"A Kind of Awed Testimonial to the Power of Madness"

"Kubrick wanted to shoot in New York, but no sound stage was big enough for the Pentagon war room, where much of the film is set, so he went back to England, where he had shot his previous film, 'Lolita' (he never really returned to the United States). Almost the entire film was shot at Shepperton Studios, outside London, where Ken Adam, the brilliant production designer on several of the Bond films, created the war room as a monster a hundred and thirty feet long, a hundred feet wide, and thirty-five feet high. In the center, the President and his advisers sit at an enormous circular table. Kubrick and Adam wanted to suggest a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse."


David Denby at The New Yorker marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.