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Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is Stanley Kubrick's masterful black comedy about the insanity of nuclear war. In black and white, this movie shows Peter Sellers at his best, giving performances as Capt. Madrake, a British RAF officer stationed in the US as General Jack Ripper's Executive Secretary, as the (unnamed) US President and as Dr. Strangelove, the German bomb maker with deply ingrained ties to his past showing difficulties trying to keep his left arm under control.
This movie smooths over the darkness of the knife edge of nuclear (nucular?) war with satire and grand comedic performances and hysterical dialogue (look out for the scene in which the President asks the Russian leader for a phone number!).
Amazon Review: Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold-war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with "the purity of precious bodily fluids," mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union.
The Soviets counter the threat with a so- called "Doomsday Device," and the world hangs in the balance while the U.S. president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. Sellers also plays a British military attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr. Strangelove; George C. Scott is outrageously frantic as General Buck Turgidson, whose presidential advice consists mainly of panic and statistics about "acceptable losses."
With dialogue ("You can't fight here! This is the war room!") and images (Slim Pickens's character riding the bomb to oblivion) that have become a part of our cultural vocabulary, Kubrick's film regularly appears on critics' lists of the all-time best. --Jeff Shannon
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