From The Movie Snob:

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (C). I saw this movie for the first time last night at a midnight movie, and it was a strange and jarring experience from the outset. Before the movie, they showed a vintage Mr. Magoo cartoon that was as painfully unfunny as anything I have seen. I guess that’s what they did instead of showing previews back in those days. The movie itself did have a few laughs, but the humor was of the darkest, most painful sort. Released only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie’s premise is that an American general (named Jack D. Ripper) has gone off the deep end and irrevocably ordered 30-some-odd nuclear bombers to attack the U.S.S.R. The big-guy general, himself a paranoid psychotic played by George C. Scott, has to give the president the bad news and theoretically help find a solution. Peter Sellers gives a triple performance as the well-meaning but ineffectual president, the weird ex-Nazi-turned-American-scientist Dr. Strangelove, and the only semi-normal person in this movie, a British officer who tries to convince General Ripper to recall the bombers. I’m not sure what the point of the movie was, since the Russians, though mostly off-screen, are portrayed as being as inept as the Americans. It was suspenseful but disturbing, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.