Dispatches from Another War

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

So said President Merkin Muffley to General Buck Turgidson and the Russian ambassador as they scuffled on the floor of the Pentagon War Room in Stanley Kubrick's blackly comic Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

I never tire of seeing this twisted apocalyptic film, this cautionary tale about the absurdity of war, and I jumped at the chance to see it again on the big screen at Seattle Center as part of a Kubrick retrospective.

This is one movie that leaves me not only laughing out loud in places, but giggling like a school girl in others. Peter Sellers' triple performance as Group Captain Mandrake, President Muffley (above, with the Russian ambassador), and the mysterious Dr. Strangelove (top) is among his best work on screen, but it's George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson who walks away with the big laughs. Scott (famous for his portrayal as Patton) is not widely known as a comic actor, but in Strangelove he's as funny (and some might argue, funnier) than Sellers.

Slim Pickens rounds out the cast as Major Kong, the bomber pilot on his way to drop nuclear weapons onto Russian targets, despite the best efforts of the Americans to call him back and the Russians to shoot him down.

"Well, boys," he tells his crew, "we got three engines out, we got more holes in us than a horse trader's mule, the radio is gone and we're leaking fuel and if we was flying any lower why we'd need sleigh bells on this thing... but we got one little budge on them Rooskies. At this height why they might harpoon us but they dang sure ain't gonna spot us on no radar screen!"