As many of you cinema-geek sorts probably know, the original ending of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was a pie fight that broke out in the war room. There are different reasons given for why it was cut–the above five minute doc claims the studio was nervous because Kennedy had just been assassinated and President Muffley in the film is assassinated by a pie. I’d like to think it was cut for a different reason; Stanley Kubrick realized that it was a dopey way to end a masterpiece and made the wise choice to end on that wonderfully abrupt moment of Strangelove regaining the ability to walk. Sellers final line–‘Mein Feurer–I can walk!’– is a moment of screenwriting/acting/directing genius. Really it’s an editors moment–it makes no real sense except for the sense it makes in the world of the film. (If you like sentences like that last one, you probably need to get rid of a lot of the mediocre film theory books on your shelves). Anyway, the stills from the pie-fight scene make it look like a spectacularly unsuccessful sequence–the actors are all laughing, having a good time etc. forgetting that for pie-fights to be funny they need to be done in dead seriousness. Even that doesn’t help them much, in my opinion. They’re a relic belonging to the Keystone Kops era, an echo of the past that people think they remember being funny. The footage from Strangelove apparently has been preserved in the British Film Institute Kubrick archive but requires permission from his estate to view it. I myself won’t be asking. I adore the movie frame-by-frame just as it is.