In a long and distinguished career at The Nation, Robert Hatch alternately served as film critic, managing editor and executive editor. The following is from his February 3, 1964, review of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which premiered fifty-one years ago today.
Mr. Kubrick is a bold man: he has taken a whole complex of America’s basic assumptions by the shoulders and given them a rough shaking. And he has done it in a rough style that pays little heed to camera niceties or the normal luxury of commercial filmmaking, but throws all its emphasis on bravado acting and rapid, uncompromising melodrama. The picture sometimes falters into too obvious gags…but overall it holds a cold blade of scorn against the spectator’s throat. The danger is that it will be cheered by the people who already agree with it and resented by those still unconverted. Kubrick can argue with good logic that if you are to expose the fallacy of depending on the hydrogen bomb as the last bastion of a free society, you must also expose the ignorance of bigotry that invents and fosters such nonsense. But he and Terry Southern take a pleasure in flaying their contemporaries that may be more effective as sadistic humor than as adult education.
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