On Screen

...If this is not the explanation, then the likeliest alternative is the attention paid by the establishment to "powerless intellectuals...

...Strangelove is that aside from the President and Group Captain Mandrake (two of Peter Sellers' three roles), none of the characters comes even close to conveying the effect of heightened actuality which is the achievement of successful caricature...

...Possibly the clues are John Simon's conception of the movie as an assault upon the establishment (whatever that may be), and Robert Brustein's concluding claim for the film that "it also releases, through comic poetry, those feelings of impotence and frustration that are consuming us all.' Apparently Brustein and Simon are suffering from the feeling that the world is out of rational control, that dull, cloddish men are complacently failing to manage technological implements of incredible malignity, and that those of us who know better are helpless to influence our "leaders...

...In the New Republic Stanley Kauffmann called Dr...

...One trouble with Dr...

...After frantic American efforts at the highest levels, all but one of our planes are recalled...

...Strangelove's vision of a world stupidly bent on its own destruction has not quite kept up with current events...

...I should rather answer these questions in the affirmative than believe either that my favorite reviewers have suffered a sudden decline of judgment or that I have...

...It is rather strange that literary intellectuals feel so particularly powerless just at this time...

...When the camera lovingly caresses General Ripper's cigar from most possible angles, what is demonstrated is no more than simply the love of the cameraman for his craft...

...Strangelove is that it is the first American film to be thoroughly irreverent about everything the establishment takes seriously: atomic war, government, the army, international relations, religion, heroism, sex, and whatnot...

...The comic names—Strangelove, Bat Guano, Merkin Muffley, Buck Turgidson, Ripper, Mandrake —are unquestionably novel labels suffused with open and covert erotic implications...

...Robert Brustein in the New York Review of Books termed the film "a series of earthquakes, shattering cultural platitudes, political pieties, and patriotic ideals with fierce, joyous shocks...

...The active agent of Armaggedon, General Ripper, is so blatantly loony that the Air Force in real life would long since have confined him to a rest home for distrait generals...

...Waiving the point that even individuals who are not members of the establishment probably take some of the items on Simon's list seriously, I must believe that something is afoot when Kauffmann, Brustein and Simon, who usually enjoy so little of what professional duty compels them to review, deliver themselves in tones as extravagant as these...

...Can it be, finally, that they leaped with so much joy upon Dr...

...The film I sat through was an exceedingly heavy-handed farce whose plot was loosely based on Peter George's Red Alert, the model for the Eugene Burdick best-seller of last year, Fail-Safe...

...Does nobody in the establishment notice...

...But is disaster inevitable...

...The nuclear bombers which we have erroneously dispatched toward Russian targets can only trigger off automatically a Doomsday Machine which the Russians have thriftily constructed in an attempt to curtail their defense expenditures and extend to Russian consumers the blessings of refrigerators, washing machines and electrical appliances...

...Ours is an incendiary planet...

...Among intellectuals these are familiar emotions...

...Even if the film is secondrate, an interesting question is raised by the romance between it and our best critics...

...After all, the nuclear test-ban treaty marked a possible turn away from a quickened nuclear arms race...

...In England the Economist and the Spectator have praised it, the latter on the ground that "it's persuasive about the way the world is brought to an end by the lot of us...

...Peace on earth is not imminent...

...A priori, therefore, there was no reason why Dr...

...Hence, and this is the crucial point, Dr...

...Strangelove himself, apparently conceived as an amalgam of Werner von Braun, Herman Kahn and Edward Teller, is so ridiculous a figure that no President, certainly not the rather intellectual figure of the film, would keep him on the premises for an hour...

...Kubrick's imagination stopped much too soon after his conception of the movie's central idea...

...What about the treaty...

...General Turgidson is too blithering an idiot to achieve eminence in any military service...

...The Russians, the French, the English and ourselves have accumulated enormous piles of nuclear weapons...

...Was it Molière who stated as a matter of good comic dramaturgy that a gag should be repeated no more than three times...

...It is less acceptable from the film's critics...

...I can only guess at the chemistry involved...

...Strangelove is a release, a purgation, a blessed relaxation of pressures of unexpressible rage against the foolishness of our politics, national defense and cultural life...

...It appears to have been the product of the rankest establishment thinking in the United States and in Russia...

...Strangelove "the best American picture that I can remember since Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre...

...Much in the world lends them credence...

...Here at home critical emotion has run the gamut from joy to ecstasy...

...Can it be that they even took some pleasure in the depiction of American leaders as besotted fools...

...The opening aerial ballet, in which a jet tanker refuels in flight one of our bombers, is a prolonged pictorial representation of the first thought that enters the mind of any adult male when he sees the long hose of the tanker wriggling in the belly of the other plane...

...With pleasant exceptions like Colonel Guano's destruction of the Coca-Cola machine, neither does it amuse...

...Which is to say that Dr...

...Strangelove does not frighten because it has nothing at all to do with the real world...

...Strangelove could not have been a hilariously funny experience instead of a wild idea poorly executed...

...As in the two novels, a combination of military psychosis, incapacity in high places, and technological accident initiates a series of events which threaten the nuclear destruction of the world...

...The camera work is of that annoyingly arty variety which continually calls attention to itself and diverts the eye from the actual flow of events...

...Either the establishment is less benighted or intellectuals are more influential than their fantasies of powerlessness suggests...

...Evidently they saw a different movie from the one that I paid $2.50 to witness a week or so ago...

...Strangelove's rickety bandwagon before they noticed the vehicle's poor mechanical condition...

...It can be argued that satire functions best as a comment on affairs of life and death...

...but the survivor does unload its bombs, the retaliatory mechanisms of the Doomsday Machine do work, and there is nothing for it but to descend for the next century into deep mine shafts where life for a chosen few can continue until the atmosphere clears...

...Can it be that they rejoice so much in the ever plentiful signs of human idiocy that they fail to note that traces of improvement will assert themselves...

...This is probably permissible in a film made some time ago...

...The film is equally clumsy in its handling of character and incident...

...Can it be that our best reviewers are taking a certain pleasure in the contemplation of themselves as men of intelligence and sensitivity overcome by a world they never made...

...Is it overliteral to expect something believable in a work of art which aims to make human and political points...

...All the same, after the 15th or so repetition, they do become boring...

...The signs of détente between Russia and the United States make it probable that entirely human fears are capable of moving even "statesmen" to constructive action...

...And in much the same vein this journal's John Simon declared that "the altogether admirable thing about Stanley Kubrick's Dr...