Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove is the most terrifying comedy ever made — a film about nuclear annihilation that is so funny and so horrifying that audiences do not know whether to laugh or scream, and end up doing both. Stanley Kubrick originally planned to make a serious thriller about accidental nuclear war, but as he researched the subject, the absurdity of mutually assured destruction became so overwhelming that satire was the only honest response.

Peter Sellers plays three roles — the mild-mannered President Muffley, the stiff-upper-lip Group Captain Mandrake, and the titular Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound former Nazi whose arm keeps involuntarily giving the Hitler salute. Each performance is a masterclass. George C. Scott's General Buck Turgidson — a gum-chewing war hawk who views nuclear casualties as acceptable losses — is the most frightening character in the film because he is the most realistic.

The War Room scenes are cinema at its blackest. The phone call between President Muffley and the drunk Soviet Premier ('Dimitri, you're going to have to tell me where it is...') is the funniest scene Kubrick ever directed. The ending — Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull while 'We'll Meet Again' plays — is the most iconic image of Cold War satire. Kubrick proved that the only sane response to the insanity of nuclear deterrence is laughter. The alternative is too frightening to contemplate.