June 5 (Saturday) 6:00 pm & 10:15 pm
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Britain 1964, b/w, 35mm, 93 min.
With Sellers, Hayden, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens,
James Earl Jones
The Cold War is back, and let’s greet it with Kubrick’s amazingly prescient, pre-Vietnam War, pre-Wag the Dog, pre-pre-pre Kosovo black comedy: American foreign policy as a delirium of yahoo "bombs away," and Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove, mastermind of warmongering, based directly on today’s cocktail party favorite, Henry Kissinger. Among the right-on Aristophanic caricatures: Peter Bull as everyone’s Stalinist "Russke," and Sterling Hayden as the paranoid-of-paranoids General Jack D. Ripper.
June 12 (Saturday) 6:30 pm
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
USA 1960, color, 35mm, 184 min.
with Kirk Douglas, Olivier, Curtis, Ustinov, John
Ireland, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton
The Hollywood blacklist was cracking at last with the previously unemployable Dalton Trumbo’s script from Howard Fast’s semi-Stalinist novel about the militant slave (a premature Communist!) who led a revolt against his Romanov-like Roman masters. This is hardly Kubrick’s most personal film, but it certainly is much bare-chested fun, from the cheeky performances (Peter Ustinov won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) to the dagger fights to the homoerotic bathing scene involving Olivier and Tony Curtis (who talks "New Yorkese" throughout). Other virtues: Alex North’s much-praised score, and the Academy Award-winning cinematography by Russell Metty, who also photographed Douglas Sirk melodramas.
June 19 (Saturday) 6 pm and 8 pm
Directed by Stanley
Kubrick
USA 1957, b/w, 35mm, 86 min.
With Kirk Douglas, Adolph Mejou, George Macready
During World War I, a French general (Macready) orders his men on a suicidal charge; when they fail, he picks three of them to be tried and executed for cowardice. An extraordinarily effective showing of the insanity of war, of life in the trenches, and probably more genuinely pacificist than either Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line. The screenplay is written by Kubrick with two of his favorite novelists, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson.
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Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College.