An Ending Fit for Armageddon
The ending of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the most audacious in cinema history. As Vera Lynn sings the impossibly sentimental World War II ballad “We’ll Meet Again,” the screen fills with majestic, yet
horrifying, mushroom clouds. The Doomsday Machine has been triggered, and humanity is extinct. It’s a moment of pure, bleak, satirical genius that perfectly caps off a film that finds humor in the logic of mutually assured destruction. For decades, this ending has been lauded as a masterstroke of dark comedy. But it was the result of a last-minute decision, replacing a finale that was even more anarchic and far more slapstick.
The Great Custard Pie Battle
Originally, Stanley Kubrick filmed a long, elaborate sequence to close his masterpiece. It began after the Russian Ambassador, De Sadeski, is caught trying to photograph the War Room's “Big Board.” When General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) moves to search him, the ambassador grabs a custard pie from a vast buffet table and hurls it. He misses Turgidson but scores a direct hit on the mild-mannered President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). The sight of their leader getting pied in the face sends the generals and politicians into a frenzy. What followed was a full-scale food fight, a chaotic ballet of pastry-based warfare. Kubrick shot the scene, which was intended as a metaphor for battle itself, with the actors devolving into childlike glee. The War Room, a pristine monument to military seriousness, was reduced to a sticky, cream-filled mess as the world’s leaders built castles out of pie filling.
A 'Disaster of Homeric Proportions'
So why did this wild scene end up on the cutting room floor? Two main reasons are consistently cited, one creative and one tragically historical. First, Kubrick himself felt the tone was wrong. He later stated that the pie fight was “too farcical and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film.” He observed that the actors were smiling and laughing during the takes, which undermined the deadpan seriousness he wanted. What was intended as a grim metaphor for war came off as a joyous, silly food fight, which he reportedly called “a disaster of Homeric proportions.” The scene simply broke the delicate tonal balance of the movie.
A National Tragedy's Unforeseen Impact
The other, more sensitive reason relates to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The film was in its final editing stages, with a press screening scheduled for that very day. In the pie fight scene, after President Muffley is hit, General Turgidson was to exclaim, “Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!” Following the national trauma of Kennedy’s death, that line became horrifically resonant and deeply inappropriate. The studio, Columbia Pictures, was reportedly horrified, fearing it would offend the grieving Kennedy family. The film's release was pushed to January 1964, and another line that mentioned a character could have “a pretty good weekend in Dallas” was overdubbed to “Vegas” for the same reason.
The Accidental Masterpiece
While some production stills and a few precious seconds of footage exist, the full pie fight sequence has been effectively buried, with the footage reportedly residing in the British Film Institute archives under lock and key. In its place, Kubrick and his team crafted the haunting montage of nuclear explosions that we know today. The decision, born from a mix of artistic dissatisfaction and a tragic historical event, inadvertently created a more powerful and enduring finale. The slapstick chaos of a pie fight would have been funny, but the quiet, beautiful horror of the mushroom clouds set to Vera Lynn’s song is unforgettable. It cemented the film’s status not just as a comedy, but as a deeply cynical and prophetic work of art that captured the terrifying absurdity of the Cold War.
