THE FIRST TAKE CLUB
Classic movies, seen for the very first time
RUFUS JONES, HOME WRITER AND STAR, FILLS IN A MISSING CINEMATIC BLANK: DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
“HELLO, DIMITRI.” PETER Sellerses. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room.” Nazi-arm. Bomb-rider. I have survived 40 years on Earth and half of that in comedy knowing precisely this much about Dr. Strangelove. For no good reason whatsoever, you decide that it’s too late to catch up and enter into a clandestine conspiracy of fucking ignorance with yourself: “I would watch Dr. Strangelove, but Cocktail’s on ITV2 again and I really should get under the bonnet of that Cruise-bryan Brown dynamic.”
If anything had put me off Dr. Strangelove, it was its reputation as a satire. As we know, satire tends to age like a fine milk. It’s not really a satire, though. It’s more in the tradition of your classical Armageddon Procedural Existential Conspiracist Sex Comedy.
Dr. Strangelove, as I finally now know, is a determinedly odd film. So odd that its most famous line is unrepresentative of its oddness. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d crack open the Glenmorangie and take the week off if I wrote that. But it is a line that is extremely happy with itself. Dare I say it, a little SATIRICAL. A little prim and neat. And Dr. Strangelove is not a prim and neat film. It is a film that is dancing wildly on a street corner waving its penis at passing traffic. It is brilliant.
For a film that has three extraordinary arias by Peter
Sellers, I was astonished to find
I left the film humming George
C. Scott. Bug-eyed and intense in a way that reminded me of Christopher Lloyd, his performance is a pure distillation of the film’s disciplined mania.
And like so many Peter Sellers movies, Sellers does something I’ve never seen before. Yes, he plays three parts, but what Sellers does is play three parts with increasing and consecutive ambition. Group Captain Mandrake is a refugee from a more naive war film, that stiff upper lip completely at odds with the cigar and gumchewing Yankee gobs surrounding him.
But while Mandrake is the old order, his President Merkin Muffley is utterly contemporary. Sellers leaps out of a Morris Minor and into the Cadillac of modern American acting, totally naturalistic and still. The Dimitri phone call instantly reminded me of Bob Newhart monologues from that period. It’s a sketch, uniquely American and perfectly carried off.
And then, of course, Strangelove himself, the most high concept and Goonish of them all. And yet it’s Mandrake that made me laugh most. Cowering during the shootout, his excuse, “The string in my leg’s gone,” is magnificently strange. It sounds to me both utterly Spike Milligan and utterly Chris Morris at the same time. And then you realise that’s because Sellers is the sweet spot of 20th-century British comedy. Both the apex of everything that had come, and the source of everything that was about to happen.
Christ, Kubrick dug a big actor. Each performance comes with a bloody great cocktail umbrella in it. His style is exquisitely composed shots with actors doing something exquisitely uncomposed in the middle of them. Kubrick loved to run rhinos through the Louvre, almost like he was jeapordising his own perfectionism through a kinky act of self-sabotage.
And talking of kinky, there’s a lot of sex in Strangelove. Only one woman — the excellent Tracy Reed — but a lot of sex. The opening coitus of midair plane refuelling. Slim Pickens riding towards Russia on his doom-cock. And of course, Sterling Hayden as Jack D. Ripper unveiling his bodily fluids conspiracy to Sellers, in a scene geysering with homoeroticism. Sex and apocalypse. Life and death. Kubrick knows what he’s doing.
Hayden talks through that theory with all the composure of the truly mad. And it was this moment for me where
Dr. Strangelove hyperdrived into the present day. Became not a satire of Then, but of Now. Commie Fluoride In The Water. Anti-vaxxers. Wuhan 5G. That voice hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s got louder. And it reminded me of another iconic voice of cinema — Hal 9000. Hayden is a HAL prototype. The voice that will kill us all, explaining very calmly what we do not understand.
HOME SEASONS 1 & 2 ARE ON ALL4 NOW. RUFUS JONES IS NEXT IN SILENT NIGHT