Word: ripper
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Like his characters, Kubrick's plot is simple--but only superficially. Actually it operates on two levels simultaneously, one hilariously fanciful, the other disturbingly realistic. It is this interplay, more than the actual tension of the story-line, that enervates the constantly laughing audiences. Jack D. Ripper (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...
Luckily, Kubrick has found actors who can inject significance, even tragedy, into the brash, punnish script. Chomping ceaselessly on a frayed cigar butt, Sterling Hayden's General Ripper represents a curious amalgam of William Holden and Groucho Marx. Yet, the character deepens magnificently, if momentarily, when Hayden stares shakily into the camera and wimpers his resolve to "keep my bodily fluids safe from women and the Reds." Somehow there is more than foolishness here. When the general stalks awkwardly into the washroom to shoot himself, a surge of pity undercuts the laughter. Hayden has almost created a Quixote; the nature...
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...
...onslaught begins under the opening credits. A B-52 bomber nuzzles up to a jet tanker for mid-air refueling while the sound track pours forth an unctuous ballad called Try a Little Tenderness. Cut to Burpelson Air Force Base, where General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches the offensive against Russia, then severs communications with SAC. Hayden's playing seems extremely right. His Ripper is impotent, a one-man military complex who means singlehanded to save the world from water fluoridation and other Communist plots "that threaten the purity and essence of our natural fluids." He alone knows...
...focuses on Lulu as predator, the second half marks her for prey. Symbolically, she is destroyed by the moral cant of the bourgeois mind, which condemns in others the vices it refuses to acknowledge in itself. Lulu's actual death is horrifying; she is disemboweled by Jack the Ripper in a London garret. At this event, Berg's music erupts in an agonizing holocaust of atonal sound, the musical equivalent of the howl of the blinded Oedipus...