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For those of a certain age the name Gary Powers will provoke cold war memories. He was shot down whilst flying at 70,000 feet over Russia in May 1960 whilst on a recce. At the time I was 22 and for a while thought this may be the end of the world. The new Bridge of Spies film is a very good factudrama of the events. Saw it yesterday.
Today I watched a DVD of Dr Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and Love the bomb. Trific film with Peter Sellars in multiple roles as upper class RAF twit, US president and mad scientist. Played for laughs and a great send up of American typecasts. Creepy fiction based around facts.
Currently residing in Pinner, Centre of the Universe.
If Peter Sellers hadn't fallen ill he would have played Major Kong as well.so they brought in Slim Pickens - his first ever time out of the States. Edgy and dodgy times indeed.They never tell you those U2 Soviet overflights were carried out by british pilots as well.
Yes, I remember them shooting down Gary Powers in his U2 high- flying spyplane. Traded him a few years later, didn't they? That film sounds good. Scary period. Portland Spy Ring, Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis. All peaceful now, of course, US, Russia, Britain .
And Dr Strangelove, what can you say? Hilarious all the way through, with an appropriately lunatic ending, Peter Sellars - didn't realise he would've been Kong as well (nor about the Brits doing U2 flights) - and Burt Lancaster trying to hang on to his essence.
Aren't we all.
[Post edited 10 Dec 2015 0:31]
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Bridge of Spies/Dr Strangelove on 08:17 - Dec 10 with 10992 views
I was staying near the actual Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam a couple of years ago. Interesting fact is that they still haven't reunited the public transport system across the old East - West border. So you get the old East Berlin tram route to the bridge, where it terminates, then walk across the bridge and catch the West Berlin bus route on the other side. Some of the Potsdam tram routes are still using 30-year-old trams from the cold war era, too. A quirky reminder of the old days.
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Bridge of Spies/Dr Strangelove on 08:29 - Dec 10 with 10980 views
"Peter Sellers was also cast as Maj. T.J. "King" Kong, but he had trouble developing a Texas accent. When Sellers broke his ankle, Stanley Kubrick decided to cast another actor who naturally fit the role. John Wayne never responded. Bonanza (1959) star Dan Blocker, declined the role because of the script's progressive political content. Kubrick cast Slim Pickens because of his work on One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Pickens was not told that the movie was a comedy and was only shown the script for scenes he was in. As a result, Pickens played the role "straight"."
Well that's your considered opinion - I thought Failsafe captured better the mood of the times.I enjoyed Strangelove immensely.My old dad's friend Peter Bull was in it as the Soviet ambassador,lovely feller Peter great convivial company.If you look carefully they cut the bit just where Bull cracked up as Sellers was doing his wheelchair antics.
edit - I just saw that mentioned in your Wiki link.Dad was also the executor of Peter's will,most of it went to Peter's young boyfriend.He also had a villa on a Greek island which was on the "tourist trail" of pleasure boats.He'd be sitting out on the patio and would hear the tour guides saying (through megaphones) "and there we have the home of Hollywood actor Peter Bull" and seeing the tourists turning to each other to mouth the word "who?".
lee harvey oswald insisted when he defected to russia, that he met gary powers, LHO did marry a daughter of a kgb general too....very complex story altogether. LHO worked with radar in japan for the marines, "race car" was the code name for the u2 new spy planes flying from japan, so very likley lho had contact, he defects and soon after powers is shot down? oswald was the real international man of mystery, will we ever know what he was really doing?
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Bridge of Spies/Dr Strangelove on 12:04 - Dec 10 with 10865 views
Thanks Blob I for one will have a watch of Failsafe having never seen it. Strangelove is one of the all-time greats. But this Bridge of Spies business. I saw it and have to say I was very underwhelmed. Where was all this crackling suspense I read about? Thought it was very polished but utterly predictable, and I knew nothing of the real story in advance. Give me The Spy That Came In From The Cold any day.
Ahhh right,wasn't seeing things then. One last memory about Peter Bull.He was the German riverboat captain in The African Queen.He'd had a poster made up which was on one wall in his old London flat....The African Queen starring ,in massive letters,Peter Bull and underneath in tiny script Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.
I haven't really been knocked out by anything Spielberg has done except Duel.It's always been a triumph of style over substance - too many shrieking American children as in the appalling remake of War Of The Worlds.
Never got Strangelove. Dion't know why as I love Sellers' stuff. I think I might have been too young the first time I watched it, and never got over the disappointment. That can happen.
"The opposite of love, after all, is not hate, but indifference."
Do you like Kubrick? The satire in Strangelove is brutal. The buffoons and incompetents that run the world will actually achieve some kind of lascivious nirvana because they f*cked up and accidentally destroyed the rest of the world.
I do like Kubrik, a lot. And I like Strangelove but it's more admiration than love. I just don't connect with it as much as I feel I should, if that makes sense.
"The opposite of love, after all, is not hate, but indifference."
Peter Sellers was an amazing mimic,the Goon Show and a couple of the Goerge Martin produced albums and the way he could instantly switch between voices.Some of the sketches were done in one take.
I revelled in the delicious supporting cast. Blob will regale you with Peter Bull stories ("Gentlemen, no fighting in the War Room!"), while I liked George C. Scott as the randy, stupid, gung-ho general and the terse, monotonic (almost film-noir) Sterling Hayden whose greatest fear seemed to be a communist conspiracy for fluoride to interfere with his reproductive fluids.
The funny thing is I got to know a former German/Soviet scientist called "Otto"back in the seventies and he told me the Doomsday device mooted in Strangelove was a distinct possibility.Otto was an aerobatics enthusiast with a limited vocabulary which mainly consisted of "loop the loop,Cuban Loop,yes I fly with them".He told me you took a hydrogen bomb and literally painted Cobalt on the casing,"very dirty."It was supposed to go off automatically if a nuclear device got detonated over Moscow,but I think the idea of an autonomous weapon spooked everyone.May have been the inspiration for "Colossus - The Forbin Project" and others.
It has benefits. Provided you built something devastating or dirty enough to stuff the globe, it means:
1) You don't need the expense or uncertainty of a delivery system; 2) It is essentially 'pacifist' - it can't be used as an offensive, first-strike weapon.
The problem comes in when the trigger conditions get unexpectedly replicated, not even by a 'Strangelove' scenario, but such benign circumstances as power failure or natural disaster. Murphy will always find a way.
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so they brought in Slim Pickens - his first ever time out of the States. 
. 
Not worth bothering with then.