Dr. Strangelove: Cold War Comedy & 1964 USA

As always there are spoilers ahead!

 

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In 1958 the Peter George novel Red Alert was published about the dangers of nuclear war. A few years later when Stanley Kubrick was looking to make a (serious) film about the topic he was recommended the book.

 

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was the resulting film. The film takes aim at military strategy, rhetoric and the people involved to give us one of the most famous satires in cinema.

 

It would be quite easy to double the length of this episode, but we've tried to fit as much as we can into the hour with my two remarkable guests.

 

Mark Bould is a professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, Bristol. He has written/edited extensively about science fiction cinema.

 

Rodney F Hill is a Professor of Film at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University and has written extensively about film.

 

This is the article I mention by Eric Schlosser: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true

 

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:12 Source material

03:12 The threat of Lumet's Fail Safe

05:35 Herman Kahn, winnable nuclear war and the doomsday machine

08:25 Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun and Operation Paperclip

13:55 Nuclear policy and the Cold War

17:23 Doomsday comedy

25:51 Masculinity, techno-eroticism and bodily fluids

33:21 Peter Sellers

38:04 1960s satire boom

40:11 Production design of Ken Adam

41:25 Music

43:27 The changes to the film

46:32 Legacy

54:34 Recommendations

 

 

Recommendations: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Fail Safe (1964).

 

NEXT EPISODE!

Next episode we will be talking about First Men on the Moon (1964). The film is based on the HG Wells novel and features stop motion animation by Ray Harryhausen.

It is is available to stream and rent from Apple. The Just Watch website can give you a list of where the film is available in your region.