Several of you youngsters have added comments here to the effect you wanted to know how this film was received in 1965. Here is the lowdown.
It was skewered by the few uptight critics who got it, and passed off as sheer nonsense by the ones who didn't. It had a big, big promotional sendoff on television and in the newspapers, featuring its over-the-top ending that is commented on elsewhere in these archives. That, in fact, is the single characteristic placing this film in the history books as one of the first real anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-bourgeois relics of popular culture just at the cusp of an entirely new epoch.
I am still dumbfounded that it went generally over the heads of most people in 1965. (Well, at least I am bemused by it.) "Dr. Strangelove" received much the same treatment. It was as if the country was still on overdrive after the assassination of President Kennedy, numb and oblivious as to what was about to happen. Only the very young, influenced as they were by the Beatles and other revolutionary pop music icons, seemed to have a clue. But they were powerless within the political vacuum that led up to the war in Vietnam, and by the time all the turmoil of 1968 came along, this movie had been long forgotten.
This is one fan, however, who still regards this wonderful satire as one of the top ten of the 20th century, right up there with the best of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Saturday Night Live (in its better days, of course).
