Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove provided a blackly comic counterpoint to another nuclear war film, Fail-Safe. Time has been kind to both…
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” bellows President Merkin Muffley, one of several characters played by Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove (or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb). It’s a line that has cascaded through generations as an iconic moment in cinema history.
Dr Strangelove, released in 1964, was the film in which Stanley Kubrick came of age, cinematically. The difficult experience of Spartacus led to far greater control on his 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, which starred James Mason (and Sellers, again playing multiple roles), to the point Kubrick decamped to make the film in the United Kingdom in order to gain the financing he needed, a country he would soon make his home.
Kubrick still ended up feeling some dissatisfaction with Lolita, come the end of the experience, despite working well with Nabokov, and Mason giving a compelling performance as the tragic (and highly problematic) Humbert Humbert, which meant Dr. Strangelove served as a statement of intent, whether Kubrick knew it or not. Once he came across Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, on which Dr Strangelove was based, he summarily became obsessed once more with war, albeit a different kind from the one he’d explored in Paths Of Glory.
As he once told biographer Gene D Phillips, “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 more fully, one had to keep leaving things out 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.”
Red Alert told the sobering story of a psychotic American general who orders a B-52 bomber troop to launch a nuclear attack across the Russian border, confronting the livid reality of the threat of nuclear conflict driving the so-called ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ of the superpowers.
Kubrick had been rattled by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the United States and Soviet Union had come to outright conflict at that point in the Cold War. He equally saw gallows humour in the idea that a crazed American officer, might trigger the end of civilisation, something so absurd that Red Alert could only be framed as a dark, farcical satire. It was far removed from what George envisaged in his novel, which was a more sober affair. Kubrick described his worries in a 1968 Playboy interview: “Can you imagine what might have happened at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis if some deranged waiter had slipped LSD into [John F] Kennedy’s coffee—or, on the other side of the fence, into [Nikita] Khrushchev’s vodka? The possibilities are chilling.”
A significant detail in Dr Strangelove ends up altered to fit Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern’s darkly comedic approach to nuclear Armageddon, not least the title character himself, one of the other players whom Sellers portrays – a Nazi scientist ported over at the end of the Second World War (as indeed many were) who, come the end, frantically attempts to conceal his robotic arm saluting the Fuhrer. Strangelove typifies the eccentric way Kubrick chose to deal with the end of the world.
Read more: Spartacus | Stanley Kubrick and the wrong Mann
What became apparent during development of the film was, in time-honoured Hollywood fashion, a rival picture was being produced along extremely similar narrative lines. Fail-Safe was a 1962 novel written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, both of them scholars and political scientists, in which a technical malfunction leads an American bomber carrying nuclear warheads into Soviet territory and, eventually, past a fail safe point where they can be recalled even by the President of the United States. What follows is a sobering account of a world on the brink of nuclear war should machinery operate in error.
Burdick and Wheeler’s novel was initially serialised in the Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis, appositely, and on publication turned out to be a sizeable hit, capitalising on the public’s deep anxiety given the near miss at the end of 1962. A movie adaptation soon went into production, with Sidney Lumet set as director and bolstered by an impressive cast, including Peter Fonda as the President and Walter Matthau as Professor Groeteschele, a political scientist who coldly and rationally argues that the devastating mistake is also an opportunity to destroy the Soviets and Communism. As an aside, he was modelled on hawkish military strategist Herman Kahn, as was Kubrick’s more outlandish Strangelove.
Here lay the issue: Fail-Safe and Dr Strangelove were swimming in almost identical waters. Both concerned a nuclear crisis involving a bomber not responding to commands. Both featured equivalents of ‘war rooms’. Both saw conversations between an American President and Soviet Chairman. The list goes on. Crucially, both end in disturbing fashion, with either the world destroyed or millions dead. The primary discernible difference, a quite radical one, was the tone. Kubrick chose to transform George’s Red Alert into a slice of morbid gallows humour. Lumet opted to adapt Burdick and Wheeler’s novel largely straight, delivering a picture conversely with almost no humour at all. Nevertheless, George began to attest that Burdick and Wheeler’s novel, released four years after his own, was a little too close to the scenario he had envisaged.
The result, inevitably, was a fairly public lawsuit. Kubrick’s strategy was simple (and devious) – tie Burdick and Wheeler up in litigation, on behalf of George, long enough to stall the making of Lumet’s film so he could get Dr Strangelove over the line first. A cunning strategy but one that ultimately failed, with Kubrick unable to gain an injunction against the adaptation of Fail-Safe. In many ways, this legal failure helped spawn the success of Dr Strangelove itself, as Kubrick pivoted away from the more straight version of Red Alert he originally envisaged into the satire described above. Had he prevented or delayed Fail-Safe happening, his examination of Cold War politics might have looked markedly different.
Read more: Stanley Kubrick | Exploring his earlier, lesser-known work
In a curious twist of fate, Columbia Pictures picked up both Dr Strangelove and Fail-Safe, produced as they were simultaneously, for distribution. Kubrick won the day as Columbia opted to release his picture first, in January of 1964, with Fail-Safe arriving in the October of that year. While Dr Strangelove arguably would have resonated down the years if it had followed Fail-Safe, the same cannot be said for Lumet’s film. In the wake of Kubrick’s blackly comic approach to the idea (so much so Kubrick almost ended the film with a custard pie fight in the War Room, which he filmed but didn’t use), Fail-Safe’s solemn depiction of a nation embroiled in the worst of all Cold War scenarios failed to resonate with audiences and, despite critical acclaim, it floundered at the box office.
Perhaps audiences felt that Dr Strangelove’s satire, watching Slim Pickens (blissfully unaware he was making a comedy) saddle up and ride the bomb to oblivion, was the more palatable approach to such an existential threat. Lumet certainly believed that Columbia releasing the film later contributed to its failure, swamped as it was by Dr Strangelove, a film that failed to carry Fail-Safe in its slipstream. Tragically, Peter George took his own life two years after Dr Strangelove was released, having battled depression and alcoholism. It followed the release of a subsequent novel concerning nuclear conflict that was less well-received.
Kubrick moved on to more expansive pastures with 2001: A Space Odyssey. In part due to a Criterion release, Fail-Safe has gained increased traction in recent years among audiences; the threat of a nuclear conflict is more potent now than it has been for decades. Viewers are perhaps more ready than ever for the stark warning Lumet’s film provides.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here. Next year, he releases An Overlook of Madness, a book about Kubrick and the making of The Shining.
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