Word: muffley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York City. More than that of any other artist in any genre, Southern's film work defined the '60s sensibility. His script for 1964's Dr. Strangelove, co-written with director Stanley Kubrick, showed an unerring ear for atomic-age Orwellianisms ("You can't fight here," cries President Muffley. "This is the War Room!"). The script won Southern an Oscar nomination, as did his work on another definitive film, Easy Rider...
...Washington, the War Room is buzzing with news of Ripper's strike. Things have reached such a frenzy that the bearish Russian ambassador de Sadesky has been admitted to the top secret chamber, spy camera and all. Peter Sellers appears again, this time as the balding President Muffley, a sort of Mister Rogers with backbone, who is determined to keep Russian Premier Kissoff from executing a retaliatory strike. Surrounded by hard-core war-mongering generals, his touchy-feely Red Line conversation with Kissoff, the missile attack blinking ever closer on the Big Board behind him, seems surreal...
During this pre-Doomsday chaos Peter Sellers, as Strangelove, converts an ingenious farce into a great social commentary. Playing his usual three roles, Sellers competently portrays an RAF Captain and President Muffley. But his Strangelove surpasses anything he has ever done. The doctor, a nuclear specialist and a former Nazi, sits silently in his wheelchair through eighty minutes of tension in the War Room. Then, five minutes before the world and the movie end, Strangelove bursts into sadistic glee. He spits out macabre suggestions for preserving human life in mine shafts, smiles hideously behind his dark glasses, clicks his teeth...
...Sterling Hayden), a right-wing general, is convinced that the Russians are surreptitiously "sapping our bodily fluids" by flouridating drinking water. Concerned for America's "virility," Ripper orders a surprise nuclear attack on the USSR. Action alternates between the Washington War Room, where a liberal, weak-kneed President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) tries frantically to recall the planes, and a wounded B-52, whose loudly patriotic pilot, Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) urges his racially mixed crew on to Moscow with slogans of brotherhood and strains of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again...
George C. Scott plays General Buck Turgidson who must tell President Muffley what Ripper "went and did." Scott's lines are outrageously funny, but the "Strangelove" script gives him little lee-way to improvise. About half-way through the picture, farce submerges all the intricacy Scott has infused into Turgidson. The character ends a near raving maniac, reflecting the general entropy that is engulfing the War Room...