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Red Alert
First Published: 1958
191 pages
 About the Book
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About Dr Strangelove the Movie
"Nightmare comedy" -- that is how director Stanley Kubrick described his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, based on Peter George´s Red Alert. George collaborated on the film´s screenplay with Kubrick and, later, the iconoclastic American satirist Terry Southern, and it was Kubrick´s intention to tell a serious story about the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. The surreal satirical nature of the film he made happened almost by accident, when Kubrick and his then-producing partner James Harris began imagining what it would be like in the President´s War Room if everyone ordered out for pizza.
Kubrick´s eventual decision to take this madcap approach probably sharpened the point of George´s cautionary story by putting it in an entirely different context. Even the film´s title made fun at the earnestness of the Establishment. All of the characters were extensively reworked, no doubt filtered through Terry Southern´s wildly irreverent viewpoint. Gen. Quentin became Gen. Jack D. Ripper, for example, a man no longer terminally ill but a psychotic right-wing extremist obsessed primarily with the idea that Communists must be annihilated because they were poisoning Americans´ "vital bodily fluids" by fluoridating the water. Arguments have persisted over who brought which elements to the film, but the controlling vision was always Kubrick´s, aided by production designer Ken Adam and a brilliant cast. Peter Sellers delivers a tour-de-force performance in three roles -- as the American President, as a British RAF group captain who becomes Ripper´s hostage, and as Dr. Strangelove (who does not appear in Red Alert), an ex-Nazi scientist now advising for the Americans.
The cast includes Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull and James Earl Jones. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb began shooting in the U.K. in January 1963 and was briefly released in the U.S. in December of that year, only to be withdrawn amid the atmosphere that existed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The film returned to theaters on January 30, 1964, drawing mixed reviews but solid box office results. Ironically, the film version of Fail Safe, a serious Cold War thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, was also released in 1964 by Columbia Pictures, which released Kubrick´s film. At the end of the year, Kubrick was named the year´s Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle, and Dr. Strangelove was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture. The British Film Academy named it the year´s Best Film and winner of its United Nations Award, for exemplifying the principles of the U.N. -- a gesture that must have Meant something to the peace-loving Peter George.
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