Dr. Strangelove Review

The joke is procedural. Nobody in the film knows they are in a comedy, so the laughs come from institutions executing their protocols flawlessly toward extinction. Ken Adam's War Room, a black triangle with a lit ring of poker-table felt, is one of the great sets in cinema, and Gilbert Taylor shoots the Burpelson base assault in newsreel handheld so the film keeps switching registers without ever changing tone. Peter Sellers takes three roles and underplays all of them, most brilliantly as Mandrake, a polite RAF officer trying to extract a launch code from a lunatic while remaining terribly sorry to intrude.

George C. Scott, coaxed into broad takes he thought were rehearsals, ends up giving the most physically comic performance of his career. Sterling Hayden's Ripper delivers paranoia about bodily fluids with total conviction. What keeps it just short of the top tier is a middle stretch aboard the bomber that runs on procedure alone, though Slim Pickens rides that ending straight into iconography.