With the lunatics back in charge of the asylum, this is the perfect time to revisit Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Made in 1964 at the height of the Cold War, Kubrick's paranoid comedy is darker than Robert Oppenheimer's conscience and an undeniable cinematic masterpiece.

In modern Hollywood, character acting often means little more than Eddie Murphy strapping on false breasts and squeezing himself into a latex fat suit, so it's startling to look back at the remarkable range and depth Peter Sellers brought to his three roles in Dr Strangelove. His RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake is a Goonishly stiff toff who finds himself faced with the task of talking Brigadier General Jack D Ripper (a brilliant Sterling Hayden) out of his plan to bomb Russia back to the Middle Ages; he plays beleaguered President Merkin Muffley as a fundamentally decent but weak man in the wrong place during the wrong nuclear war; while his crazed German boffin Dr Strangelove follows the mad scientist tradition established by Fritz Lang in Metropolis and provides the missing link between Michael Howard and Davros.

There are also great turns by George C Scott as the proto-Hawkish General Buck Turgidson and Slim Pickens as gung ho B-52 pilot Major TJ 'King' Kong. Kubrick co-scripted the film with novelist Terry Southern and the dialogue crackles like a Geiger counter, aided by improvised input from Sellers himself. As with all of his films, Kubrick meticulously planned and researched every last detail of the production, from the expressionist Pentagon War Room set to the arch sexual metaphors lurking beneath the movie's surface.

When, Cinema Paradiso-style, the last cinema burns and a few tattered frames are rescued from the flames, here's hoping that Slim Pickens' rodeo ride to oblivion will be among them.

Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (Sony Home Entertainment) is out now on Blu-ray.

Colin Houlson