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I only yesterday picked up the new Bluray of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” one of those canonical classics that becomes almost a cliched entry in any number of all-time-best-films lists. I haven’t had a chance to dive in yet, though the recent mini-controversy (wholly on the web) concerning the grain levels doesn’t worry me all that much.
In a real coup over at The Auteurs’ Notebook, Glenn Kenny has managed a detailed exchange with the film’s editor (and later a director himself) Anthony Harvey. There is some intriguing discussion regarding Kubrick’s post-production process, his philosophy on editing performances, etc. But the most engaging bit is obviously the paragraph devoted to the film’s notorious unused denouement that featured a pie fight preceding the end of the world rather than the title character’s painfully ironic miracle moment.
The original ending was meant to be much more in line with Terry Southern’s brand of absurdist stylings. As the iconic “war room” of the film descends further into madness in the light of oncoming nuclear holocaust, an epic pie fight erupts as the final act of bedlam from some of the world’s foremost political figures. But tragic history ultimately stood in the sequence’s way.
Writes Kenny:
Harvey, who had also cut the director’s prior film Lolita, recalls the press screening, which happened to occur on or around November 22, 1963, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “There we are. I was showing it to the press, I remember, around that time. We canceled everything and we all trudged on to Grosvenor Square, stood in shocked silence as the news unfurled. That’s the date. And some weeks after that, I believe, the film was going to be released.
Columbia Pictures were very nervous about anything to show the president—any president—in that state, as it should be…That ending, how it started, the George Scott character threw a custard pie to the Russian ambassador, and it missed and hit the president. And then all hell broke loose. And it was like there was about two minutes when, after this brilliantly constructed film, it devolves into a kind of silent Mack Sennett sort of thing, with everybody getting hit by custard pies.
[S]omehow they were very worried, the studio, about releasing it. They found it might be offensive or something. So Stanley took it out for the moment, and then the film opened and he just didn’t feel like putting anything back. So that remained in the cutting room floor. But it was a brilliant piece of work. Who knows? I certainly thought it was. But I think when you get to a point in working on a film for almost a year, and this sort of sudden pressure comes in as a result of what happened to Kennedy, it’s a sort of clear-cut situation. So that was removed. And it never went back.”
While stills of the footage exist, it’s still unclear as to whether the scene survived the loss of the original negative, or exists in Kubrick’s archive. Despite the hopes of some cinephiles, it is not, finally, included on the new Blu-ray disc of Strangelove.
Read the rest over at The Auteurs’ Notebook.
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