Stanley Kubrick’s painfully funny take on Cold War anxiety is one of the fiercest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood.

The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles:

Royal Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general (Sterling Hayden); the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded U.S. President Merkin Muffley, who must deliver the very bad news to the Soviet premier; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound presidential adviser with a Nazi past.

Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, Dr. Strangelove, or:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist.