Dr. Strangelove Stanley Kubrick

• Peter Sellers as:
  • Group captain Lionel Mandrake, a British RAF exchange officer
  • Merkin Muffley, the President of the United States
  • Dr. Strangelove (né Merkwürdigliebe), the wheelchair-using nuclear war expert and former Nazi, who has alien hand syndrome[9][10]
• George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, paranoid commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which is part of the Strategic Air Command.
• Keenan Wynn as Colonel "Bat" Guano, the Army officer who finds Mandrake and Ripper
• Jack Creley as Mr. Staines, National Security Advisor
• Slim Pickens as Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 bomber's commander and pilot
• Peter Bull as Soviet Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski
• James Earl Jones as Lieutenant Lothar Zogg, the B-52's bombardier (film debut)
• Tracy Reed as Miss Scott, General Turgidson's secretary and mistress, the film's only female character. She also appears as "Miss Foreign Affairs", the Playboy Playmate in Playboy's June 1962 issue,[11] which Major Kong is shown perusing at one point.[12]
• Shane Rimmer as Capt. Ace Owens, the co-pilot of the B-52

Peter Sellers's multiple roles

Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the film if Peter Sellers played at least four major roles. The condition stemmed from the studio's opinion that much of the success of Kubrick's previous film Lolita (1962) was based on Sellers's performance, in which his single character assumes several identities. Sellers also played three roles in The Mouse That Roared (1959). Kubrick accepted the demand, later saying that "such crass and grotesque stipulations are the sine qua non of the motion-picture business."[14][15]

Sellers ended up playing three of the four roles written for him. He had been expected to play Air Force Major T. J. "King" Kong, the B-52 aircraft commander, but from the beginning, Sellers was reluctant. He felt his workload was too heavy and worried he would not properly portray the character's Texan accent. Kubrick pleaded with him, and he asked the screenwriter Terry Southern (who had been raised in Texas) to record a tape with Kong's lines spoken in the correct accent, which he practiced using Southern's tapes. But after the start of shooting in the aircraft, Sellers sprained his ankle and could no longer work in the cramped aircraft mockup.[14][15][16]

Sellers improvised much of his dialogue, with Kubrick incorporating the ad-libs into the written screenplay so that the improvised lines became part of the canonical screenplay, a practice known as retroscripting.[17]

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake

According to film critic Alexander Walker, the author of biographies of both Sellers and Kubrick, the role of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake was the easiest of the three for Sellers to play, since he was aided by his experience of mimicking his superiors while serving in the RAF during World War II.[17] There is also a heavy resemblance to Sellers's friend and occasional co-star Terry-Thomas and the prosthetic-limbed RAF flying ace Sir Douglas Bader.

President Merkin Muffley

For his performance as President Merkin Muffley, Sellers assumed a Midwestern American English accent. Sellers drew inspiration for the role from Adlai Stevenson,[17] a former Illinois governor who was the Democratic candidate for the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections and the U.N. ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In early takes, Sellers simulated cold symptoms to emphasize the character's apparent weakness. That caused frequent laughter among the film crew, ruining several takes. Kubrick ultimately found this comic portrayal inappropriate, feeling Muffley should be a serious character.[17] In later takes, Sellers played the role straight, though the President's cold is still evident in several scenes.

Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove is a scientist and former Nazi, suggesting Operation Paperclip, the US effort to recruit top German technical talent at the end of World War II.[18][19] He serves as President Muffley's scientific adviser in the War Room. When General Turgidson wonders aloud to Mr. Staines (Jack Creley), what kind of name "Strangelove" is, possibly a "Kraut name", Staines responds that Strangelove's original German surname was Merkwürdigliebe ("Strange love" in German) and that "he changed it when he became a citizen". Strangelove accidentally addresses the president as Mein Führer twice in the film. Dr. Strangelove did not appear in the book Red Alert.[20]

The character is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (a central figure in Nazi Germany's rocket development program recruited to the US after the war), and Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb".[21] It is frequently claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this;[22] Sellers said: "Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger—that's a popular misconception. It was always Wernher von Braun."[23] Furthermore, Henry Kissinger points out in his memoirs that at the time of the writing of Dr. Strangelove, he was a little-known academic.[24]

The wheelchair-using Strangelove furthers a Kubrick trope of the menacing, seated antagonist, first depicted in Lolita through the character "Dr. Zaempf".[25] Strangelove's accent was influenced by that of Austrian-American photographer Weegee, who worked for Kubrick as a special photographic effects consultant.[17] Strangelove's appearance echoes the mad scientist archetype as seen in the character Rotwang in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927). Sellers's Strangelove takes from Rotwang the single black gloved hand (which, in Rotwang's case, is mechanical because of a lab accident), the wild hair, and, most importantly, his ability to avoid being controlled by political power.[26] According to Alexander Walker, Sellers improvised Dr. Strangelove's lapse into the Nazi salute, borrowing one of Kubrick's black leather gloves for the uncontrollable hand that makes the gesture. Dr. Strangelove apparently has alien hand syndrome. Kubrick wore the gloves on the set to avoid being burned when handling hot lights, and Sellers, recognizing the potential connection to Lang's work, found them to be menacing.[17]

Slim Pickens as Major T. J. "King" Kong

Slim Pickens, an established character actor and veteran of many Western films, was eventually chosen to replace Sellers as Major Kong after Sellers' injury. John Wayne was offered the role after Sellers was injured, but he never responded to Kubrick's offer.[27][28] Dan Blocker of the Bonanza western television series was also approached to play the part, but according to Southern, Blocker's agent rejected the script as being "too pinko".[28][29] Kubrick then recruited Pickens, whom he knew from his brief involvement in a Marlon Brando western film project that was eventually filmed as One-Eyed Jacks.[27]

His fellow actor James Earl Jones recalls, "He was Major Kong on and off the set—he didn't change a thing—his temperament, his language, his behavior." Pickens was not told that the movie was a black comedy, and he was only given the script for scenes he was in to get him to play it "straight".[30]

Kubrick's biographer John Baxter explained, in the documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove:

As it turns out, Slim Pickens had never left the United States. He had to hurry and get his first passport. He arrived on the set, and somebody said, "Gosh, he's arrived in costume!", not realizing that that's how he always dressed ... with the cowboy hat and the fringed jacket and the cowboy boots—and that he wasn't putting on the character—that's the way he talked.

Pickens, who had previously played only supporting and character roles, said that his appearance as Maj. Kong greatly improved his career. He later commented, "After Dr. Strangelove, my salary jumped five times, and assistant directors started saying 'Hey, Slim' instead of 'Hey, you'."[31]

George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson

George C. Scott played the role of General Buck Turgidson, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In this capacity General Turgidson was the nation's highest-ranking military officer and the principal military advisor to the President and the National Security Council. He is seen during most of the movie advising President Muffley on the best steps to take in order to stop the fleet of B-52 Stratofortresses that was deployed by Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper to drop nuclear bombs on Soviet soil.

According to James Earl Jones (who did not act opposite or appear in any scenes with Scott) Kubrick tricked Scott into playing the role of Gen. Turgidson in a much more outlandish manner than Scott was comfortable doing. According to Jones, Kubrick talked Scott into doing absurd "practice" takes, which Kubrick told Scott would never be used, as a way to warm up for the "real" takes. According to Jones, Kubrick used these takes rather than the more restrained ones in the final film, allegedly causing Scott to swear never to work with Kubrick again.[32]

During the filming, Kubrick and Scott had different opinions regarding certain scenes, but Kubrick obtained Scott's compliance largely by beating him at chess, which they played frequently on the set.[33][34]