The 1964 Stanley Kubrick film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is in my all-time top-ten movie list — or maybe even my top-five, depending on the mood I’m in.
The film remains the funniest and most sophisticated satire ever produced by a Hollywood studio. And, “Dr. Strangelove” earned big bonus points for addressing/mocking the greatest fear of the populace at the time it was made — i.e. an Earth-destroying nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
It’s very hard to imagine today’s Columbia Pictures — or any other major studio — releasing a comedy about al Qaeda or the collapse of the global financial markets.
Anyhow, over the past five decades, I thought I had seen every production still connected with “Dr. Strangelove” but my pal Drew Taylor — of The Fairfield Weekly and the Media Wave video store in Fairfield — recently emailed me this rare color photo taken during the making of the black-and-white feature.
Director Stanley Kubrick is in the wheel chair occupied in the film by the diabolical Dr. Strangelove and Peter Sellers is standing in his guise as the crazed and heavily accented military strategist said to be based in part on Henry Kissinger (years before he joined forces with President Richard Nixon).
In this particular case, it is sadly true that they don’t make them like they used to.
Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room.
— One of the greatest lines in history