FAIL SAFE & DR. STRANGELOVE
Join us for special screenings of Sidney Lumet’s 1964 nuclear thriller FAIL SAFE and Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear satire DR. STRANGELOVE July 4-6. Tickets are at regular Ross prices.Â
FAIL SAFE (1964)
Friday, July 4 – 5:10 p.m.
Saturday, July 5 – 1:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 6 – 5:00 p.m.
This unnerving procedural thriller painstakingly details an all-too-plausible nightmare scenario in which a mechanical failure jams the United States military’s chain of command and sends the country hurtling toward nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Working from a contemporary best seller, screenwriter Walter Bernstein and director Sidney Lumet wrench harrowing suspense from the doomsday fears of the Cold War era, making the most of a modest budget and limited sets to create an atmosphere of clammy claustrophobia and astronomically high stakes. Starring Henry Fonda as a coolheaded U.S. president and Walter Matthau as a trigger-happy political theorist, Fail Safe is a long-underappreciated alarm bell of a film, sounding an urgent warning about the deadly logic of mutually assured destruction. ~Criterion (1 hour, 52 minutes / Not Rated)
DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)
Friday, July 4 – 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 5 – 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, July 6 – 2:45 p.m.
Stanley Kubrick’s painfully funny take on Cold War anxiety is one of the fiercest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood. The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles: Royal Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general (Sterling Hayden); the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded U.S. President Merkin Muffley; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound presidential adviser with a Nazi past. Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist. ~Criterion (1 hour, 35 minutes / Rated PG)