Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb review – still a blast
Age has not withered the queasy nightmare of Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear holocaust satire, starring Peter Sellers at the peak of his powers
Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear holocaust suspense satire Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is now rereleased as part of the Kubrick retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank – a movie written by Kubrick with the journalist and counter-culture satirist Terry Southern, transforming the conventional thriller Red Alert by Welsh author Peter George.
Strangelove was released in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis, and 31 years before a real-life Strangelove scenario in 1995, when Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin came close to pressing the red button after a US meteorological rocket investigating the northern lights off Norway had been interpreted by the Russian military as a hostile gesture. A Kubrickian movie about that blood-chilling event is in order, although it has been discussed in Lucy Walker’s nuclear documentary Countdown to Zero.