1971
DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER: STANLEY KUBRICK SCREENPLAY: STANLEY KUBRICK, BASED ON THE NOVEL BY ANTHONY BURGESS STARRING: MALCOLM MCDOWELL (ALEX), PATRICK MAGEE (MR. ALEXANDER), ADRIENNE CORRI (MRS. ALEXANDER), MIRIAM KARLIN (CATLADY), AUBREY MORRIS (DELTOID), JAMES MARCUS (GEORGIE), WARREN CLARKE (DIM), GODFREY QUIGLEY (PRISON CHAPLAIN)
A Clockwork Orange
POLARIS PRODUCTIONS/WARNER BROS. • COLOR, 137 MINUTES
In a lawless London of tomorrow, a young thug is imprisoned for murder, then reformed to become physically revolted by violence.
Not content to stun the world with his 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, maverick filmmaker Stanley Kubrick followed it with a futuristic fable so singularly and memorably shocking that it was originally given an X rating in the United States and withdrawn from distribution in the United Kingdom for twenty-five years. A social satire that pushes the boundaries of onscreen violence, sex, and pitch-black comedy to the outer limits, A Clockwork Orange may be the most subversive film ever released by a major Hollywood studio.
After exceeding his 2001 budget by millions, Kubrick (allotted only $2 million from Warner Bros.) was eager to prove that he could make an impactful movie on a low budget. According to actress Adrienne Corri, who plays a victim of brutal rape in the film, Kubrick crafted A Clockwork Orange as a dark alternative to the bright 2001 future. “That was what we might have got; this is what we were going to get,” said Corri. And what we get is a nightmarish journey through author Anthony Burgess’s near-future Britain where juvenile delinquency has run rampant, a dystopian horror show with a deep undercurrent of science-fiction running through its subtext. Instead of writing a screenplay, Kubrick filmed scenarios straight from the pages of the 1962 novel.
Kicking off the journey is a seemingly simple shot of Alex—our antihero and “humble narrator,” audaciously played by Malcolm McDowell—and his “droogs” lounging in their Korova Milkbar hangout, one of the few sets constructed for the film. Kubrick’s one-and-a-half-minute zoom-out as the camera dollies back to reveal the Korova’s outlandish decor is among the most unsettling and unforgettable openings in movie history. Alex’s narration establishes the Nadsat slang (a clever Cockney mix of Russian and English invented by Burgess) and his penchant for “a bit of the old ultraviolence.” With the hint of a smirk, Alex raises his glass of hallucinogen-spiked milk directly to the camera, as McDowell told Kubrick, to “let [the audience] know they’re in for one hell of a ride.”
After the Milkbar, Alex and his gang spend the evening attacking and terrorizing innocent victims merely for sport. The use of authentic locations in and around London and the sound captured by mini-microphones pinned to lapels give the movie a vividly real—yet surreal—feel, like the most stylized and perverse documentary ever made. Taking inspiration from a line in the novel about “purple and green and orange wigs” on young women being “the heighth (sic) of fashion,” Kubrick and production designer John Barry fashioned a wild world of purple hair, erotic art, and Moog synthesizer versions of Beethoven symphonies, performed by composer Wendy Carlos.
Of his leading man, Kubrick said, “If Malcolm hadn’t been available, I probably wouldn’t have made the film.” Indeed, McDowell brings an uncommon blend of menace, charm, and physical comedy to Alex. While rehearsing the disturbing rape scene, McDowell improvised “Singin’ in the Rain” in the style of Gene Kelly, which Kubrick liked so much he immediately called MGM to secure the song rights. Choreographed like a grotesque musical number, the sequence becomes all the more horrifying. For McDowell, the role did not come without a price: the actor suffered a blood clot after an on-camera kick and scratched his cornea when Alex is given the Ludovico Technique, an aversion therapy that leaves him nauseated at the thought of violence. The experimental treatment, an extreme sci-fi twist on Pavlovian conditioning, involves drugs to induce terror, nausea, and paralysis—the results of which are later reversed by brain surgeons who tinker with Alex’s “gulliver” (an Anglicization of the Russian word golova, meaning “head”).
Kubrick’s dark satire polarized viewers and critics. Some thought A Clockwork Orange deplorable and labeled it pornography, while others hailed it as a thought-provoking work of genius. Amid a firestorm of controversy—including a rash of copycat crimes in England that led Kubrick to pull it from theaters—the film managed to earn four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (it won none), and to endure as a pop-culture legend. It impacted cinema as a prototype for edgy dark comedies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), and informed the punk-rock movement in the United Kingdom. Its electronic soundtrack even sparked the trend of synthesizer-driven pop music that would follow in the wake of punk.
Adrienne Corri on the set with Stanley Kubrick
Paul Farrell, Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus, and Michael Tarn
To Kubrick, the movie’s message was obvious. “It is necessary for a man to have a choice to be good or evil,” he said. “To deprive him of this choice is to make him something less than human—a clockwork orange.” (Burgess took his title from the obscure Cockney phrase “queer as a clockwork orange,” meaning odd or unnatural.) Though acknowledging Alex as “evil,” the director maintained that A Clockwork Orange only outraged those who could not face the savagery inside themselves. “You can regard Alex as a creature of the id,” Kubrick said in 1972. “He is within all of us.”
FAR-OUT FACTS
MIND-BLOWING MOMENT
KEEP WATCHING
MAD MAX (1979)
LIQUID SKY (1982)