So he stopped leaving out “things which were either absurd or paradoxical.” In the movie, the planes can be recalled only with special codes that the mad general will not release; the Doomsday Machine cannot be stopped once it is triggered. And so on. Each element makes some sort of sense in itself as strategy, but, in the aggregate, they produce an insane system of interlocking absolutes. Kubrick’s purpose, of course, was to reduce and humiliate the Strangelovian planners like Kahn and their military bullyboys. George C. Scott’s General Turgidson is an example of delusional paranoia—not at all stupid, but contemptuous, insanely competitive, and physically frat-boy-ish, his neck jerked off the vertical, arms snapping like semaphores. When his bikini-babe mistress calls him in a tense moment in the Pentagon war room, he says into the phone, with indignation, “Of course it isn’t only physical. I deeply respect you as a human being.”

Some of the wilder riffs may have been provided by Terry Southern, the profane literary bad boy (the author of “The Magic Christian” and, with Mason Hoffenberg, the porno-spoof “Candy”). As the script was nearing completion, Kubrick, at the recommendation of Peter Sellers, called in Southern, who, in a pressured six weeks, kept up with the director’s manic energy by consuming the amphetamine “diet pill” Dexamyl; sometimes the two men worked together in the back of an old Bentley as Kubrick was driving to the studio. On the set, Kubrick allowed Sellers to improvise in rehearsals, and then Kubrick would take the best of Sellers’s improvisations, write them into the script, and shoot them. The finished script, submitted to the ineffable judgment of the M.P.A.A.’s Production Code Administration, met with a reception only slightly less bizarre than some of the satirical riffs in the movie itself. Geoffrey Shurlock, who administered the code, complained of the use of “hell” and “damn” and warned against a too-revealing bikini worn by General Turgidson’s mistress; he also objected to the inclusion of prophylactics among the gear given to the B-52 crew. This in a film about annihilation! Shurlock’s difficulties (most of which Kubrick ignored) suggest how many squares remained to be conquered by the movie.

Kubrick wanted to shoot in New York, but no sound stage was big enough for the Pentagon war room, where much of the film is set, so he went back to England, where he had shot his previous film, “Lolita” (he never really returned to the United States). Almost the entire film was shot at Shepperton Studios, outside London, where Ken Adam, the brilliant production designer on several of the Bond films, created the war room as a monster a hundred and thirty feet long, a hundred feet wide, and thirty-five feet high. In the center, the President and his advisers sit at an enormous circular table. Kubrick and Adam wanted to suggest a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse.

Kubrick was thirty-six when “Strangelove” came out. It was the last movie directed by the young Kubrick—the ace filmmaker who put emotions right on the surface and moved quickly through charged narratives. He was superseded by the “visionary” Kubrick, the artificer of slow-moving “sublime” movies like “2001,” “The Shining,” and “Barry Lyndon.” Many of us who loved the drive and the sardonic wit of such movies as “The Killing” (1956), “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Lolita” (1962), and “Strangelove” never loved the late films, with their glacial pacing and coldly sarcastic tableaux, in the same way.

“Strangelove” is an enraging struggle between reason and madness, between three-dimensional characters and men devoted, in the old usage, to “humors”—a fixed obsession that limits their responses, a comic device that goes back to Ben Jonson’s plays, or earlier. The camera lodges beneath Sterling Hayden’s chin—his Ripper has the certainty of megalomania, with a clenched cigar pointing skyward like an artillery piece. By contrast, the super-rational President (in a devastating parody of the blandly suave Democratic Party hero Adlai Stevenson) is shot in a level stare, and so is Lionel Mandrake (Sellers again), the R.A.F. officer attached to General Ripper, who speaks with stern British probity and gets nowhere with his boss. The movie is a kind of awed testimonial to the power of madness and an expression of contempt for sweet reason, which comes off as hapless.

There are actually some standard heroes in the movie: the crew of the B-52, who fly over the frozen north and head toward a Soviet target. As in an old Second World War adventure picture, like “Air Force” or “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” the bomber crew is ethnically mixed—in this case, a Texan, a black man, a Jew, and so on. They are about to blow up the world, yet they go through the professional routines of any other bomber crew; the discrepancy between their competence and what’s at stake is excruciating. It’s part of the fiendish malice of the movie that we find ourselves, with a queasy stomach, rooting for the men to complete their mission. Such is the power of movie narrative! Our boys! Doing their job, sacrificing themselves, gamely steering the plane in the right direction even after it’s been partially incapacitated by a Soviet missile. In effect, we wind up satirizing ourselves. Slim Pickens, as the pilot, achieved immortality by riding an H-bomb as it fell, yahooing and whipping his cowboy hat back and forth like a rodeo champion.

Most of the reviews were good, though Bosley Crowther, in the Times, found much that was “grave and dangerous.” Crowther went on, “I am troubled by the feeling, which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical Commander in Chief.” Crowther found the ending “malefic.” Crowther’s philistinism was notorious, but there were far better writers who were also disturbed by “Strangelove.” Pauline Kael wrote that “ ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was clearly intended as a cautionary movie: it meant to jolt us awake to the dangers of the bomb by showing us the insanity of the course we were pursuing. But artists’ warnings about war and the dangers of total annihilation never tell us how we are supposed to regain control, and ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity.” In the same vein, Susan Sontag asserted that, in future decades, “the display of negative thinking” in the movie would seem “facile.” And Sontag wrote that “Dr. Strangelove is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.”

I find both of these sets of remarks strange. Why should a popular artist have any obligation to propose “sane” solutions to an intolerable situation? Surely it’s enough to expose with overwhelming comic energy the contradictions and paradoxes of “mutual assured destruction.” Sane actions are the business of scientists, the military, and Presidents, a few of whom may have been roused to act by this movie. (When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he wanted to see the war room. This gives one pause. But, later, working with Mikhail Gorbachev, he brought about a partial reduction of nuclear weapons by both sides.) And Sontag’s distaste for “Strangelove” feels off. It’s actually a “cheerful film,” she says. Well, yes, that’s the point of the joke. The movie teases the many Americans acquiescing in a mad logic. At the end, Strangelove leaping out of his chair, and General Turgidson warning of a “mine-shaft gap” with the Soviet Union, are continuing their assertion of high acumen. For them, the game of “strategy” just continues. Sontag wanted a serious film, but I don’t see how anyone could miss, under all the buffoonery and juvenile joking, a furious sense of outrage.

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Read Eric Schlosser on the surprising accuracy of “Dr. Strangelove” and his deconstruction of several clips from the movie.