(9.21) Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see Stanley Kubrick’s epic 1964 satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” on the big screen. Four screenings are scheduled: 2pm and 7pm, Sunday and Wednesday.
This movie may not feel quite as hilarious today, what with a certain presidential candidate whining that we never get to use our nuclear arsenal anymore. (Bill Maher sort of joked recently on the tightening presidential race: “It’s like America’s watching Dr Strangelove and half are rooting for the bomb!”) But none of this is Stanley Kubrick’s fault and this film is easily one of the ten best movies of all time. The cast, the script, the everything.
But while the film is widely regarded as a satirical masterpiece, Slate’s Fred Kaplan — author of “Wizards of Armageddon” and writing for The New York Times — reveals how closely these scenarios hewed to reality. In “Truth Stranger Than Strangelove,” written on the occasion of the movie’s 50th anniversary, Kaplan notes that
. . . the film’s weird accuracy is evident in its very first scene, in which a deranged base commander, preposterously named Gen. Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), orders his wing of B-52 bombers — which are on routine airborne alert, circling a “fail-safe point” just outside the Soviet border — to attack their targets inside the U.S.S.R. with multimegaton bombs. Once the pilots receive the order, they can’t be diverted unless they receive a coded recall message. And only General Ripper has the code.
The remarkable thing is, the fail-safe system that General Ripper exploits was the real, top-secret fail-safe system at the time. According to declassified Strategic Air Command histories, 12 B-52’s — fully loaded with nuclear bombs — were kept on constant airborne alert. If they received a Go code, they went to war. This alert system, known as Chrome Dome, began in 1961. It ended in 1968, after a B-52 crashed in Greenland, spreading small amounts of radioactive fallout.
So this is my Go code — see this movie and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
2pm & 7pm, Sunday & Wednesday, September 18 & 21, Providence Place, (tickets)