Dr. Strangelove

In 2002, film magazine Sight & Sound published its top 10 poll, as it does once a decade. Split into two separate lists of critics’ and filmmakers’ choices, neither held much surprise: Citizen Kane topped both, The Godfather, 8½ and Vertigo were all present, and a Stanley Kubrick film appeared on each.

But while the over-analysing critics voted for Kubrick's ambiguous masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, the directors surprisingly picked his only straight-up comedy: the technically conventional but darkly hilarious Dr. Strangelove.

The two films are admittedly similar in their basic premise – man's ingenious creations ironically lead to catastrophe – but to near-obsessive fans of the filmmaker, Dr. Strangelove never fully feels like a Kubrick movie.

Lacking his distinctly epic approach, the story – a crazed general orders a B-52 bomber to start a nuclear war, while world leaders try desperately to avert disaster – is incongruously small in its scale, set primarily within three cramped locations: an army base, the inside of a bomber and the much-remembered war room. But its selection by the filmmakers – the people who make movies, remember – does offer a strong case for the timeless maxim that all one needs is a great script.

And what a script it is: penned by Kubrick and beat generation writer Terry Southern. The duo were so struck by the comedic possibilities inherent in nuclear disaster that they felt it had to be a comedy. And really, why not? They say that humour is the best way to deliver a harrowing message, and Dr. Strangelove is the ideal definition of a “black comedy”: a political satire so absurdly dark in its true-to-life balance of terror between nuclear powers that one can't help but laugh.

Taking the basic idea that funny people are never as funny as serious people being idiots, the film is anthropological satire at its finest, putting its world leaders and military men in bizarre situations that question how a relatively normal person would react when faced with possibility of nuclear holocaust. In one classic scene, the American president nervously attempts to break the news over the phone that he's “accidentally” about to blow his Russian counterpart's country to oblivion.

And while there's no argument that Kubrick was the devilishly funny puppet-master behind this radioactive riot-fest, it helped, of course, that he had a cast with names like Peter Sellers and George C. Scott.

Sellers is often praised for his three madcap roles, but it's Scott who gets the largest laughs, his horny General Buck Turgidson so over-the-top in his ultra-conservative ideals, that his inflated antics easily steal the show.

Next year, Sight & Sound will once again conduct its top 10 poll, and while Kubrick's sci-fi epic is slowly losing lustre amongst critical circles, Dr. Strangelove's inclusion is all but guaranteed. Because in our dire days of air-strikes, radiation scares and Sarah Palin, we could all do with a good laugh.

Originally published in South China Morning Post, April 10 2011