Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove arrived in cinemas in January 1964, fifteen months after the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world closer to nuclear exchange than any previous moment of the Cold War. Kubrick had begun the project as a serious adaptation of Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert, then rewrote it as a black comedy with George and the satirist Terry Southern when, by his own account, he found he could not write the dialogue without it turning inadvertently funny. It was a UK production, financed by Columbia Pictures and shot at Shepperton Studios outside London.

Peter Sellers plays three of the central roles, RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, US President Merkin Muffley and the wheelchair-bound former Nazi nuclear strategist Dr. Strangelove, having signed on after his other studio commitments collapsed. George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, Sterling Hayden as the deranged Brigadier General Jack Ripper, Slim Pickens as Major Kong and James Earl Jones, in his screen debut, complete the principal cast. Gilbert Taylor shot it, and Ken Adam designed the war room, one of the most quoted single sets in cinema history.

The film earned four Academy Award nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Sellers, and Best Adapted Screenplay) and won the BAFTA for Best Film. Sight & Sound has placed it on its Greatest Films of All Time poll across several decades. Kubrick also shot a custard-pie fight in the war room but cut it after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, and that footage is considered lost. Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again is on the soundtrack, used with an irony that has not dulled.