Peter Sellers played three roles in Dr. Strangelove: those of the President, a mad German scientist named after whom the title is named, and Captain Lionel Mandrake. Sellers had been cast to play four roles actually, but he had trouble developing the proper accent for T.J. “King” Kong. The role was later given to Slim Pickens instead.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a Stanley Kubrick directed, classic black anti-war comedy. It laughs sardonically at the ineptness of our government and military. Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay, originally intended for the film to be serious and to follow the novel Red Alert by Peter George III. However, as he wrote the scenes, they all turned out to be black humor. He then switched the tenor of the film from drama to satire. It says something about the seriousness of the topic that it is so terrifying that it can only be dealt with by laughing at it and at us.

Sterling Hayden’s character, Colonel Jack D. Ripper, is obsessed with the commies’ plan to steal our “precious bodily fluids”; this leads him to single-handedly start into motion “Plan R,” a plan in which the bombers which are in flight are ordered to engage nuclear war on Russia. As President Merkin Muffley consults with his trusted advisors in an attempt to call back Plan R, Slim Pickens and his flight crew which includes a young James Earl Jones head towards Russia with every intention of fulfilling their mission. Meantime, the President learns that the Russians have a doomsday device.

One of the best characters in the film is George C. Scott (wise old sage)’s gum-chewing militarist General “Buck” Turgidson.

Related Links:

• Unofficial page with images, sounds, quotes and links
• Part of Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide
• Review by Tim Dirks
• Dr. Strangelove - Farzad's Page
• Information
• Images/Sounds
• Essay on Dr. Strangelove by Jeremy Boxen
• Screen sizes chosen by Kubrick
• Dr. Strangelove - Kubrick on the Web
• Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick: Master Filmmaker
• Movie poster

Trivia about Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

• Based on the novel “Red Alert,” by Peter George, and originally conceived as a tense thriller about the possibility of accidental nuclear war. Director Stanley Kubrick was working on the script when he realized that many scenes he had written were actually quite funny.
• In the novel by Peter George the two H-bombs are named Hi There! and Lolita. Two years earlier, Kubrick directed Lolita (1962)! The graffiti on the second bomb is “Dear John” in the movie.
• Peter Sellers based Dr. Strangelove's strangled accent on the voice of Weegee, the famous German-born crime photographer of the 1950's whose name was given by New York police due to his uncanny ability to show up at murder scenes before they did. Sellers heard Weegee talking during an on-set visit and adopted his strange German accent for the title character.
• Sellers was cast in four roles, but experienced problems when trying to develop a Texas accent for Major T. J. King Kong. After sending Kubrick a letter informing him he would be unable to play the part under any circumstances, he “fortunately” broke his leg while exiting his car. Despite doubts over the legitimacy of the injury, Kubrick was forced by the production's insurance company to find another actor. Convinced that nobody could have acted the part as well as Sellers, Kubrick decided to cast someone who naturally fit the role. Remembering his work on the western One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Kubrick cast Slim Pickens as Kong, the gung-ho hick pilot determined to drop his bombs at any cost. Pickens was never shown the script nor told it was a black comedy; ordered by Kubrick to play it straight, he played the role as if it were a serious drama - with amusing results.
• Major Kong's comment about the survival kit, “A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff,” originally referred to Dallas instead of Las Vegas, but was dubbed over after President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.
• Major Kong's plane's primary target is an ICBM complex at “Laputa.” In Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel “Gulliver's Travels,” Laputa is a place inhabited by caricatures of scientific researchers.
• The photographic mural in General Ripper's office, presumably showing an aerial view of Burpelson AFB, is actually a view of Heathrow Airport, London.
• Kubrick intended the film to end with a custard pie fight between the Russians and the Americans in the War Room (which is why we see a big table of food there). The footage was shot, but he decided not to use it because he considered it too farcical to fit in with the satirical nature of the rest of the film.
• Another reason for cutting the custard pie fight at the end of the film was that at one point, President Muffley took a pie in the face and fell down, prompting Gen. Turgidson to cry, “Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has just been struck down in his prime!” Kubrick had already decided to cut the pie fight before the Kennedy assassination, but this line (or possibly even the whole sequence) would certainly have been cut due to its eerie similarity to real events.
• General Turgidson (George C. Scott) was not scripted to fall over in the war room when he gets excited, but when it happened, Kubrick decided it was in character, and left it in.
• When Strangelove is talking about the doomsday device, Turgidson says, “Strangelove. What is that, German?” The reply he receives is, “He changed his name; it was originally Merkwurdigliebe,” which is German for Strangelove.
• This was George C. Scott's personal favorite of all his performances.
• Continuity: Burpelson Air Force Base is in daylight throughout the incident, and yet in Washington DC it is 3 A.M.
• Crew or equipment visible: The shadow of the B-17 from which the (model) B-52's were filmed.
• Factual errors: After the bomber is 10 miles from the target, it takes almost 4 minutes to advance 3 miles more, giving an impossibly low speed of about 45 mph.
• The United States was engaged in a cold war and an arms race with the Soviet Union from 1946 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. By the 1960's, the period during which this movie is set, each country could destroy the other many times over with nuclear weapons. The military theory under which the U.S. armed forces were proceeding was called “deterrence” or Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
• One of the risks that haunted most people during this period was the possibility of accidental nuclear war caused by a mistake or a madman. This movie explores the latter possibility.
• Dr. Strangelove was made shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war. In the early 1960's the U.S. began a program to acquire enough long range nuclear delivery devices to give it a first strike capability and a four to one advantage over the Russians in nuclear missiles. (At the end of the build-up the U.S. had 1000 Minuteman Missiles. It had launched 32 Polaris submarines that could deliver 656 warheads. 600 B-52 bombers which could carry nuclear bombs were also in service.) The Soviet Union had only recently been humiliated in Berlin where it had failed in its effort to evict the Western Powers from their zones of occupation and where it was forced to build a wall to keep East Germans from fleeing to the West. The Soviets gambled that they could install intermediate range missiles in Cuba undetected and redress the imbalance in nuclear forces without the necessity of building many long-range delivery devices. The U.S. discovered this scheme before the missiles were operational and, in a tense week or so in which the whole country held its breath, forced the Soviets to dismantle the missiles and take them back to Russia.
• The Soviets, determined never to be caught short again, embarked on a massive nuclear arms build-up, and the arms race heated up again. It was in this climate that Dr. Strangelove was made.
• During the Cold War many people in the United States were obsessed with the menace of communism from within the United States. They often went to unjustified extremes in trying to persecute people with left wing political views who they considered communist sympathizers and, therefore, unpatriotic. General Ripper is a caricature of these people.
• The first long-range missiles were the German V-1 and V-2 rockets, which terrorized England during WW II. At the end of the war the United States and the Soviet Union competed to capture and keep the top German engineers. The engineers who had built the V-1s and V-2s became the backbone of the American space program for decades. The most famous of these engineers was Dr. Werner Von Braun (1912 - 1977). The character of Dr. Strangelove is a take off on these engineers. (See The Right Stuff for an exploration of how the seven original U.S. astronauts forced NASA, over the objections of the formerly German engineers, to install manual controls in the space capsules.)

Quotes from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

President Merkin Muffley: You can't fight in here—this is the War Room!

Major T. J. "King" Kong: Goldie, how many times have I told you guys that I don't want no horsing around on the airplane?

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.

General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.

General "Buck" Turgidson: That's right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so. And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.

General "Buck" Turgidson: I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up.

Turgidson advocates a further nuclear attack to prevent a Soviet response to Ripper's attack.

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

President Merkin Muffley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

General "Buck" Turgidson: Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel! Colonel, I must know what you think has been going on here!

Colonel "Bat" Guano: You wanna know what I think?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Yes!

Colonel "Bat" Guano: I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts. Now MOVE!!

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel... that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.

Colonel "Bat" Guano: That's private property.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine?! Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!!

Colonel "Bat" Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: What?!

Colonel "Bat" Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.

Cast overview, first billed only:

Peter Sellers ....  Capt. Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley/Dr. Strangelove

George C. Scott ....  General "Buck" Turgidson

Sterling Hayden ....  General Jack D. Ripper 

Keenan Wynn ....  Colonel "Bat" Guano 

Slim Pickens ....  Major T. J. "King" Kong 

Peter Bull  ....  Ambassador de Sadesky 

James Earl Jones ....  Lieutenant Lothar Zogg 

Tracy Reed  ....  Miss Scott 

Jack Creley ....  Mr. Staines 

Frank Berry ....  Lieutenant H. R. Dietrich 

Robert O'Neil  ....  Admiral Randolph 

Glenn Beck ....  Lieutenant W. D. Kivel 

Roy Stephens ....  Frank 

Shane Rimmer ....  Captain G. A. "Ace" Owens 

Hal Galili ....  Burpelson Defense Team Member 

This page created by Mr Zac