“Adapting Peter George’s novel Red Alert, Kubrick recognized that, even told seriously, the story would be absurd and comic. So he decided to treat it as a black comedy on the most tragic subject imaginable: the end of the world. Extremely concise, Dr Strangelove is divided between three spaces: the air base where a general, gone crazy, launches a nuclear attack against Russia. The B52 in which his soldiers carry out the mission. And the War Room in Washington, where the President of the Unit­ed States tries to avoid the Apocalypse, despite the auguries of his military adviser, the ex-Nazi Dr Strangelove, and the joy at waging war of his principal head of state. With his sense of the grotesque, Kubrick brings out the death drive which governs society as well as man. And the abyss which separates technological progress from human nature. Made two years after the Cuban missile crisis, which had almost set off an atomic war, the film has the implacable precision of clockwork and the original freedom which its actors bring to it. In particular Peter Sell­ers, in the triple role of the American President, a British official and the German scientist”.

Michel Ciment, Le guide du cinéma chez soi, edited by Pierre Murat, “Télérama” hors série, Paris, 2002