...quite certainly the best black comedy ever produced for the screen.
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It's always good to see an old favorite back with added trappings. "Dr. Strangelove" is quite certainly the best black comedy ever produced for the screen. Equally convincing, it is one of filmdom's most pointed and funny satires. Furthermore, its cast put forth transcendent comedic performances, especially Peter Sellers in triple roles. Stanley Kubrick's direction is unerring; the dialogue is scintillating; the photography is consummate; and while the Communists may have lost control of Russia, the film's messages are as important today as they were all those years ago.
"Dr. Strangelove" is a movie classic that belongs in every collector's library, and in its new Special Edition it's better than ever.
The movie takes place in 1963 (although it wouldn't be released until 1964 due to the Kennedy assassination), the height of the Cold War, and the Russians have just built a super bomb known as the "Doomsday Machine." If anyone attacks the U.S.S.R., the world ends. A pretty good deterrent, except that the Russians haven't announced it yet, and as Dr. Strangelove asks late in the film, "What good is a Doomsday Machine if nobody knows about it?" Too bad the impotent General Jack D. Ripper didn't know about it before he ordered his bomber wing to drop the big one! He's convinced that water fluoridation is a Communist plot to dry up our precious bodily fluids, one of many innuendoes the film makes linking military and political aggression to sexual motivation, innuendoes that begin in the opening credits with a jet bomber refueling and continue through the climactic scene of a phallic bomb heading towards nuclear orgasm.
The movie is a faultless lampoon of Cold War politics and paranoia, the military, the arms race, and the stupidity and near-sightedness of all mankind.
Peter Sellers is a standout as Merkin Muffley, the well-meaning President of the United States; as Captain Lionel Mandrake, the stuffy British adjutant stationed at Burpelson Air Force Base; and as Dr. Strangelove, the sinister, former-Nazi rocket scientist now working for the U.S., a role obviously patterned after the real Dr. Wernher von Braun. Sellers would have done the bomber pilot, too, if he hadn't been hurt during production. In equally memorable roles are Sterling Hayden as the mad-as-a-hatter General Ripper; George C. Scott as gung-ho U.S. Air Force General Buck Turgidson, a role loosely based on General Curtis LeMay; Slim Pickins as the wild-West pilot of the jet bomber, Major T.J. "King" Kong, determined to drop his nuclear payload at any cost; and Keenan Wynn as the dim-bulbed Colonel Bat Guano, a model of military discipline extended to its most illogical end.
"Strangelove" is a story that begs repeated viewing for its clever subtlety, devastating humor, and scary believability. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here," pleads the President. "This is the War Room!"
Video:
Now, about the new Special Edition DVD. This appears to be the same transfer used in Columbia TriStar's previous DVD release. Considering its source--an almost forty-year-old black-and-white print and monaural sound--the disc conveys good, although not spectacular, clarity. The image quality shows some minor signs of aging, a few flecks and specks, an occasional line, and a very small bit of grain. The contrasts and definition are also good, but they don't show up as well as they would in a digitally restored film.
As far as screen size is concerned, Kubrick intended the film to be shown theatrically in something called "multi-aspect ratios"; that is, the screen dimensions varied in size from 1.33:1 to 1.66:1, according to the needs of a scene. Before his death, however, Kubrick asked that his films be transferred to video in the full-frame aspect ratios from which the director later matted the widescreen versions. But in spite of the claim on Columbia's keep case that the film is shown here in its "original camera aspect ratio of 1.33:1," the ratios on the DVD actually measure on a standard TV from 1.33:1 to approximately 1.45:1. Maybe some day Columbia will issue the film either in its prototype multi-aspect ratios or in a true full-frame ratio.
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