The authorities start planning the pre-emptive strikes against the enemy’s military capabilities, which might well be mobilised, because of their own meaningless and unprovoked attack.Īge has not withered that final queasy nightmare of the mushroom clouds, set to Vera Lynn’s hopeful We’ll Meet Again – underscoring how the certainties of the second world war ceased to hold their meaning in the nuclear age.In 1937 São Paulo, 12-year-old Hugo comes from Santa Catarina, his grandmother returning him to his mother Anna, who is now with Osmar, the state's most influential politician.
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(The recent TV version of The Man in the High Castle contained a scary homage, with the huge, dark, eerily uplit round table round which the postwar Nazis discuss their plans for a global nuclear strike.) And Strangelove does an efficient job of reminding us about the mentality of war – the “Pearl Harbor” thinking that the mad but nonetheless prescient Ripper knew would take hold once he had lit the fuse. Ken Adam’s spectacular design has governed everyone’s idea about how and where these decisions must surely be made – in Bond-villain-type stage sets. (Only when watching this film again this week did I sense that Sellers drew for inspiration here on his Goon Show comrade Spike Milligan.) Energised by this fascistic new idea, and its sexual opportunities, he then experiences an extraordinary personal miracle. He is Doktor Merkwürdigliebe, who has anglicised his name as Strangelove: the wheelchair user and strategic visionary who has a habit of addressing the president as “Mein Führer” and, as the nuclear immolation nears, starts discussing how an American master race might be bred down in a mineshaft while waiting for the post-strike radiation to clear. This was arguably Sellers’ finest hour on screen, with his bravura multi-personality performance, playing Mandrake and also the insidiously bland mandarin President Merkin Muffley, and, most egregiously of all, the ex-Nazi scientist inspired by the V-2 rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. Hayden regretted complying and the role of Jack D Ripper was his way of hitting back, just a little, at the red-scare bullies. The house un-American activities committee forced him to name names, with the FBI privately threatening that refusing would mean he would lose custody of his children in his ongoing divorce case. As an intelligence officer in the second world war, he had served with the Tito partisans and in 1946, in a spirit of martial gallantry and admiration for them, had briefly joined the Communist party. Hayden was well qualified for this satirical role. It’s supposed to be bizarre, yet the quiet fear in Sellers’s voice is very real. “Oh hell – are the Russians involved, sir?” breathes Mandrake. Somehow this is most acute when Peter Sellers, playing the stiff-upper-lipped RAF officer Lionel Mandrake is curtly informed by his crazy American commanding officer Brigadier General Jack Ripper ( Sterling Hayden) that the nuclear confrontation has begun – which is to say, Ripper has pre-emptively begun a war to prevent communists sapping America’s precious bodily fluids. But I can never watch it without a bowel-liquefaction of fear. Perhaps this film inoculated our minds with black comedy, absurdified and ironised the horror and made the unthinkable thinkable. Maybe it was Dr Strangelove that really did persuade us all to stop worrying about the bomb. Photograph: Columbia TriStar/Getty Images Absurdified horror … Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden.