Michael J Fox names the greatest movie he’s ever seen: “That’s easy”
A fact is something that is defined as ‘known or proved to be true’, something that exists in reality and is a truth that can be backed with evidence. An example would be that humans require oxygen and water to exist. Or that apples grow on trees. Or that Back to the Future is the single greatest film of all time. Arguably, that last one is technically just my opinion, but given there is so much evidence to support it, I’m going to present it as unarguable. Annoyingly, it isn’t a fact that the star of the movie, one Michael J Fox, agrees with, but it’s still a fact nonetheless.
The reasons for Back to the Future being the greatest film ever made are numerous, probably too numerous to list all here, but let’s examine just a few of them. It has a time-travelling DeLorean that runs on plutonium, an eccentric, mad-haired inventor, a car chase involving a skateboard, a mother trying to copulate with her own son from the future, a baddie getting covered in manure over and over again, a quality rock/pop soundtrack with songs spanning 30 years, 1980s fashion nightmares, ‘50s television, Iranian terrorists, psychotic bald-headed teachers—what more do you need?
So perhaps Michael J Fox is simply being humble when he picks an entirely different film as his favourite of all time, where he once told USA Weekend, “That’s easy. Dr Strangelove. I think I saw it as a teenager in an art theatre in Vancouver”.
To Fox’s credit, Dr Strangelove is a fine, fine film. Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece from 1964 routinely features in authoritative ‘best movie ever’ lists and contains an incredible turn, or three, from Peter Sellers as an RAF officer, a German scientist and the president of the USA.
Born out of Kubrick’s fascination with the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union that almost came to a nuclear head in the early ’60s, Dr Strangelove was originally conceived of as a drama, but while writing it Kubrick found himself unable to escape the darkly comic overtones of the politics at play involving the potential end of the world, so he decided to simply embrace them.
As for the many memorable characters in the film, Fox loves how they simply exist solely for the time that the audience is watching it, to better serve the movie. He explains: “That’s something that Kubrick does through all his films, I find, is that no characters really have histories. It’s really about the moment, it’s about who they are in that moment. All the way through The Shining, and The Killing, or any of these films. It’s always who they are in the moment, and so you don’t have to explain these guys, you just have to enjoy them.”
Unfortunately (and deliberately), that aforementioned shift in comic tone wasn’t communicated to American western actor Slim Pickens, who was drafted in to play Air Force Major TJ “King” Kong, the larger-than-life B-52 aircraft commander. Kubrick wanted him to appear as straight as possible in the film, and simply told him the movie was a wartime drama. It was a trick the director repeated with George C Scott, who played General ‘Buck’ Turgidson.
Although Scott did at least know that the film was going to be a comedy, Kubrick told him to be increasingly over the top in his performance, promising that it was only for tests that would end up on the cutting room floor. Of course, no such thing happened, and his outlandish acting ended up in the finished film. It reportedly angered Scott so much that he refused to work with Kubrick again.
The subtlety of the comedy at play is something Fox loved about the film, noting, “Well, there’s no jokes in the movie. I mean, for all the puns and the funny names, it’s deadly serious”.
The filmmakers, however, had several concerns about how Dr Strangelove would be received by cinema goers, especially after the movie’s release had to be delayed due to the shooting of then-President John F Kennedy in November 1963. A couple of lines from the film even had to be changed to avoid sensitivity over the assassination, including substituting “Dallas” for “Vegas” and removing the phrase “Our beloved President”— although the latter was only uttered in a now infamous deleted scene featuring a chaotic pie fight.
In the end, despite Columbia Pictures’ fear that the film would come across as anti-American, Dr. Strangelove became a huge hit and a bona fide classic so influential that it affected real-world governmental policies and has been referenced by directors for decades.
It’s still not as good as Back to the Future, though.
