Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 🎥 is a lot funnier and also more compact than I remembered.
More compact, because in my memory the business of trying to decode ‘POE’/‘OPE’ etc, went on for much longer than the few seconds it actually takes. And trying to get through to the President on the phone: that just happened offstage, no messing about with underlings.
An aside: there’s a line, ‘He made a payphone call to the Pentagon’, in the Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets GI Joe’, which I realised is almost certainly a reference to this.
There was also far less of the titular doctor and his attempts to suppress his Nazi instincts than I recalled.
In contrast, I thought the final scene of the bomber on its fatal flight went on a bit too long. But who am I to judge?
If you haven’t seen this film, you owe it to yourself to watch it.