“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room.”
Stanley Kubrick's Cold War masterpiece reminds you what political and social satire can do at its peerless best.
Screened as part of Autumn Events 2014
Dr Strangelove 1964
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
With the US and Soviet Union vaunting their capacity for mutual annihilation, Cold War tension was a terrifying daily reality in the early 60s, and not generally considered a laughing matter. Fifty years after it was first lobbed into that volatile arena, Stanley Kubrick’s brazen black comedy of military-industrial psychosis continues to jolt and astound. Positing a nuclear war in the hands of a demented US General convinced that fluoridation of the water supply is an “international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids”, the film thrives on the manic brilliance of its stellar cast, not least Peter Sellers – the film’s marquee star at the time – in three indelible roles.
“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room.”
“Fifty years later… Strangelove seems all the more brilliant, bleak, and terrifyingly on the mark.” — Eric Schlosser, New Yorker