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A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Almost thirty years after its initial (and X-rated) release, Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange still strikes me as ferocious and original — a comedy and social satire so black that it still has the ability to make one squirm with its portrayal of a government’s reaction to a society beset by violence. But Kubrick’s exhilarating violence — it has the sharp zap of pop art by Roy Liechtenstein — is never gratuitous. Nonetheless, it proves more disturbing than more explicitly violent films because the perpetrator of the violence — a young thug named Little Alex (Malcom McDowell) is an utterly charming young man when compared to the swinish, agenda-driven "good" people that surround him. In fact, Kubrick tries to make Little Alex a saint, and that’s precisely what makes this film so extraordinary, and why it still has the power to shock and disturb. |
 A Clockwork Orange (1971) Starring: Malcom McDowell Directed by:Stanley Kubrick VHS Tape - $16.99 Rated R |
Little Alex is the leader of a gang. His droogs Pete, Georgie, and Dim — wearing immaculate white work suits, bowlers and Doc Martens — pass their leisure time by talking in quirky Russian slang (Burgess’ book has a Nadsat glossary), beating up drunks, stealing cars, and raping women. The gang’s leader, Alex clearly enjoys the control and power he has over his droogs. After raping the wife (Adrienne Corri) of a writer (Patrick Magee), Alex pursues a menage à trois (at mach three and to synthesized Tchaikovsky), leaving Georgie (James Marcus) and Dim (Warren Clarke) to consider revolt. The gang raids the home of a rich eccentric health farm owner (Miriam Karlin), but the robbery goes wrong and Alex kills her — with a huge pop art penis. Alex is smashed in the face by his mutinous droogs and left for the police.
Alex is sent to prison, where he gets on the good side of the prison chaplain by reading the Bible (and having some violent and erotic biblical fantasies), but hears of an experimental technique that cures criminal tendencies and gets one out of prison. When Alex makes a spectacle of himself in front of the new Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp), he is chosen as a perfect candidate for the brand new Ludivico Technique. The Technique, a kind of Pavlovian aversion therapy, includes having Alex strapped to a chair, eyes clamped open, being forced to watch Nazi atrocity films while his system is pumped with an experimental serum. It works, despite a new and unforeseen aversion to Beethoven, and after a particularly humiliating incident where he is tortured and sexually taunted, Alex is sent home a cured man.
But home isn’t what it used to be for Little Alex; Mum and Dad have taken in a boarder who is none too happy to see the return of the prodigal son. His ex-droogs Georgie and Dim are now policemen, and they take Little Alex out to an abandoned field to beat him senseless. Half dead, Alex makes his way to the nearest house, which turns out to be the very home of the writer whose wife he raped. The writer has been waiting for a chance to expose the corrupt government in his subversive writing. What better way than to exploit Alex’s new crippling aversion to violence, sex, and Beethoven, torture Alex to suicide, and blame the government while exacting personal revenge?
In the end, Alex, thanks to the Minister, is restored to his former self and all is set right. The film poses a serious moral dilemma: at what point is behavior modification a transgression of personal freedom? Kubrick offers no answers, and his film was pilloried because of it. But Burgess’ novel offers no answer either, a fact many of Kubrick’s critics conveniently ignored. Kubrick was also taken to task for being "cold" and "unemotional," but this, my friends, is SATIRE with a big S, not a Frank Capra film. Most of the characters are wildly exaggerated (see Alex’s probation officer Mr. Deltoid who ends every sentence with a ‘yes?’ and Alex’s wonderfully fickle parents), and Alex’s duplicitous smile carries such a halo of goodness with it in the film’s second half that I am always surprised by those who take this film at face value.
Visually, A Clockwork Orange is among the most impressive films ever made. There is not one uninteresting camera shot in the film, and Kubrick’s use of classical music — from Beethoven to Rossini and Elgar — is without equal. As Alex, Malcom McDowell is perfect in a role that very well could have gone to Mick Jagger (the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham once owned the book rights and intended a film of it as a Stones feature), and Magee as the subversive writer has some wonderfully eccentric moments. Still hard to take for some, as all good social satire is, Clockwork feeds the mind and the eye as few films ever do. It just may be the wittiest film in Kubrick’s entire canon.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.