 minutes, while the older Special Edition timed in at 90, but here too I couldn't tell you where the missing minutes were. I feel like Richard Nixon.
It's the same dilemma with the sound. The original Special Edition was Dolby Digital Mono, and everything emanated from the center speaker. But the 40th Anniversary transfer sports DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 options—again, responding to the new bells and whistles that have become standard for home entertainment systems. Though you'd expect the sound to be channeled through all speakers, because so much of "Dr. Strangelove" is dialogue and the sounds are so center-specific—even in a scene where machine guns blast away—the battle sounds are still localized in the center speaker region, with no ambient sounds coming out of the rear speakers. And when I switched from DTS to Dolby Digital 5.1, I was unable to notice a significant different. Thankfully, viewers can choose the original Mono as an option on the new release, because you know what? The original soundtrack still sounds the cleanest and sharpest.
"Dr. Strangelove," in case you've never been exposed to this Cold War classic,
is Stanley Kubrick's black comedy about the nuclear holocaust. With direct phone "hot lines" between Washington and Moscow and nuclear weapons stockpiled everywhere, was it possible someone could push the button by accident? Could a mistake launch missiles that would result in retaliatory missiles being fired, with the result being total annihilation of the planet? The chilling answer to that was, yes. I was among those schoolchildren who, during the Cold War, filed into school basements and put their hands over their heads during frequent H-Bomb drills, and I remember neighbors digging pool-sized holes in order to build concrete shelters. This was the mindset during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone was paranoid that the world would end one day in a shower of fiery atomic explosions, and yet there was a weird acceptance of it all, as if to say, what can you do? America's frighteningly casual doomsday mindset bothered director Stanley Kubrick so much that, after making a movie about love ("Lolita"), he read nearly 50 books about nuclear war and set out to make a drama based on "Red Alert," a novel by Peter George. After working long hours on the project, a punchy Kubrick began to see how absurd the whole situation was, and decided to turn it into what would become one of the cinema's greatest black comedies.
It's also one of the great single-actor showcases. Peter Sellers is superb in three roles as the timid Strategic Air Command British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, as President Merkin Muffley (an Adlai Stevenson look-alike), and especially as Dr. Strangelove, the title character (a demented, wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi nuclear expert that comes across as a cross between Henry Kissinger and Werner Von Braun). As Strangelove, with his mind-of-its-own "Heil Hitler" arm, Sellers is at his comic best. He was also slated to play a fourth role—Maj. "King" Kong, the drawling, gung-ho Texas pilot whose payoff is to ride into film history on the payload end of a falling atomic bomb—but he broke his leg spilling out of the bomb doors. Veteran character actor Slim Pickens was called in to handle the part, and now, of course, you can't imagine anyone else in the role.
Sterling Hayden plays Jack D. Ripper, the commander-gone-mad who seals off his base and orders an unauthorized nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, while George C. Scott tries comedy on for size as the ebullient warmonger Gen. Buck Turgidson, a role he now says is his best—and you know what? He's right! As the chief military officer on hand in the "war room" who has the President's ear, Scott is as flamboyant and energetic as you've ever seen him. Look for a young James Earl Jones, who debuts as a member of the B-52 bomber crew en route to set Armageddon in motion, and just sit back and enjoy veteran Keenan Wynn as Col. "Bat" Guano, the soldier who shoots a Coca-Cola machine to try to save the world.
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