Reporting Back: Dr Strangelove

Last week my post about films I haven't seen got lots of you talking and sparked some interesting discussions both here and on Twitter. I am not particularly proud of the list, fun though it was to make, and I really do intend to check out as many of thise films as I can in the year ahead.

I started with Doctor Strangelove. The Cold War satire which received Oscar nominations for Stanley Kubrick as Best Director and Peter Sellers as Best Actor as well as for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

It was, I'll be honest with you, a bit of a disappointment. I like Kubrick. I like Sellers. I love Lolita in which they also worked together. And while I can imagine that Dr Strangelove may have had some genuine satirical clout when in was first released, slap bang in the middle of the Cold War itself, it lacked any real punch today. I would politely suggest that it hasn't aged well. It was, if anything, a bit tame.

I expected something more manic, something more agitated, something more, well, more funny. I didn't laugh once.

Please feel free to disagree with me below.

Comments

[DOT]

I think you forget the absolute paranoia that gripped America at the time. And the genuine fear everyone felt of a nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis had occurred only two years before the making of Dr. Strangelove and, as a fifteen-year old at the time, I remember being extremely frightened when we read the headlines of the standoff between the US and the USSR.

The fact is Kubrick had to make the film in England rather than the US because of the nature of its content. And it is a satirical work. I doubt an episode of Have I Got News For You would cause you much mirth fifty years from now, but nor would it be as historically significant.