Today, few people remember Peter George’s novel Red Alert, but everyone knows the windy-titled movie Stanley Kubrick made from it. (George co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick and Terry Southern.) It’s a bizarre title if you think about it. Even though Peter Sellers plays three roles, there’s no protagonist in this satirical ensemble picture, so who’s the “I”? Certainly not Strangelove, whose eerie poise, lugubrious German accent, and brutally pragmatic realpolitik suggested Henry Kissinger before anyone had ever heard of him, He seems never to have endured a moment of worry or lack of love for the bomb. At any rate, the title didn’t stop the nuclear satire from becoming a modern classic, perhaps because the character’s name offered an easy, short version. That’s a good lesson; think how hard it would have been for 2006 movie with the subtitle Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan to become a smash if we couldn’t all shorten it to Borat.
