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" Every Wednesday we show you a great scene from film history you may remember, you may not \u2014 and then we break it down for you.      Imminent apocalypse: hilarious! Or so Stanley Kubrick made it seem with his 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, in which a lunatic general sends a wing of B-52s to attack the Soviet Union without his commander-in-chief&amp;#039;s consent. Sidney Lumet made the solemn thriller Fail Safe, with Henry Fonda as a U.S. president presiding over a similar scenario, at almost exactly the same time, but it&amp;#039;s Kubrick&amp;#039;s film that has endured, not least thanks to a POTUS played by Peter Sellers. As agreeable as a parable of Cold War paranoia possibly can be, Dr. Strangelove still is the definitive nuclear-doomsday movie, largely on account of being a comedy, and it&amp;#039;s still funny largely on account of Sellers.  Tone was Strangelove&amp;#039;s coup de grace; Kubrick got it right by hiring Terry Southern to adapt the otherwise serious novel Red Alert, and by casting Sellers in three roles. (Reportedly it would have been four but for an ankle injury and a not-quite-nailed Texas accent.) Right in a sweet spot between the extremes of Sellers&amp;#039;s eponymous ex-Nazi gonzo scientist and his impeccably British straight-man RAF officer, there&amp;#039;s his even-keeled, Adlai Stevenson-esque egghead, one &amp;quot;President Merkin Muffley,&amp;quot; whose official duties include a very awkward phone call, from within the War Room echo chamber, to the (possibly drunk) Soviet premier. &amp;quot;Now then, Dimitri. You know how we&amp;#039;ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb. The Bomb, Dimitri. The Hydrogen Bomb....&amp;quot;  We arrive at this moment hoping for executive-level salvation: Surely some safety protocols exist to keep the world from being destroyed by ridiculous misunderstanding. But what kind of understanding really is possible when nations only communicate through brinkmanship?  In a movie full of classic scenes, this one stands out for its restraint; it would have been so easy to overplay. Save for some characteristically great George C. Scott reaction shots, Sellers owns the scene \u2014 without having to steal it. He&amp;#039;s a pillar of deadpan dignity (not to mention one-sided conversational comedy later well-exploited by Bob Newhart). Here, with only half their dialogue audible to us, the superpower leaders exchange banal pleasantries, some minor ego massage, and a smidge of diplomatic testiness over who&amp;#039;s sorrier about their situation. It goes straight to Kubrick&amp;#039;s essential theme: the whole Cold War as one big preposterous pissing contest. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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