Dr. Strangelove – Free Film & Discussion

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 political black comedy which satirizes the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, and stars Peter Sellers in 3 different roles.

Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant satire remains as funny and razor-sharp today as it was when it first appeared. It has been rated by IMDB as one of the greatest 100 movies in cinema history.

“There had been nothing in comedy like Dr Strangelove ever before. All the gods before whom the America of the stolid, paranoid 50s had genuflected – the Bomb, the Pentagon, the National Security State, the President himself, Texan masculinity and the alleged Commie menace of water-fluoridation – went into the wood-chipper and never got the same respect ever again.” (John Patterson, The Guardian)

The film will be followed by a discussion and a clip from Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower who recently wrote The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner: “…for the first time, former high level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking first-hand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our very survival.”

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