Dr. Strangelove
Pablo FerroAs an attack on Cold-war
hysteria, there was no more
biting comedy than Stanley
Kubrick’s 1964 doomsday film,
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb,in which an
overzealous U.S. general, Jack
D. Ripper, launches an A-
bomb attack against the
USSR. This send-up of
nightmare scenarios depicted
in the nuclear dramas Fail Safe
and On the Beachfiercely
lampooned the era’s hawkish fanaticism, suggesting that the world was
close to the brink of the unthinkable.
The film’s frightening absurdity is established in the very first frame
of the main title sequence designed by Pablo Ferro. As the ballad “Try a
Little Tenderness” plays in the background, a montage of B-52 bombers
engage in midair coitus with their refueling ships, underscoring the subplot
that sexuality is endemic to all human endeavor, especially the arms buildup.
Surprinted on these frames, the film’s title and credits are full-screen graffiti-
like scrawls comprised of thick and thin hand-drawn letters, unlike any
previous movie title. The sequence brilliantly satirizes the naïve pretense that
America was protected from nuclear attack by oversexed flying sentries. It
also contrasts beautifully with the film’s concluding montage, edited by Ferro,
which shows atomic bombs rhythmically detonated to the accompanying
lyric, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when... .”
This was not the first time that a movie title sequence added
narrative dimension to a film. During the brief history of modern film
titles, which began with Saul Bass’s 1954 Carmen Jones,a handful of
designers (among them, Maurice Binder, Steven Frankfurt, and Robert
Brownjohn) established film identities by compressing complex details into
signs, symbols, and metaphors. By the time that Ferro made his 1964 debut,
the stage (or rather the screen) had already been set for ambitious artistry.
Although the Dr. Strangelovetitles were a distinct departure from Bass’s292