On Screen

...How, at their age, could they hope to comprehend the Fluoride Cadenza...

...Strangelove...

...But there are works that triumph over their authors, that float above the Zeitgeist like a cloud or an emanation...

...On Screen KUBRICK'S NUCLEAR LANTERN BY DAVID BROMWICH SATIRE takes no hostages...

...When Stanley Kubrick bought the motion pic?ture rights to a thriller called RedAlertby Peter George, he meant to make a melo?drama about a nuclear war triggered by a solitary madman...

...Made up like Henry Kissinger in the waning days of prodigydom, Sellers as Strangelove has hair that is wavy and white, Aryan white, Rand white, polar white...

...His slow drawl, kindly temper, and air of benign but total acceptance qualify Major Kong as nature's servant to the fanatical Ripper...

...there were, he said, in Southern's novel The Magic Christian "certain indications" of the kind of thing he wanted...

...Vodka, that's what they drink, isn't it...

...Army unit from retaking his sealed-off base, while the Colonel feeds him bullets), Mandrake is reduced to limply asking when it was "you first became??well??developed this theory...

...The folks back home is a-countiri on you, and by golly we ain't about to let 'em down...

...Kubrick thinks of people as more like dolls and more like apes than the earnest shivers or helpers that a taste for exalting comparisons has led us to believe we are...

...The fighting is rugged, with bumps and bruises in the soundtrack, and the camera is handheld: a brilliantly jus?tified use of that frequently dubious tac?tic...

...The camera does not follow the man...

...If the pilot's good, see, I mean if he's real?ly sharp??he can barrel that baby in so low??you ought to see it sometime??has he got a chance...

...Last summer, Dr...

...But I got a pretty fair idea somethin' doggone important's go?ing on back there...

...These specimens are then photographed almost neutrally...

...And at this angle Hayden has burned the image into our memories: ungentle father and fierce imago, every inch of him dead with purpose??and all carried off with just one prop, a cigar...

...2) impartially hates the origi?nals of all its characters, while relishing everything the characters make of the originals...

...Control of its proceedings is in the hands of President Merkin Muffley, a vague Stevensonesque presence, decent, compromised, and abortive of command, whose authority is quickly usurped by General Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott...

...His usual method has been to work out a screenplay that shows people (mostly men) as beings either so primitive or so hyperevolved that they have no claim to the passions they display from habit...

...4) is not encum?bered by a wish to preserve appearances, or to preserve anything...

...Like every legitimate psychosis...

...Gen?eral Ripper's idea is an explanation that explains everything...

...The room, cavernous and marmoreal, is photographed flat...

...But I want you to remember one thing...

...Gulliver's Travels was like that??its time?ly jokes trained on the 1720s, its broader myth an unforgettable point-for-point negative of Enlightenment humanism...

...Had anyone seen a war room, the war room, before Kubrick made it up...

...Dr...

...President, if I may speak freely: The Ruskie talks big but frankly we think he's short of techni?cal know-how...

...When the two men are finally on the floor together, as they were meant to be (Ripper firing the machine gun that was in his golf bag, to keep a U.S...

...All satire was once compassion...

...Look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches...

...Kubrick in this film showed a genius for selection in every range of detail...

...Before the bomb is ridden down by the Major, we are with him inside the bomb bay, a closetlike gloom illuminated only by his swinging flashlight and sparks from a short circuit...

...and, as we learn, close to the polar icecap is the wiring for a Doomsday Machine the Russians have built in secret: hundreds of nuclear bombs programmed to go off as soon as the So?viet Union is attacked, to create a radioac?tive death cloud that will surround the earth for 93 years...

...All those large dreams," wrote William Empson, "by which men long live well/Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell ."Nuclear conquest has been the largest of our dreams, and Kubrick's grave and unfettered allegory its magic lantern...

...Fluoride explains why Ripper sent a fleet of B-52s to bomb the Soviet Union, a motive he had earlier con?fessed obliquely: "I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Com?munist indoctrination, Communist sub?version, and the international Commu?nist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids...

...The rest of the crew are the eth?nic mix required in every warmovie since Shakespeare wrote Henry V. Pickens, having verified the order to attack, opens a combination safe, gets out his cowboy hat, and at once discovers a vein of pathetic and homely eloquence...

...3) never "explores the issues'' because it has already reached its conclu?sion, a lowdown so complete it can feel like indifference, a saturated skepticism in which the paltriest show of vanity, greed, or power-hunger seems on a par with the most atrocious crime...

...In the war room itself, the only bright thing is Dr...

...Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water...

...It sailed over their heads and under their feet...

...Never water...

...And not without good reason...

...They sit at a round table, under a circular band of light...

...This role, Major Kong (like Terry Southern a Texan to the bone), was transferred to Slim Pickens when Sellers injured himself on the fuselage set, and I doubt that anyone has ever regretted the change...

...It no longer is and no longer cares what we call it...

...The B-52 theme, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," is a song about a tat?tered soldier who does return??a hint that confirms Major Kong's vision of the folks back home "when this thing's over with...

...He is a father as well as a neighbor to his men...

...At the last word, the inadvertent Turgidson puts his hand to his mouth, and the look on his face then is almost an emblem, Ambiva?lence Beginning to Know Itself...

...The shot carries with it a mo?rality of art that Kubrick found equally suited to the men in the war room, the General guarding Ms potency with a gun-belt out of his golf bag, and the B-52 crew strapped into their miniature posts on their world-annihilating mission...

...Could a single plane ever penetrate Soviet airspace undetected...

...Luckily, I was in a posi?tion to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence...

...And I got a fair idea the kind of personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin...

...SATIRE of the Strangelove type (1) sees the world as divided between thugs and saps, and suspects the saps may also be thugs...

...It came to him, Ripper reflects, "during the physical act of love...

...Some way into the script, Kubrick realized the subject was too appalling for serious treatment and phoned Terry Southern...

...he asks his NATO liaison officer, Colonel Man?drake...

...I saw it in West Los Angeles, where the crowd was young...

...Meanwhile, back at the war room...

...A pro?found sense of fatigue, a feeling of emp?tiness followed...

...If this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and per?sonal citations when this thing's over with, and that goes for every last one of you regardless of your race, color, or your creed...

...As he talks and, oc?casionally, listens, a huddle of America's elite project a future for the human race...

...One of the most startling and inventive stretches is the combat footage of the Army company sent to retake General Ripper's base...

...Strangelove now belongs to the Kubrick oeuvre, where its nearest rela?tive is his most recent film, Full Metal Jacket...

...On hearing the news, the prudent remnant in the war room are aghast??all except Strangelove, who reaches for his slide rule...

...His early film, Killer's Kiss, had an adventurous shot of a fugi?tive clambering up a fire escape and rac?ing across the flats of a New York rooftop...

...Kubrick photographed Sterling Hay-den's opening monologue as Ripper at a sheer monumental angle, from under his granite jaw: a camera setup unmistak?ably fascist, which the film never out?wardly mocks...

...The H-bombs are being dropped by a compulsive practitioner of coitus interruptus, for whom this will be the first completed act in many years...

...The gentle British Colonel is nonplussed...

...Into that mouth will pass many sticks of gum, for Buck Turgidson has the oafish gusto of the natu?ral-born gum chewer...

...Hell ye...

...It stops on the near edge of the roof, and registers the crazy weavings as he grows smaller in the distance, then larger??as if to say, "Here is the horizon on which this creature will live and die...

...In retrospect, Scott's seems the central performance of the film??as exhilarat?ing as Hayden's, and the necessary anchor for Peter Sellers as Mandrake, as the Pres?ident, and as Dr...

...Strangelove was made in black and white, a tonality that suits its documen?tary narration and its visual style of bureaucratized sublimity...

...Strangelove are characters from an iron-age saga, oddly misplaced...

...Let Buck Turgidson answer...

...The result was a grim holiday, a fable so pure it casts no light, a paean from the ditch of "acceptable casu?alties" without a shadow of hope to soft?en its gaiety...

...Strangelove, whose heroes are slated to bomb "the missile complex at Laputa," bears something of the same relation to our age, an age of the instant conversion of thought, whim or delusion into acts of binding force...

...Scott's au?tomatic strut and valor, his slapping his hard belly as he runs through the options at first notice of emergency, his inside dopester's hunch as he cups the phone to be sure the Soviet Prime Minister on the hotline will not hear his breathing??in every one of his postures his mouth is sure to be open, to advise, to confide, to exhort, to mollify...

...here is his pre?dicament...

...Tell you somethin' else...

...The lunatic dialogue of Mandrake and Ripper and the subdued chatter of the war room are intercut with the jarring images, and always in the background is the bill-board with the motto: "Peace is Our Pro?fession...

...Strangelove was shot on three sets at Shepperton Stu?dios, and, as Southern recalls in a mem?oir in a recent issue of Grand Street, he and Kubrick together reworked the scenes for each day's shooting in the limousine rides from London...

...The greater part of it turns out to be literally black...

...Heck, I reck?on you wouldn't even be human beeans if you didn't have some pretty strong per?sonal feelings about macular combat...

...Strangelove, and he wears tinted glasses...

...General Ripper's office is dark at midday, the blinds shut tight, the desk lamp shattered by bullets from outside, the ceiling lights doused for security...

...I mean you just can't ex?pect a bunch of ignorant peons to under?stand a machine like some of our boys...

...Satire, sometimes, is epic grown too small for its britches, and the little guy heroes of Dr...

...Since then, "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence...

...Strangelove was 30 years old, and to mark the anniversary Kubrick released the print now making the rounds of American cities...

...The pilot of the B-52 whose adventures we follow will exhibit maximum indi?vidual initiative in repairing his frozen bomb-bay doors with hands-on electrical work...

...His calculations are jerked to fitful stops by a spastic arm that strays down his wheelchair, pivoting it at weird angles, or that smashes his chin with uppercuts...