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Peter Sellers' Portrayal Of Clare Quilty Must Have Gone A Long Way To ...

Peter Sellers' portrayal of Clare Quilty must have gone a long way to convincing the director to cast him in a number of roles in his next project, Dr. Strangelove, or How Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), one of the most obvious examples of a cinematic auteur in practice during the entire postwar period.
Before embarking upon making Dr. Strangelove Kubrick consumed scores of books on warfare in the nuclear age in addition to transforming Peter Bryant's novel ‘Red Alert (Two Hours to Doom)' into a screenplay that veered between viewing nuclear holocaust with a kind of grim amusement and posing a serious question to a western world that felt a real, tangible threat from the spectre of a large scale nuclear war. It is worth remembering that the Cuban Missiles Crisis had taken place within a year of the film's release. Thus, the viewing audience would have had the very life-like imagery of the days in October 1963 when the USA and the USSR came to the very brink of World War Three, which must have made Dr. Strangelove very uncomfortable viewing indeed for a great many people in the cinema audience. After great deliberation, Kubrick chose to make sure that he approached the film from the angle that, in the event of such a conflict, it is the policymaking path to war (as opposed to the tools of war) that is responsible for the inevitable human suffering that must ensue.
In the end what triggers global nuclear destruction is human error rather than aggression. (Dixon, 2003:7)
It is interesting to note that Kubrick chooses not to depict the human suffering incumbent in the aftermath to nuclear destruction, in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock preferred to leave the true horror of Psycho to the dark recesses of the human psyche. Again, this detracts from the part played by technology and machinery in the destruction of mankind; only man could follow such a well worn path to ruin. The film is also full of irony, which suggests that Kubrick may well have been uneasy with regards to which movie he wanted to make: the serious appraisal of the nuclear arms race or a comical masterpiece that revolves around the unique trio of parts played by Peter Sellers (Herr, 2000). Certainly, the fusion of irony and true terror is married in the final frame of the film, which sees the Abomb being despatched over the Soviet Union to the tune of We'll Meet Again. Thus, Kubrick ends with an open question of whether or not the audience will be able to see one another again in the event of such a large scale catastrophe. With regards to genre, Dr. Strangelove is not just a different genre for Kubrick to experiment with; it was at the time a new genre for any film-maker to attempt to harness: the fusion of comedy and nuclear warfare.


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