Kevin's Watch

Have just recorded this acknowledged Kubrick classic, which, if I have seen at all, it was many years ago long before my ability to deal with any film more demanding than Mary Poppins (a story which in itself has many dark undertones and sub-currents immediately apparent to the initiated).

I am a great fan of 'Good Night and Good Luck' - George Clooney's [in my view] masterpiece detailing the conflict between Ed Murrow and McArthey during the period of the notorious witchhunts - and it was no more than a similarity of appearence in a clip I saw of Dr S with this film that made me want to record it. It appears however I may have stumbled upon a gem. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film the highest rating I think I have ever seen and Sellers, it appears, gave the performance of his life.

So I am much looking forward to watching the film, which I will do in about two weeks time in the company of two friends with whom I have a film night once every three weeks. In the mean time any points I should look out for, any background or indeed any observations at all from you guys on the film would be of great interest to me.

I love the film, I'm saying nothing else except it's the only thing I really love Sellers for [though I enjoy him in many things], the casting of Scott was freaking brilliant, and to recommend watch it, let it sit for a week or two, then watch it again.

Atomic Cafe seems a damn cool companion piece in its way...I'd never literally/directly connected the dots between them, but I think cuz of Hashi I've gonna watch them back to back sometime soon...I expect something lively/fascinating to happen from that..

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed.

Atomic Cafe? This is a new one on me. I'll go do some sniffing around and see if it can be 'got'. Thanks Hashi/guys for the post and the positive vibes re Dr S. The Cuban misile crisis has been well covered in a couple of serious films that bring home just how close the 'civilised' world came to meeting it's doom. I'm buzzing now to see Kubrick's dark comedic take on the lunacy that was MAD.

I dunno if other people will knock it, but there's another movie called "Failsafe" which has a pretty similar scenario but attempts a more serious tone. I figure Strangelove is closer to the truth even with its exaggerations of disaster through incompetence and a sort of carefree attitude held by many of the characters.

Atomic Cafe is also very good.

Colonel Mandrake is probably my favorite character in this film. "You said, 'Feed me Jack, feed me!' And I fed you."

Holsety wrote:I dunno if other people will knock it, but there's another movie called "Failsafe"

I quite liked it...
And I thought the ending very interesting considering when it was made.
Some decent acting, too.

Little known fact: Kubrick did not intend Strangelove to be a comedy, and the source material (the novel "Red Alert") was a straight hard boiled thriller, but while writing the script the overwhelming absurdity of the Cold War kept creating situations with inherent black humor. Kubrick realized this of course and went with it. And the rest as they say is history...

From wikipedia:

Stanley Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident, building on the widespread Cold War fear for survival.[20] While doing research, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and unstable "balance of terror" between nuclear powers. At Kubrick's request, Alastair Buchan (the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies), recommended the thriller novel Red Alert by Peter George.[21] Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an article written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The Observer,[22] and immediately bought the film rights.[23]

In collaboration with George, Kubrick started writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn.[24] In following the tone of the book, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious drama. But, as he later explained during interviews, he began to see comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction as he wrote the first draft. Kubrick said:

My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.

Prevert.

This is almost the ultimate expression of the idea that all comedy is grounded in the tragedy (or at least misfortune) of others - exept in this case there are no others. That the world should have been put at risk on the basis of this twited logic is shown to be ridiculous - in both senses of the word.

In my view, perhaps only "Life of Brian" is a social satire of equal hilarity and poignance.

I saw Dr. Strangelove back when I was young (not long after it came out). I admit, I was too young to fully grasp it at the time.

I really need to re-watch this...

Holsety wrote:I dunno if other people will knock it, but there's another movie called "Failsafe" which has a pretty similar scenario but attempts a more serious tone.

Thank you--I couldn't recall the name of that Henry Fonda/Walter Matthau movie (featuring one of Mr. Matthau's rare dramatic performances).

This is one of those rare movies which should never be remade.

one of my favorite scenes - I took film study in hs, this is one of the films we did.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8lVXQfPXRw

Gosh yes - Walter Matthau! How could I have forgotten him. Does anyone remember the classic scene in *The Fortune Cookie* where, having been engaged in trying to persuade Jack Lemmon into a scam to extract money for a non-existant football injury, he hands him a chinese fortune cookie to bolster his case. The cookies message is negative and with a withering look that is worth a thousand words he comes out with the contemptuously delivered immortal line " The Chinese - What do they know!"

(I must have tried 20 times to get that set of quotation marks down onto the next line - adding in spaces, removing letters etc. Well, if it wants to be there so badly then sod it, let it be there )

Ok - finally got to see the film and yes, it's clearly a masterpiece of the film-makers art. Kubric was always going to stir a lot of dust with this one and I would love to know more about it's reception [both critical and political] at the time of it's release. It must have been a dangerous thing at that time of hightened tension and cold-war mentallity to release a film that could in any way be seen as critical of the governments defence strategy and surely Kubric must have paid a price for this after the films release. One wonders how it affected [and surely it must have] his later career and relationship with the country he lived in.

Strangelove himself is clearly a reference to the relationship of the USA government with german rocket scientists post WW2 [and their subsequent input into the US space program] and one wonders that Kubric was prepared to rub the noses of the establishment in this grubby business so soon after the events themselves - brave man!

Has the film stood the test of time? Viewing this film at the time of it's release can only have been a very disconcerting and challenging experience, since it dealt with a situation that pertained in every bodys minds every day. I'm in my late fifties and even in the UK in the early sixties at 5,6,7 years old I knew that 'we had won the war', but we could all be killed at any time by 'atom bombs' as ws called them. I wasn't afraid of this, and neither was anyone else - we just knew it was the case and lived with it. Had I been an adult and seen this film at that time, well - I can only imagine the effect it could have had on me. So in that sense the film has lost some of it's power [and thankfully so - unless you start questioning where all those soviet, and now freelance, nuclear scientists have dissapeared to since the collapse of the USSR], MAD is now sane, and the absurdity of the situation {so wonderfully captured in the film's final scenes with talk of the 'mine gap'} is much reduced. We now have new villains to fear and the old bogey men seem less threatening. But you have to remember - on at least two occasions that we know of the fate of the world depended on the descision of just one man [different men in each case], and on both occasions the men decided,against orders, to draw back from the unleashing of nuclear weaponry that would have led to total anhilation. Twice, the world came that close....that close, to the end, and by just the type of situation that Kubric had envisaged - by accident! So yes - the film still has power and yes, the message of the film can still resonate in the world of half a century hence. What is that message? One redolent of meaning in todays market "War is far too imprtant a thing to be left to the generals. War is far too important a thing to be left to the politicians." Oh - and never try to shoot the lock off a Coke machine.

Hashi - this seems an appropriate place to ask you about your choice of avatar [isn't that what the 'picture' we all go under is called]. You will always be inextricably linked with this image for me [as no doubt I will with mine for you] - but there is a difference; mine is just a picture of a fictional charachter I liked [and would perhaps even have liked to be like], but I am nothing like in reality. Yours [and I may be wrong big time on this and if so forgive me] does actually seem to reflect [in it's best aspects I hasten to add] something of the 'way you are'. Your posts are precise and thought out and rarely descend[?] from the lofty heights of reason and analysis to the perhaps more mundane levels of feeling and emotion. I don't imagine your feelings ever preventing your thinking from following through it's chain of thought to its logical end point, even if that might be an uncomfortable place to be in. Dr Strangelove was not in all respects an admirable charachter - but no-one could claim that his pursuit of truth by the process of ratiocination was hampered by fear of where that logic might take him. {By all means ignore this post and no offence will be taken - a persons choice of avatar is their's alone to make and it quite possibly oversteps the limits of good taste to question it, but I guess you also know me a bit by now }