LUNCH WITH BOOKS: Wheeling Film Society Conversation - "Dr. Strangelove"

November 13, 2018

Friday, Nov. 9 - Towngate at 7:30
Free Screening: Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) - 95 mins.

Tuesday, Nov. 13 - Library at Noon 
Conversation: Dr. Strangelove

Last season, the Wheeling Film Society watched Kubrick’s 1968 epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its surprisingly hopeful vision of an alternative to the terminal aggression of the human species. Dr. Strangelove was the exceedingly black-comic film Kubrick made four years before 2001, a slapstick comedy about nuclear apocalypse. If you can’t imagine the end of life on Earth as a suitable subject for laughs, you haven’t seen the inspired Peter Sellers play three different roles (including the President of the United States AND the mastermind of the nuclear bomb), or the manic George C. Scott nearly steal the film as a lunatic general (six years before his Oscar for Patton). Made during the depths of the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove is also a film for our times.

Screenings and conversations

Wheeling Film Society screenings take place on Fridays at 7:30 pm at Oglebay Institute's Towngate Theatre, 2118 Market St. All Friday night screenings will be preceded by catered buffet cuisine as part of the popular “Dinner and a Movie” series; call Towngate to reserve. 

Wheeling Film Society conversations take place the following Tuesday at noon at Lunch With Books at the Ohio County Public Library, 52 16th St.

All programs – screenings and conversations – are free of admission charge. Attend as many or as few programs as your schedule allows. All are welcome, and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Parental Guidance is recommended for all screenings and conversations.

John Whitehead, professor of film studies at Wheeling Jesuit University and author of Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood (2011) and Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation (2014), serves as host for the screenings and conversations.