Friday March 24 | 5 Films
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore once said, “You can’t debate satire. Either you get it, or you don’t.” It’s no wonder, then, that satire – like Moore’s oeuvre – is polarizing and controversial. The genre’s use of humor, irony and exaggeration to critique political problems or human folly is too often misunderstood as righteousness or mere derision. However, it is one of the most profound aesthetic ways to offer constructive criticism and commentary on an issue. The Motion Picture Academy seems to get the joke. Most recently satires Birdman (2014), Get Out (2017) and Jojo Rabbit (2019) have all won Oscars. On March 24, TCM highlights a collection of classic satires that caught the attention of the Academy.
It kicks off with what is often considered one of the greatest films of all time: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a black comedy that satirizes Cold War fears of nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens, the film is loosely based on the thriller novel, Red Alert whose author, Peter George, collaborated with Kubrick and satirist Terry Southern on the screenplay. Dr. Strangelove ridicules nuclear war planning, taking shots at numerous Cold War attitudes such as the “missile gap,” but it primarily directs its satire on the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD), in which each side is supposed to be deterred from a nuclear war by the prospect of a universal cataclysm regardless of who ‘won.’
The film follows a crazed and deranged United States Air Force general, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) (the name echoes the notorious nineteenth century serial killer) who orders a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It separately follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Royal Air Force exchange officer as they attempt to prevent the crew of Ripper’s B-52 from bombing the Soviet Union and starting a nuclear war. Famously, Sellers plays three roles: group captain Lionel Mandrake, a British RAF exchange officer; Merkin Muffley, the President of the United States; and Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair bound nuclear war expert and former Nazi named Merkwürdigliebe, who has alien hand syndrome (his hand acts as if it has a mind of its own). Initially Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the film if Sellers played at least four of the major roles, but he had to drop his performance of Major T.J. “King” Kong, the B-52 aircraft commander because he sprained his ankle and could no longer work in the cramped aircraft mockup. Rodeo and character actor Pickens was given the role and was not told that the movie was a black comedy, and he was only given the scripts for scenes he was in so he would play it “straight.” James Earl Jones recalls that Pickens, “was Major Kong on and off the set – he didn’t change a thing – his temperament, his language, his behavior.” It was originally planned for the film to end with a pie fight in the War Room. However, Kubrick “decided it was a farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film.”
Released in 1964, Dr. Strangelove was sandwiched between two other films about the end of the world – Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) about a group of people coming to terms with their limited time on the planet and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, which came out the same year as Kubrick’s film and also tells a story about an air command that attacks Russia without permission. But these films are decidedly not comedic. Indeed, many film critics at the time seemed confused as to what to make of Dr. Strangelove. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote that his, “reaction to it is quite divided…when virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane – or, what is worse, psychopathic – I want to know what the picture proves…to me, it isn’t funny. It is malefic and sick.” Pauline Kael agreed: “artists’ warnings about war and the dangers of annihilation never tell us how we are supposed to regain control.” Stanley Kauffmann called it, “the best American picture that I can remember.” According to Sonny Bunch, for The Washington Post, it is precisely the film’s absurdism that has allowed it to endure: “the death of one man is a tragedy and a tragic film may best suit the telling of his story, but the death of billions is a cosmic joke, one whose punchline needs no explanation.” Dr. Strangelove was nominated for four Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Sellers, and Best Adapted Screenplay – but it did not win in any category.
TCM screens another war satire that evening: Charlie Chaplin’s anti-war send up of Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator (1940). Having been the only Hollywood filmmaker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, Chaplin made this his first true sound film, becoming his most commercially successful film. Chaplin plays both leading roles: a ruthless fascist dictator and persecuted Jewish barber. The Great Dictator is a condemnation of Hitler, Benito Mussolini, fascism, antisemitism and the Nazis. At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany and neutral during the first days of World War II. In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he could not have nailed the film’s satire if he had known about the extent of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at that time. The Great Dictator is largely considered cinema’s first important satire and one of the greatest films ever made. It was nominated for five Academy Awards: Outstanding Production, Best Actor (Chaplin), Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Oakie), and Best Music (Original Score), but did not win in any category.
TCM’s evening of satire also includes a trio of Oscar winning films that take shots at the trinity of show business: theater, television and the movies. With a little more spoof than The Great Dictator, Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967) is about a theater producer (Zero Mostel) and his accountant (Gene Wilder) who, as part of a scam, decide to stage the worst musical they can create. They find a script celebrating Hitler and the Nazis and bring it to the stage. Because of this plotline, the film was controversial from the start and received mixed reviews. Renata Adler said it, “is less delicate than Lenny Bruce” and “less funny than Dr. Strangelove”; John Simon wrote that it “is a model of how not to make a comedy.” Now it is a cult classic, praised for being a ruthless satire of the business side of the entertainment industry. The Producers was Brooks’ directorial debut, and he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, tells the fall and rise of Howard Beale (Peter Finch), longtime evening TV anchorman for the “USB Evening News,” who learns from friend and news division president Max Schumacher (William Holden) that he’s being sacked because of declining ratings. The following night, Beale announces, on live broadcast, that he will commit suicide on air the following week. USB tries to immediately fire Beale, but Schumacher intervenes so that Beale can have a proper farewell. Beale promises to apologize on air for his outburst but ends up ranting that “life is bullshit” – which causes ratings to spike and the USB upper executives to exploit the situation for even more viewership! Unlike Fail Safe, Lumet turned up the satire with this film – to lambast the television industry which, in the words of Chayefsky, “will do anything for a rating…anything!”
Network came out only two years after the first on-screen suicide in television history: of television news reporter Christine Chubbuck in Sarasota, Florida on July 15, 1974. The anchorwoman who was suffering from depression and loneliness was often emotionally distant from her co-workers. An audience of viewers were shocked when she took her own life on camera. Whether Chayefsky was inspired by the Chubbuck case remains unclear; apparently, he wrote for Beale to exclaim that he would kill himself on air “like that girl in Florida” but it was eventually deleted. In a separate set of notes about the dark and sardonic screenplay Chayefsky wrote, “Now, all this is Strangelove-y as hell, can we make it work?”
Upon seeing the film, Roger Ebert called it a “supremely well-acted, intelligent film that tries for too much…but what it does accomplish is done so well, is seen so sharply, is presented so unforgivingly, that Network will outlive a lot of tidier movies.” A quarter-century later Ebert said, the film was “like a prophesy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, he could have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, and the World Wrestling Federation.” I might also add the film anticipated the likes of Roger Ailes. Network was nominated for a whopping nine Oscars, including Best Picture, that led to four wins: Best Actor (Finch), Best Actress (Faye Dunaway), Best Supporting Actress (Beatrice Straight), and, of course, Best Screenplay.
The night rounds off with Robert Altman’s playfully cynical and thrilling Hollywood satire, The Player (1992) written by Michael Tolkin based on his own 1988 novel of the same name. It stars Tim Robbins as Hollywood film studio executive, Griffin Mill, who hears pitches from screenwriters and decides which have the potential to be made into films, greenlighting only a handful out of every 50,000 submissions each year. However, his job is threatened when up-and-coming story executive Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) begins working at the studio. Under the pressure, Mill kills an aspiring screenwriter that he believes is sending him death threats. The film has many references and Hollywood in-jokes – pitches like “it’s a psychic, political, thriller comedy with a heart,” “it’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman.” And it has sixty-five celebrity cameos (including Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts and Andie MacDowell). Yet it doesn’t rely on the celebrity glamour. It is a well-crafted film. The remarkable opening sequence shot on the Hollywood lot lasts 7 minutes and 47 seconds without an edit. Fifteen takes were required to shoot this scene and the tenth was used in the final edit. The Player opened to near universal acclaim by critics and audiences. It was nominated for three Oscars: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing, but did not win in any category.
