A friend commented that he didn't understand why Stanley Kubrick's Cold War-era black comedy "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) rarely shows up in lists of the greatest movies ever. He said it was the film he'd take to that putative desert island if he could take only one.
It's a reasonable question. If you do a Google search for lists of the 50 greatest films of all time, "Strangleove" would show up on more than 90% of them. The film is neither obscure nor neglected -- there are plenty of academic papers written about it, and it still has cultural relevancy.
On the other hand, my friend is right. His favorite movie is rarely the first Kubrick film mentioned on those lists and is rarely cited in the top 20. Maybe that's because the people who make up these lists -- and who vote for these lists -- don't value serious comedy as highly as they do serious drama.
But it's more because they honestly think other movies are better. "Dr. Strangelove" is probably my second or third favorite Kubrick film -- I like "A Clockwork Orange" and "Barry Lyndon" better, though even as I write that I realize my ordering is as meaningless as it is transient. In any case, if I were asked to scratch out a list of the greatest movies of all time, I'd be unlikely to include "Strangelove" in the first 15.
Unless I happen to be thinking a lot about "Strangelove" at the moment the request was made. I could make a case for the movie as the ultimate expression of American existential anxiety in the pre-Beatles world. It would be fun to write an essay suggesting "Strangelove" is as much about male sexual repression as the threat of nuclear holocaust.
It also marks the moment when Kubrick unlocks the full potential of his essential pessimism about the ability of humans to refrain from hurting each other. His previous film, 1962's "Lolita," is good enough in its own right, though hampered by censors and the stubborn resistance of Vladimir Nabokov's prose to translation to light and shadow, but "Strangelove" is where Kubrick becomes more than just a reliable director of quality prestige pictures.
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Kubrick was engaged by the irreconcilable dissonance between fervency and reason, and "Strangelove" is where he became one of the few directors we can confidently call an artist.
But if I don't think it's his best film, how can I rank it high in some silly poll?
We need to consider that not all the people who vote in these polls are like you and me. A lot of them have very different relationships with cinema. For a long time in this country, and some would argue even today, movies served as a cultural binding agent -- everyone was aware of Clark Gable and John Wayne and Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe. A larger percentage of us went to the movies every week. Some continue the moviegoing habit deep into our lives, but many stop going to movies about the time they stop listening to new popular music -- around the Christ-like age of 33.
There are people who insist they are huge movie fans yet haven't been to a theater in years. They may watch old movies on TCM or DVD; they're not rushing out to see "Women Talking" today. Most would probably hold out the movies they saw before they fully settled into adulthood as the "best ever" because we tend to deeply cherish those pop culture products we receive when first becoming aware of the universe's wonders and possibilities. (Pop culture is never better than it is when you are 12 years old.)
As a quick experiment: I asked two 30-somethings who write regularly and professionally about film if they had ever seen "Strangelove." One had, one hadn't; neither considered it important.
We could pretend to be scandalized by a film critic who hasn't seen "Strangelove," but everyone has holes in their education and none of us knows what we don't know. I've taught way more film classes than I ever took (zero), and almost every day I encounter a mention of a movie that I probably ought to see (or a book I ought to read or a recording I ought to listen to). There's a lot of stuff out there; none of us can claim to have mastered it all.
All you can do is stay humble.
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Last year, when the new Sight & Sound/British Film Institute poll of film critics came out and Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" -- a great if difficult to watch film, a movie that deserves, like "Strangelove," to be considered one of the most important ever -- ascended to the top spot, it was a result of a few factors.
The poll was far more inclusive, with nearly double the number of critics, filmmakers and scholars voting. In that influx were younger voters, some of whom surely were aware of the poll's reputation for ignoring recent films (a defensible position, since we often can't genuinely gauge the impact of a movie until it's had years to marinate in the culture).
Many were aware that the work of female and non-white filmmakers was under-represented in the S&S critics poll. As Jordan Ruimy explained on his excellent website World of Reel (worldofreel.com) last month: "A big chunk of those polled made their lists with the intention of including at least one female filmmaker within their list of 10."
Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" is often considered the best film ever made by a woman, especially by critics with a feminist bent. So a huge percentage of those determined to vote for a female filmmaker listed the film on their ballots, causing it to jump from 35th to the top spot. It's not that hard to understand, if you accept that "Jeanne Dielman" was already the highest-ranked film on the list by a female director. (In retrospect, that seems shocking.)
In his analysis, Ruimy also pointed to the ascension of "Twitter favorites 'Moonlight' (60) 'Get Out' (95) and 'Portrait of A Lady on Fire' (30), all of which broke through via S&S deciding to expand its voter pool this decade from 800 to nearly 1,600 voters, many of which might not be as familiar with film history.
"The result is [Jordan] Peele, [Celine] Sciamma and [Barry] Jenkins being included in the same ranks as esteemed auteurs such as [Jean] Renoir, Kubrick, [Yasujiro] Ozu, and [F.W.] Murnau. Voters opted to include Sciamma, Jenkins and Peele in the top 100. Do we now live in a world where 'Moonlight' is ahead of 'L'Avventura,' 'Casablanca,' 'Metropolis,' 'Journey to Italy,' 'The Third Man' and 'Goodfellas'?"
I don't think so, though I understand that some movies are going to naturally age out of the poll as their champions die off. Ruimy wonders if the fact that John Ford's "The Searchers" fell out of the top 10 for the first time in the poll's history might have something to do with the politics of its star John Wayne.
Possibly, but it might be more of a function of new voters diluting the support for perennials like "The Searchers" and "Citizen Kane," which are rich and entertaining experiences that have been stigmatized as favorites of unfashionable people. (They'd both be in my top five most days.)
"Strangelove" did not make the most recent S&S critics poll, though it did land at No. 46 on the parallel poll of film directors.
Which feels right -- though demographically I have more in common with the overwhelming white and male cohort that voted in the director's poll than with the current batch of voting critics.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com