Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Peter Sellers plays three separate roles in Stanley Kubrick’s mordant Cold War comedy in which insanity and political manoeuvrings lead to nuclear meltdown.

  • Director

    Stanley Kubrick

  • With

    Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden

  • UK-USA 1963. 95min

  • Digital 4K

  • Certificate

    PG

Stanley Kubrick originally intended a straight adaptation of Peter George’s novel Red Alert, a chilling thriller about a paranoid American general initiating a nuclear bombing mission over the USSR. But he saw the absurdity behind the retaliatory strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and decided to film it as a comedy.

In an acting tour de force, Sellers plays the British officer attempting to apprehend the psychotic general (Sterling Hayden), the US President trying to smooth things over with his Soviet opposite number, and the eccentric Dr Strangelove, a German émigré scientist with an autonomous Nazi arm and wild ideas about the post-apocalyptic world.

Much of the action of Kubrick’s jet-black satirical masterpiece occurs within the cavernous War Room at the Pentagon, a space indelibly imagined by production designer Ken Adam. Though one of Kubrick’s early films, many of the topics raised still resonate with global issues of today, and the film is just as relevant a watch as it was on release 62 years ago.