New York City's current dilemma is so depressing I finally decided to take my mind off current events by watching a movie. I used the Crackle app on my iPhone and after some scrolling picked Dr. Strangelove, aka How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It is one of those movies that I saw snippets of back in the day of channel-flipping. It is also the movie that got me to love the tune When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Maybe it was the suspense and action that were pulsating on-screen, the tune is so memorable.
Without reading up about the movie, of all the times I saw short sections of the movie I didn't know that Peter Sellers played a few different roles in it. What a talented man! I knew him mostly as the clumsy Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther movies. The Strangelove movie deals with nuclear annihilation but had its funny moments. My favorite part is when Group Commander Mandrake asked a Colonel to shoot the Coca Cola vending machine to get him some coins so he could make a call to the President of the United States, to give the President the code to recall the B-52 bombers on their way to attack Russia. The Colonel told Mandrake that if there really is no imminent nuclear war then Mandrake will have to face the wrath of the Coca Cola company. Such absurdity is in many places throughout the movie. Someone trying to reach some important general by phone and he was busy on the toilet seat and didn't even want to take the call afterward. The Russian chairman insisting that he's more sorry than the U.S. President about the impending nuclear holocaust. Some high-ranking general believing in conspiracy theories and putting in motion something that ultimately doomed the world. Not a good choice of a movie that would cheer me up, even with the funny moments. One man can really doom the world if not enough people try to stop him.
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