A Clockwork Orange. (18.)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick.1971
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke, Anthony Sharp, James Marcus, Miriam Karlin, Godfrey Quigley and Philip Stone. Released by Warner Brothers Premium Collection. Blu-ray/ DVD/ Digital Download. 136 mins
A Clockwork Orange is to the seventies what Sgt Pepper was to the sixties. It is the shutters being slammed down on all that hippy peace and love malarkey; a rain on all our parades, but so gleeful you grin like an idiot as it strips away every shred of human decency. Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's tale of youth violence and state oppression makes it into a thrilling horror comedy, a saucy end-of-the-pier variety show full of top turns and overseen by an extraordinary MC in Malcolm McDowell's Alex DeLarge. It is a nightmare vision of humanity and a dream of what cinema can be; one of the most inventive and thrilling of all movies. Most artists would trade their right yarble (if they had any yarbles) to make something half as accomplished. Still, you'd hate to have it on your conscience.
Ah, Clockie, still shocking after all these years. The late sixties/ early seventies weren't short of transgressive films but even the hysteria of The Devils, The Exorcist, Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch don't carry the clout of the Orange. The culture was all over the place back then. Just seven years earlier, The Pawnbroker was the first Hollywood film to feature female nudity in over forty years. From that inch given, many miles were quickly taken and it is hardly surprising that people didn't really know how to deal with the explosion of sex and violence that followed. Into this chaos comes Stanley with his adaptation of a little book he'd read that would be the definitive statement on youth, sex and violence.
You shouldn't speak of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, without recognising that it was Anthony Burgess' first, and his Clockwork Orange was equally remarkable. There's a quote from Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook, “I hate reading. I can’t stand it. I only ever read two books. One about the Kray brothers. And A Clockwork Orange.” Which is an amazing statement, like saying you've only read The Da Vinci Code and Finnegans Wake. It's a slim volume, around 130 pages but the language is a real challenge, a vivid linguistic collage of Russian, Romany and cockney rhyming slang. And it's nasty too, possibly even more so than the film. The perpetrator and victims are that bit younger. But it's a book, isn't it? The process of imaging what is being communicated by those words and that strange new language is a bit different from having it all laid out in front of you.
I believe if my house was on fire, the only material object I'd really want to save would be my paperback copy of Clockwork Orange, bought secondhand for 50p, because the pop art cover of Alex with a single cog for an eye is so iconic. Few things can take me back to my schooldays as that book. Clockie (yes, shamefully I do still on occasion refer to it as Clockie) was an obsession for me. I was of the generation that couldn't see it. I had to wait some ten years to finally get it on pirate video. The picture was blurred and the colours were a mess but even in that state, it surpassed my wildest expectations.
The story is a nihilist Dickensian fable, divided into three equal parts. In the first, schoolboy Alex (McDowell) and his gang of Droogs run wild committing a series of rapes, beatings, robberies and finally, a murder. In the middle part, he is in prison and volunteering for the Ludovico treatment which brainwashes him into being repulsed be evil acts. The third act is a reversal of the first with the now powerless Alex being set upon by all the people he victimised in the first.
Thus it is a parable about the importance of free will, a statement that the ability to choose between good and evil is sacrosanct to society and worth paying a high price for. The argument would perhaps be more potent if the audience had any free will, any freedom of choice, but we have little option than to side with Alex because he's the one with the narration, the smartest tongue and the only one who has any life in them.
And McDowell is so staggeringly good as Alex. So charming and inventive. However bad things get he is unbowed, always ready to spring back from adversity. His Alex is a music hall composite, a cheeky chappie set loose in a world full of stooges and buffoons. How could you not identify with him? Everybody else is a sap or as evil as him. Dignity is in short supply in A Clockwork Orange. Everybody has outlandish futuristic costumes. It's like some totalitarian fancy dress society where power is enforced by making everyone look ridiculous. Embodied in this vision is one of the most dangerous and destructive fantasies. The Matrix delusion that you are the only thing that is real, that nobody else really counts. Everybody else is basically fodder.
The film is funny, by far the funniest of Kubrick's films, way more than Dr Strangelove. It is like a frenzied pop art composite of a Benny Hill chase scenes, with nubile big boobed women constantly falling out of their clothes and caricature authority figures wagging their fingers at a Robin Askwith figure who is running rings them. The last line "I was cured alright" is chillingly hilarious and spot on, in a way that "Mein Fuhrer, I can walk" can't match. Of all the other top turns, Patrick Magee as the writer is my favourite. In take after take, Kubrick got this master interpreter of the work of Samuel Beckett to go large, larger than he probably imagined possible. Anytime I watch this film I treasure his delivery of the line, "Food alright? Try the wine?" which make me laugh harder than most witty one-liners in other films.
Watching it today you can only gasp, and wonder what on earth all concerned thought they were doing. Pairing McDowell's free-spirited irreverence and Kubrick cold eye for the perfect image was a recipe for disaster. Kubrick always encouraged improvisation and experimentation on his set: he doesn't know what he wants but he knows what he doesn't want, is the mantra repeated by collaborators in the documentaries included in the Extras. Here it seems like everybody was just egging each other on to go to ever wilder extremes.
Of the many unforgivable things in Clockwork Orange, probably the worst is what is done to Singin' in the Rain. A spur of the moment idea while they were rehearsing, the song becomes the soundtrack to the film's most disturbing scene, the home invasion scene rape scene at the writer's home. A carefree Alex sings it as he and his gang systematically strip their victims of their humanity. Singin' In the Rain is one of cinema's most gloriously uplifting numbers because it's showbizzy but not sappy and the emotions were real. Here though the happy refrains become cues for slaps and kickings and the line "I'm ready for love," becomes a taunt, a rape threat. Oh, it works, it really works, but really f*** you misters Kubrick and McDowell.
That whole scene is a microcosm of what is wonderful and wretched in the film. The cast spent days on the set working out the most visually compelling way to stage a rape scene is ghoulish, but you have to say they succeed. The scene contains I believe one of the most definitive camera angles in any film. When the writer (Magee) has been knocked to the floor and is forced to look on as his, still standing, young wife (Adrienne Corri) is assaulted and stripped naked, the film cuts to an angle down near his eye level, just above the floor. The angle emphasizes his powerlessness but not with any sympathy; rather it emphasises The Droogs and their power, as well as making the rape more of a spectacle.
The film doesn't just glorify violence, it makes it euphoric. It is a great irony that the film indoctrinates Alex to associate violence with Beethoven because that's exactly what it does to the audience. All its musical cues - Beethoven's 9th, Rossini's Thieving Magpie, and especially the speeded up version of the William Tell overture - have become inextricably linked to this film.
Like all black comedies, it gives you the illusory security that because you're in on the joke, you'll be alright. It's the ones that don't get it who will the victims. What shocks in Clockwork Orange is how far a gap it puts between the audience and the victims.
That gap can be seen in the way the film was defended. After the release author Burgess, in Kubrick's absence, was often consulted, remarking that whenever two nuns were raped in Berwick upon Tweed he'd be asked to comment on this latest Clockwork crime. A nice line but hugely dismissive of the suffering of others. When Kubrick himself was interviewed after the film's release by Michel Ciment, his defence of the film was to run off a list of awards that the film had won, say that it had been highly praised by Fellini, Bunuel and Kurosawa, and conclude that “the film has been accepted as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm.” (It's worth remembering that this affront to decency was nominated for four Oscars including Best Film.)
Then around 15 months after its UK release, when it was still in cinemas, Kubrick had Warner Brothers remove it from British cinemas, which is where it stayed until his death in 1999, because of all the death threats and stalkings that the film had provoked. I don't want to sound like Michael Gove (who would have looked very at home among the film's gallery of slimy caricatures in the film) but though all the experts and their studies have proved that there is no direct correlation between screen violence and actual violence, we all know that deep down there must be. Maybe copycat crimes that were a direct result of the film were a tabloid creation, but surely the film must have added something to the culture that has not been helpful. Among the drip, drip of desensitizing violent imagery, this was a bigger splash.
If we're honest, which we very rarely are, you'd probably conclude that this was a work of art, a very great work of art, that did do social harm. Of course, I'm OK, I can watch it, but I'm not sure about you lot. It was probably better when it was banned and this was something you had to put yourself out to see. At least then you experienced the weight of what you were doing. Now it's just like any other film. I'm offended that it can be shown on ITV4 when they haven't got a Steven Seagal film to fill the schedule.
The Extras.
There is a selection of documentaries on the main disc (A making of/ about the controversy/ a recollection by McDowell) and a commentary by Malcolm McDowell. Most of these date back to a 2006 home release. By far the most interesting one is The Return of A Clockwork Orange, produced by Channel 4 in 2003 when the film was at last back in cinemas. The range of contributors (critics, directors, authors) is wide and all top quality. Everybody has something relevant and thoughtful to say; not just blindly praise it but thinking critically about its impact.
There is also a separate blu-ray featuring two full-length pieces.
Stanley Kubrick, A Life in Pictures. A 2 hours twenty minutes trawl through his career which, I think, originally appeared on the box set of Kubrick films. It's an uncritical, film by film study of his life which rattles through the early ones a bit too quickly but is very thorough from Strangelove onwards. Narrated by Cruise and directed by his brother in law and producer Jan Harlin, it is focused on replacing the mad recluse image with that of a loving family man who made blockbuster movies with a small team more or less from the security of his own home.
O, Lucky Malcolm. Didn't really expect to sit through an 85 minute documentary on Malcolm McDowell but this is much better than you'd expect. Obviously, it rather runs out of steam once the end of the seventies is reached and the Lindsey Anderson films and Time After Time are do,e but McDowell is a great raconteur with some hilarious stories.
Other Kubrick reviews:
The Shining
2001: A Space Odyssey
Fear And Desire.
Barry Lyndon
Dr strangelove
Directed by Stanley Kubrick.1971
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke, Anthony Sharp, James Marcus, Miriam Karlin, Godfrey Quigley and Philip Stone. Released by Warner Brothers Premium Collection. Blu-ray/ DVD/ Digital Download. 136 mins
A Clockwork Orange is to the seventies what Sgt Pepper was to the sixties. It is the shutters being slammed down on all that hippy peace and love malarkey; a rain on all our parades, but so gleeful you grin like an idiot as it strips away every shred of human decency. Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's tale of youth violence and state oppression makes it into a thrilling horror comedy, a saucy end-of-the-pier variety show full of top turns and overseen by an extraordinary MC in Malcolm McDowell's Alex DeLarge. It is a nightmare vision of humanity and a dream of what cinema can be; one of the most inventive and thrilling of all movies. Most artists would trade their right yarble (if they had any yarbles) to make something half as accomplished. Still, you'd hate to have it on your conscience.
Ah, Clockie, still shocking after all these years. The late sixties/ early seventies weren't short of transgressive films but even the hysteria of The Devils, The Exorcist, Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch don't carry the clout of the Orange. The culture was all over the place back then. Just seven years earlier, The Pawnbroker was the first Hollywood film to feature female nudity in over forty years. From that inch given, many miles were quickly taken and it is hardly surprising that people didn't really know how to deal with the explosion of sex and violence that followed. Into this chaos comes Stanley with his adaptation of a little book he'd read that would be the definitive statement on youth, sex and violence.
You shouldn't speak of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, without recognising that it was Anthony Burgess' first, and his Clockwork Orange was equally remarkable. There's a quote from Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook, “I hate reading. I can’t stand it. I only ever read two books. One about the Kray brothers. And A Clockwork Orange.” Which is an amazing statement, like saying you've only read The Da Vinci Code and Finnegans Wake. It's a slim volume, around 130 pages but the language is a real challenge, a vivid linguistic collage of Russian, Romany and cockney rhyming slang. And it's nasty too, possibly even more so than the film. The perpetrator and victims are that bit younger. But it's a book, isn't it? The process of imaging what is being communicated by those words and that strange new language is a bit different from having it all laid out in front of you.
I believe if my house was on fire, the only material object I'd really want to save would be my paperback copy of Clockwork Orange, bought secondhand for 50p, because the pop art cover of Alex with a single cog for an eye is so iconic. Few things can take me back to my schooldays as that book. Clockie (yes, shamefully I do still on occasion refer to it as Clockie) was an obsession for me. I was of the generation that couldn't see it. I had to wait some ten years to finally get it on pirate video. The picture was blurred and the colours were a mess but even in that state, it surpassed my wildest expectations.
The story is a nihilist Dickensian fable, divided into three equal parts. In the first, schoolboy Alex (McDowell) and his gang of Droogs run wild committing a series of rapes, beatings, robberies and finally, a murder. In the middle part, he is in prison and volunteering for the Ludovico treatment which brainwashes him into being repulsed be evil acts. The third act is a reversal of the first with the now powerless Alex being set upon by all the people he victimised in the first.
Thus it is a parable about the importance of free will, a statement that the ability to choose between good and evil is sacrosanct to society and worth paying a high price for. The argument would perhaps be more potent if the audience had any free will, any freedom of choice, but we have little option than to side with Alex because he's the one with the narration, the smartest tongue and the only one who has any life in them.
And McDowell is so staggeringly good as Alex. So charming and inventive. However bad things get he is unbowed, always ready to spring back from adversity. His Alex is a music hall composite, a cheeky chappie set loose in a world full of stooges and buffoons. How could you not identify with him? Everybody else is a sap or as evil as him. Dignity is in short supply in A Clockwork Orange. Everybody has outlandish futuristic costumes. It's like some totalitarian fancy dress society where power is enforced by making everyone look ridiculous. Embodied in this vision is one of the most dangerous and destructive fantasies. The Matrix delusion that you are the only thing that is real, that nobody else really counts. Everybody else is basically fodder.
The film is funny, by far the funniest of Kubrick's films, way more than Dr Strangelove. It is like a frenzied pop art composite of a Benny Hill chase scenes, with nubile big boobed women constantly falling out of their clothes and caricature authority figures wagging their fingers at a Robin Askwith figure who is running rings them. The last line "I was cured alright" is chillingly hilarious and spot on, in a way that "Mein Fuhrer, I can walk" can't match. Of all the other top turns, Patrick Magee as the writer is my favourite. In take after take, Kubrick got this master interpreter of the work of Samuel Beckett to go large, larger than he probably imagined possible. Anytime I watch this film I treasure his delivery of the line, "Food alright? Try the wine?" which make me laugh harder than most witty one-liners in other films.
Watching it today you can only gasp, and wonder what on earth all concerned thought they were doing. Pairing McDowell's free-spirited irreverence and Kubrick cold eye for the perfect image was a recipe for disaster. Kubrick always encouraged improvisation and experimentation on his set: he doesn't know what he wants but he knows what he doesn't want, is the mantra repeated by collaborators in the documentaries included in the Extras. Here it seems like everybody was just egging each other on to go to ever wilder extremes.
Of the many unforgivable things in Clockwork Orange, probably the worst is what is done to Singin' in the Rain. A spur of the moment idea while they were rehearsing, the song becomes the soundtrack to the film's most disturbing scene, the home invasion scene rape scene at the writer's home. A carefree Alex sings it as he and his gang systematically strip their victims of their humanity. Singin' In the Rain is one of cinema's most gloriously uplifting numbers because it's showbizzy but not sappy and the emotions were real. Here though the happy refrains become cues for slaps and kickings and the line "I'm ready for love," becomes a taunt, a rape threat. Oh, it works, it really works, but really f*** you misters Kubrick and McDowell.
That whole scene is a microcosm of what is wonderful and wretched in the film. The cast spent days on the set working out the most visually compelling way to stage a rape scene is ghoulish, but you have to say they succeed. The scene contains I believe one of the most definitive camera angles in any film. When the writer (Magee) has been knocked to the floor and is forced to look on as his, still standing, young wife (Adrienne Corri) is assaulted and stripped naked, the film cuts to an angle down near his eye level, just above the floor. The angle emphasizes his powerlessness but not with any sympathy; rather it emphasises The Droogs and their power, as well as making the rape more of a spectacle.
The film doesn't just glorify violence, it makes it euphoric. It is a great irony that the film indoctrinates Alex to associate violence with Beethoven because that's exactly what it does to the audience. All its musical cues - Beethoven's 9th, Rossini's Thieving Magpie, and especially the speeded up version of the William Tell overture - have become inextricably linked to this film.
Like all black comedies, it gives you the illusory security that because you're in on the joke, you'll be alright. It's the ones that don't get it who will the victims. What shocks in Clockwork Orange is how far a gap it puts between the audience and the victims.
That gap can be seen in the way the film was defended. After the release author Burgess, in Kubrick's absence, was often consulted, remarking that whenever two nuns were raped in Berwick upon Tweed he'd be asked to comment on this latest Clockwork crime. A nice line but hugely dismissive of the suffering of others. When Kubrick himself was interviewed after the film's release by Michel Ciment, his defence of the film was to run off a list of awards that the film had won, say that it had been highly praised by Fellini, Bunuel and Kurosawa, and conclude that “the film has been accepted as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm.” (It's worth remembering that this affront to decency was nominated for four Oscars including Best Film.)
Then around 15 months after its UK release, when it was still in cinemas, Kubrick had Warner Brothers remove it from British cinemas, which is where it stayed until his death in 1999, because of all the death threats and stalkings that the film had provoked. I don't want to sound like Michael Gove (who would have looked very at home among the film's gallery of slimy caricatures in the film) but though all the experts and their studies have proved that there is no direct correlation between screen violence and actual violence, we all know that deep down there must be. Maybe copycat crimes that were a direct result of the film were a tabloid creation, but surely the film must have added something to the culture that has not been helpful. Among the drip, drip of desensitizing violent imagery, this was a bigger splash.
If we're honest, which we very rarely are, you'd probably conclude that this was a work of art, a very great work of art, that did do social harm. Of course, I'm OK, I can watch it, but I'm not sure about you lot. It was probably better when it was banned and this was something you had to put yourself out to see. At least then you experienced the weight of what you were doing. Now it's just like any other film. I'm offended that it can be shown on ITV4 when they haven't got a Steven Seagal film to fill the schedule.
The Extras.
There is a selection of documentaries on the main disc (A making of/ about the controversy/ a recollection by McDowell) and a commentary by Malcolm McDowell. Most of these date back to a 2006 home release. By far the most interesting one is The Return of A Clockwork Orange, produced by Channel 4 in 2003 when the film was at last back in cinemas. The range of contributors (critics, directors, authors) is wide and all top quality. Everybody has something relevant and thoughtful to say; not just blindly praise it but thinking critically about its impact.
There is also a separate blu-ray featuring two full-length pieces.
Stanley Kubrick, A Life in Pictures. A 2 hours twenty minutes trawl through his career which, I think, originally appeared on the box set of Kubrick films. It's an uncritical, film by film study of his life which rattles through the early ones a bit too quickly but is very thorough from Strangelove onwards. Narrated by Cruise and directed by his brother in law and producer Jan Harlin, it is focused on replacing the mad recluse image with that of a loving family man who made blockbuster movies with a small team more or less from the security of his own home.
O, Lucky Malcolm. Didn't really expect to sit through an 85 minute documentary on Malcolm McDowell but this is much better than you'd expect. Obviously, it rather runs out of steam once the end of the seventies is reached and the Lindsey Anderson films and Time After Time are do,e but McDowell is a great raconteur with some hilarious stories.
Other Kubrick reviews:
The Shining
2001: A Space Odyssey
Fear And Desire.
Barry Lyndon
Dr strangelove
