I Shutter to Think #7: Weegee and Dr. Strangelove

His gritty crime-scene photos were the metaphorical equivalent of a car crash. You don’t want to look, but you can’t help it. You feel compelled to stare, to gawk.

Arthur Fellig aka Weegee was a notorious, freelance chronicler of the dark side of urban life in the New York City of the 1930s and ‘40s. His stark, black & white, and almost otherworldly images forced us to observe and even examine the worst of human nature, confirming then as now that we are not very evolved as a species.

Weegee used a simple Graflex Speed Graphic press camera, generally shooting at night against dark, flat backgrounds. His use of flashbulbs at close range, however, lent garish illumination to his subjects, often dead or wounded people or those brought to justice for killing them. He was literally an ambulance chaser, using a police-band shortwave radio to arrive at crime and accident scenes sometimes before the first responders. Truth be told, many of us learning photojournalism used police scanners and rode with the cops, too. It remains a common practice today.

I thought of Weegee last week while watching the Abraham Polonsky film, Force of Evil (1949). Some of the imagery seemed right out of the Weegee catalog. Weegee had more than a few Hollywood moments, too. For example, his first book of photographs, the best-seller Naked City (1945) served as inspiration for Mark Hellinger’s 1949 film noir blockbuster of the same name.

I was surprised to learn that years after Weegee was thought to be over the hill, Stanley Kubrick asked him to shoot stills behind the scenes of the film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Kubrick, who was coming off great successes with Spartacus (1960) and Lolita (1962), fancied himself a Weegee fan. Indeed, the teenage Kubrick had worked as a press photographer for Look Magazine. Kubrick insisted that Weegee recreate his crude, flashbulb-dominant style of previous decades.

On the Shepperton Studios sets, Peter Sellers grew increasingly intrigued by Weegee’s odd presence and distinct craftsmanship. Sellers certainly knew a thing or two about being odd. Interestingly, Sellers fixated on Weegee’s squeaky, high-pitched, Central European-accented voice and appropriated it as the voice for Dr. Strangelove himself. Not only did Kubrick get from Weegee more interesting images (four examples below) than anything Columbia Pictures’ house photographers would have produced, he also got from him one of the most distinctive character voices in Hollywood history.

Images courtesy of Pinterest/Olympia Orlova, dangerousminds.net