Somewhere in the vaults of film history sits an ending in which the Cold War concludes with a custard-pie fight. Stanley Kubrick shot it: the entire War Room of Dr. Strangelove, generals and diplomats in their dark suits under Ken Adam's great ring of light, hurling pies from a banquet table until the floor is a swamp of cream. President Muffley takes one in the face, and General Turgidson cries out that "our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime". Kubrick cut the whole sequence — he later said the pie fight had turned his characters into clowns in a way the film could not survive, that it was farce of the wrong flavour. But timing sharpened the decision into necessity: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963, weeks before the film was to open, and a joke about a president struck down was suddenly unthinkable. The premiere was pushed to late January 1964, and one more Dallas reference was scrubbed — Slim Pickens's line that a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with the survival-kit contents was redubbed so that the good weekend happened in Vegas instead.
The film had begun as a perfectly serious thriller. Kubrick, obsessively reading nuclear strategy, bought the rights to Red Alert, a sober 1958 novel by former RAF officer Peter George about an unauthorised bomber attack. But as he and George worked, Kubrick kept hitting the same wall: the scenarios were so logically absurd — the doomsday arithmetic, the protocols nobody could stop — that every draft kept curdling into comedy. He surrendered to it, brought in the satirist Terry Southern, and the thriller became a nightmare comedy subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. A rival, straight-faced version of nearly the same plot, Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe, was racing through production simultaneously; Kubrick and Columbia used legal pressure over the source material's similarities to ensure Strangelove reached cinemas first, and the sombre twin, arriving months later, was commercially flattened.
Three roles and a runaway arm
Columbia's price for financing the film was Peter Sellers, whose performance playing three roles in The Mouse That Roared (1959) had delighted them. Sellers plays three parts: Group Captain Mandrake, the RAF exchange officer radiating decent helplessness; President Merkin Muffley, the mild Adlai Stevenson-ish egghead; and Dr. Strangelove himself, the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi strategist whose black-gloved right arm keeps escaping into a fascist salute. He was meant to play a fourth — Major "King" Kong, the B-52's Texan commander — but by the standard account a sprained ankle ruled out the cramped cockpit work, and Sellers was in any case struggling with the accent. Kubrick replaced him with the rodeo-riding character actor Slim Pickens, who played the part dead straight; colleagues enjoyed claiming Pickens was scarcely told the film was a comedy, a story that has hardened into legend even if witnesses differ. Kong's final exit — riding the hydrogen bomb down like a bucking bronco, whooping and waving his hat — became one of cinema's indelible images. George C. Scott, as Turgidson, later complained that Kubrick tricked him: the director asked for deliberately over-the-top "warm-up" takes, promised they would never be used, and used them.
The set that fooled the Pentagon
Ken Adam's War Room — a black triangular cavern with its ring of light and circular table, like a poker game for the end of the world — is routinely cited among the greatest film sets ever built, and a much-repeated anecdote holds that Ronald Reagan, arriving in the White House, asked to see the real thing. (The story is told by insiders and denied confirmation anywhere official; treat it as Washington folklore.) More substantively, the US Air Force refused all cooperation, so the B-52 cockpit was reconstructed from a single published photograph and educated guesswork — accurately enough, the production team liked to recall, that visiting military men wondered aloud where the security breach had occurred.
Released in January 1964, Strangelove earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won none. Its afterlife has been kinder: it regularly tops polls of screen comedies, and its vocabulary — the doomsday machine, the mineshaft gap, fighting in the War Room — remains the standard satirical toolkit for nuclear lunacy. The pie fight, meanwhile, survives only in production stills and testimony. Kubrick understood that the world ending in cream was funny; the world ending politely, to the sound of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again" over mushroom clouds, was true.
Quiz nuggets
- Dr. Strangelove was adapted from Red Alert, a serious 1958 nuclear thriller by Peter George, and turned comic with co-writer Terry Southern.
- A filmed War Room pie-fight ending was cut; JFK's assassination also forced a redub changing Slim Pickens's "Dallas" line to "Vegas".
- Peter Sellers played three roles — Mandrake, President Muffley and Strangelove — and lost a planned fourth, Major Kong, which went to Slim Pickens.
- Denied Air Force help, the production recreated the B-52 cockpit from a single published photograph and guesswork.
- The film's four 1964 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, yielded no wins; the rival drama Fail Safe reached cinemas months later and flopped.