Dr Strangelove - A Scene for Analysis (Mandrake and Ripper)

The plotting, dialogue, and performances in Dr. Strangelove are so extraordinary that we may overlook other aspects of filmmaking. Note how camera angles, lighting, pictorial composition, soundtrack and quality, and cuts control our response to this crucial scene.

Dr. Strangelove - An Astonishingly Good Idea

Dr. Strangelove - The Doomsday Machine

"The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret. Vhy didn't you tell ze Vorld, eh??!"

Dr. Strangelove - The President Calls the Soviet Premier

This 4-minute sequence is, deservedly, one of the most celebrated scenes in American film.

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and LOVE the Bomb!

From the Wikipedia article on the film: Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident, building on the widespread Cold War fear for survival. While doing in-depth research for the planned film, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and unstable "Balance of terror" existing between nuclear powers and its intrinsically paradoxical character. At Kubrick's request, Alistair Buchan (the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies), recommended the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George. Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an article written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The Observer, and immediately bought the film rights. Kubrick, in collaboration with George, started work on writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn. In following the tone of the book, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious drama. However, as he later explained during interviews, the comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction became apparent as he was writing the first draft of the film's script. Kubrick stated: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question. After deciding to turn the film into a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian (1959), which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers. Sellers is also sometimes considered an uncredited co-writer, as he changed many lines by way of improvisation.




The end of the film shows Dr. Strangelove exclaiming "Mein Führer, I can walk!" before cutting to footage of nuclear explosions, but it was originally intended that the film would end with everyone in the War Room involved in a pie fight, and this scene was filmed.
Accounts vary as to why the pie fight was cut. In a 1969 interview, Kubrick said: "I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Alexander Walker observed that "the cream pies were flying around so thickly that people lost definition, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at." Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern, suggests that the fight was intended to be less jovial. "Since they were laughing, it was unusable, because instead of having that totally black, which would have been amazing, like, this blizzard, which in a sense is metaphorical for all of the missiles that are coming, as well, you just have these guys having a good old time. So, as Kubrick later said, 'it was a disaster of Homeric proportions.'"
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Dr. Strangelove takes passing shots at numerous Cold War attitudes, such as the "missile gap", but it primarily focuses its satire on the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), in which each side is supposed to be deterred by the fact that a nuclear war would be a cataclysmic disaster for both sides, regardless of who "won". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War used the concept of a doomsday machine in order to mock mutually assured destruction; in effect, Kahn argued, both sides already had a sort of doomsday machine. Kahn, a leading critic of American strategy during the 1950s, urged Americans to plan for a limited nuclear war, and later became one of the architects of the MAD doctrine in the 1960s. The prevailing thinking that a nuclear war was inherently unwinnable and suicide was illogical to the physicist turned strategist. Kahn came off as cold and calculating; for instance, in his works, he estimated how many human lives the United States could lose and still rebuild economically. This attitude is reflected in Turgidson's remark to the president about the outcome of a pre-emptive nuclear war: "Now I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I am saying no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops!" Turgidson also has a binder which is labeled "World Targets in Megadeaths".
Many have compared the portrayals of Ripper and Turgidson to the fiery Air Force general, Curtis LeMay, and many of his direct subordinates who openly lobbied for war with the Soviet Union.
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Also see:

Dr. Strangelove fan site