Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [110]
Whatever actually occurred, it didn’t matter, because Kubrick cut the sequence. “It was too farcical and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film,” he later explained.
Southern believed that this was because the characters were enjoying themselves too much: “He [Kubrick] believed that watching people have fun is never funny.” (Even in the final cut of Dr. Strangelove, Peter Bull, who plays DeSadesky, cracks up onscreen during one of Peter’s gestures. Bull remains embarrassed about his inability to keep a straight face, “grinning in an obvious and inane way. [It] makes me blush to think of it.”)
As far as the custard pie sequence is concerned, Kubrick was right; it doesn’t work. History also intervened in the cutting of the legendary, supposedly lost sequence. (It exists in the archives of the British Film Institute.) Test screenings of Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb were conducted in late November 1963. Given the artistic failure of the sequence, the question of whether it took the assassination of President Kennedy to cause the sequence to be deleted is irrelevant.
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With Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers achieved genius once again. His three characters are variegated, complex, and refined. He effaces himself as an actor, but not completely; he invites his audience to appreciate his performance as a stylistic tour de force, but he doesn’t issue the invitation hammily. He lets his characters speak for themselves, and yet they do so with Sellers’s unique panache.
He gives Mandrake that slight British slack-jaw quality, ending each of his sentences with his mouth left slightly agape, perhaps in expectation of receiving a further command that would require a dutiful response. He’s got the unflappable politesse of a seasoned British military officer, one who, facing atomic holocaust, responds in unflappable kind. He is above all an Englishman.
Muffley is an unnaturally placid, somewhat indigestive-looking middle-aged man with a flat, indistinguishable American accent and little hair. He’s intelligent—perhaps too much so for the job. The nasal inhaler routine is reduced to a faint sniffle, which Muffley dabs methodically with a hanky. One of the most remarkable aspects of the performance is that Kubrick’s camera keeps catching Muffley with an eerily neutral expression on his face. It’s not Sellers in plain repose; it’s a precisely studied lack of affect, the elimination of emotion without the simultaneous expulsion of intellect.
Time ticks by, but Muffley remains on his imperturbable course. He’s on the phone with Kisoff, the Soviet premier:
“Fine, I can hear you now, Dimitri—clear and plain and coming through fine. I’m coming through fine, too, then? Fine. Well then, as you say, we’re both coming through fine. Good. Well then it’s good that you’re fine and, and I’m fine. I agree with you. It’s great to be fine. [At this point even Muffley grows a bit frustrated and launches into a slightly sickly singsong tone in an attempt to steer the drunken Kisoff to the matter at hand.] Well then Dimitri. You know how we’ve always talked about something going wrong with the bomb? [Pause.] The bomb, Dimitri. [Pause.] The hydrogen bomb.”
But it’s the grimace-grinning Strangelove who steals the show, for obvious reasons. Beyond his ghastly German accent, which transcends imitation no matter how often it has been imitated, Peter Sellers achieves pure grotesquerie on the level of physicality and intelligence combined. With his persistent baring of teeth while holding his lips rigid, Strangelove’s mouth is a leering, terrifying rictus, and everything that comes out of it is infected. With a high-pitched nasality, he spits nothing but contempt for the self-evidently lower-functioning