Where to watch Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is available to stream in ES on FILMIN. It can also be rented or bought from AppleTV and Amazon.
After a rogue military commander initiates a nuclear strike, politicians and military leaders scramble in a tense war room while an aircrew continues toward its target. This sharply comic crisis exposes the absurdity, paranoia, and dangerous human weaknesses behind decisions that could threaten the entire world.
Cast: George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull, James Earl Jones, Tracy Reed, Jack Creley, Frank Berry, Robert O'Neil, Glenn Beck
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Trivia & production notes
- Stanley Kubrick bought the film rights to Peter George's thriller novel Red Alert after it was recommended by an institute director and praised by game theorist Thomas Schelling.
- Kubrick originally planned to film Dr. Strangelove as a serious drama but decided to make it a black comedy after realizing how absurd and paradoxical the concept of mutual assured destruction had become as he wrote the screenplay.
- The film's title is a satirical reference to Dale Carnegie's self-help book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
- Terry Southern was brought in as a co-writer in late 1962 after Kubrick read his comic novel The Magic Christian, which Peter Sellers had given to Kubrick as a gift.
- Dr. Strangelove was filmed at Shepperton Studios near London because Peter Sellers was in the middle of a divorce and unable to leave England.
- The War Room set was an enormous concrete structure 130 feet long and 100 feet wide with a 35-foot-high ceiling, designed with a triangular shape based on Kubrick's belief that this geometry would be most resistant to explosions.
- The B-52 cockpit was reconstructed so accurately from comparisons with a B-29 and a single photograph that U.S. Air Force personnel said it was correct to the detail of the CRM black box, making Kubrick worry whether the research had been conducted legally.
- Kubrick filed a lawsuit against the competing film Fail Safe, arguing that its source novel had plagiarized Peter George's Red Alert, which led to a settlement where Columbia Pictures bought Fail Safe and agreed to release Dr. Strangelove first.
- The nuclear explosion footage at the end of Dr. Strangelove comes from actual atomic and hydrogen bomb tests including Operation Crossroads, Trinity, Operation Sandstone, Operation Redwing, and Operation Ivy.
- An originally planned ending featuring a pie fight in the War Room was removed from the final cut because Kubrick felt it was too farcical and inconsistent with the film's satiric tone.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Dr. Strangelove, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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