5. Peter Sellers And The Uncontrollable Nazi Salute - Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
If audiences had already been disturbed by Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita, the exploration of paedophilia in middle America which caused not a small degree of controversy, his film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb proved to be even more divisive with its broad satirical swipe at the folly of nuclear war. No doubt impressed with Peter Sellers' turn in Lolita, Kubrick decided to cast him in Dr Strangelove as three of the principal characters. It is Sellers' performance as the titular mad scientist which stands out the most, but throughout the production the great actor - renowned for being more than a little mad himself in real life - is said to have improvised so much of the movie that Kubrick incorporated the lines in a canonical screenplay. Perhaps most memorable of all is Strangelove's unnerving habit of accidentally calling the President "Mein Fuhrer" whilst pushing one arm down with the other to hide the Nazi salute - the subtle (or not so subtle) reference to Operation Paperclip, in which the US snapped up Nazi scientists after the war, might be lost on some, but few audiences missed the warped, dark humour of the performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuP6KbIsNK4