My mum and dad went to see this film on one of their first dates at the Kilburn Classic Cinema. The bomb didn’t get them, although the fear was very real back then. I suspect they came out laughing at Peter Sellers, rather than being gripped by paranoia. Not something my dad suffered from excessively. Sellers’ Group Captain Lionel Mandrake is a delicious comic construction, every inflexion spot on, eyebrows raised at the perfect moment as he grapples with Sterling Hayden’s unhinged General Ripper. In truth, the film is highly theatrical, switching between three locations, the airforce base, the war room and the plane that will drop the bomb. It feels more like comic strip agit-prop than a serious critique of nuclear policy, (see The War Game), glued together with some beautiful shots of B52 bombers flying over Siberia. It’s a long way from Kubrick’s later heavyweight filmmaking, but the combination of humour and fear is always engaging.
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