Stanley Kubrick - Deserving of Worship

Thursday, 17 March 2016

Criterion Collection Blu Ray - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Stanley Kubrick's painfully funny take on Cold War anxiety is without a doubt one of the fiercest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood. The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles: Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general (Sterling Hayden); the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded President Merkin Muffley, who must deliver the very bad news to the Soviet premier; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound presidential adviser with a Nazi past. Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a genuinely subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist.

Special Features:

Restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack
New interviews with Stanley Kubrick scholars Mick Broderick and Rodney Hill; archivist Richard Daniels; cinematographer and camera innovator Joe Dunton; camera operator Kelvin Pike; and David George, son of Peter George, on whose novel Red Alert the film is based
Excerpts from a 1965 audio interview with Kubrick, conducted by Jeremy Bernstein
Four short documentaries from 2000, about the making of the film, the sociopolitical climate of the period, the work of actor Peter Sellers, and the artistry of Kubrick
Interviews from 1963 with Sellers and actor George C. Scott
Excerpt from a 1980 interview with Sellers from NBC's Today show
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by scholar David Bromwich and a 1962 article by screenwriter Terry Southern on the making of the film