| A Clockwork Orange | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Produced by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Written by | Anthony Burgess (novel) Stanley Kubrick |
| Starring | Malcolm McDowell Warren Clarke James Marcus Patrick Magee |
| Cinematography | John Alcott |
| Editing by | Bill Butler |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | February 2, 1972 (USA general) |
| Running time | 136 min. |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2,200,000 |
| Gross revenue | $26,589,355 |
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 satirical science fiction film adaptation of a 1962 novel of the same name, written by Anthony Burgess. The adaptation was produced, co-written, and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It stars Malcolm McDowell as the charismatic and psychopathic delinquent Alex DeLarge whose pleasures are classical music (especially Beethoven), rape, and ultra-violence. He is the leader of a small gang of thugs (Pete, Georgie and Dim), whom he calls his "droogs" (from the Russian word друг meaning "friend" or "buddy"). Alex narrates most of the film in "Nadsat", a fractured contemporary adolescent argot comprising Slavic (especially Russian), English, and Cockney rhyming slang. A Clockwork Orange features disturbing, violent imagery to facilitate social commentary on psychiatry, youth gangs, and other topics in a futuristic dystopian Britain.
The film features a soundtrack comprising mostly classical music selections and Moog synthesizer compositions by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos. One notable exception is "Singing in the Rain," which was chosen because it was a song actor Malcolm McDowell knew all the words to.[1]
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The film opens with Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) and his Droogs drinking at the Korova Milk Bar for purposes of (in the words of Alex’s voice-over narration) “sharpening up their minds” with narcotic-spiked milk for “the old ultra-violence”. After leaving they ridicule and beat an elderly vagrant under a motorway flyover at night. They then get into a gang brawl with a rival gang led by Billy Boy (Richard Connaught), but leave when they hear the police coming. Then follows a high speed country night-drive with a stolen car. They gain entry into the house of a writer through a deceptive ruse claiming that they need to use the phone to call an ambulance. They assault the writer and rape his wife while Alex sings "Singin' in the Rain". After getting rid of the car, they return to Korova milk bar. At a different table are some well-dressed guests including a woman who starts singing the melody of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Dim (Warren Clarke) expresses his dislike of this music by making a rude noise, whereupon Alex immediately hits Dim sharply with his cane. Being very fond of classical music, Alex finds Dim’s attitude disrespectful. When Alex returns to his own home, he puts on a cassette tape of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This is accompanied by a fantasy montage of violent images.
Alex’s mother (Sheila Raynor) attempts to wake him up, but Alex claims that he is too sick to go to school. He gets a visit from a social worker, Mr. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), who suspects Alex has been up to "some nastiness”. Alex then goes to a music shop and picks up two young women. When Alex later that day meets up with his Droogs, they express displeasure with his leadership stating they want to run things differently according to a “new way” that entails more ambitious crime and “no more picking on Dim”. While they are walking by a canal, Alex without warning suddenly attacks the other Droogs in a move to reestablish his leadership.
The Droogs' next job is to burgle the home of a woman who runs a health farm and owns an enormous number of cats and suggestive works of art. Alex and the “cat lady” (Miriam Karlin) get into a fight which results in Alex’s mortally wounding her with a large, phallus-shaped statue. When Alex exits the house, his fellow Droogs attack him, the police arrive, and Alex is arrested.
He is visited in the interrogation room by Mr. Deltoid, who tells him he is “now a murderer” after the “cat lady” dies in the hospital. Arriving at the jail, Alex is processed and assigned the number #655321. In jail, he develops a relationship with the prison chaplain, a kindly soul who preaches to the prisoners about hellfire and damnation. Alex begins studying the Bible, but largely identifies with the violent characters in it, including a soldier who whips Jesus. Alex discovers a new experimental medical procedure called the Ludovico technique an experimental aversion therapy for rehabilitating criminals. When the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp) visits the prison looking for potential candidates for this treatment, Alex presents himself as a possible candidate for it. Alex is chosen and reports to the Ludivico facility. He is made to wear a straitjacket and watch films containing extreme scenes of violence while being given drugs to induce reactions of revulsion and regurgitation. At one point, Alex notes that the soundtrack on one film is music by Beethoven. He shrieks in agony realizing that he will now have similar feelings of revulsion towards Beethoven’s music. He yells out “I’m cured, praise God” hoping to have the treatment prematurely terminated.
When the treatment is concluded, a demonstration of the technique’s effects is given to an audience that includes the prime minister and one of the prison guards. In this demonstration, an actor (John Clive) gratuitously insults and then picks a fight with Alex, and Alex is unable to fight back. The other man forces Alex to lick his boot. This is followed by the appearance of a nude woman who stands in front of Alex. Alex gets up and attempts to reach for her breasts but “the sickness” suddenly floods over him and he is unable to continue any interaction with her. At the end of this demonstration, the Minister of the Interior declares that Alex is now a “true Christian” over the prison chaplain’s protests that Alex has no free choice.
Alex returns home hoping for a reunion with his parents, but they have taken on a new lodger who now lives in his room whom they decline to evict, leaving Alex to fend for himself. Alex wanders the streets, and runs into the tramp that he and his droogs beat up at the beginning of the film. The tramp summons several of his friends all of whom now assault Alex, who is of course unable to fight back. Two police arrive to break up the brawl, but they turn out to be two of Alex’s old droogs who now work for the police. They continue to bear a grudge against him and take him out to the country and savagely beat him, attempt to drown him and then abandon him. Alex, now in very bad shape, stumbles on the country house of the writer whose wife he had raped two years earlier. The writer, Mr. Alexander, does not at first recognise Alex as his wife’s rapist, as Alex had been masked at the time. But Mr. Alexander does recognise Alex as the young lad in the news who had been subjected to the Ludovico technique. Mr. Alexander takes Alex in. However, the writer does not realise who Alex is until he hears him singing the song “Singin’ in the Rain” in the bathtub, as Alex had also sung this song when raping the writer’s now deceased wife. Mr. Alexander first drugs Alex and then locks him in a room on the upper storey of a house, while blasting the music of Beethoven’s Ninth at full volume from a powerful stereo on the floor below. Mr. Alexander knows that Alex will have a revulsion reaction to this from the side-effect of the Ludivico technique, and as Mr. Alexander predicts, Alex jumps out of the third-storey window of the house.
The action now cuts to Alex in traction at a hospital. When he awakes, he is given a psychological test of a slide show of pictures. He is asked to say what he thinks the characters are saying. His answers are typically violent. Alex reports having had dreams about doctors messing around inside his “gulliver” (head). Alex is now visited by the Minister of the Interior who tells him how much he regrets subjecting Alex to the Ludovico treatment, and reassures him that the state will look after him from hereon, and that the writer, Mr. Alexander, has been arrested. Alex is also told he will be granted an important government job. As a token of good will, the Minister has wheeled into Alex’s room a large stereo system playing Beethoven’s Ninth. Alex realises that he is having no aversion reactions. He briefly has a fantasy of him having sex with a naked woman while Victorian age figures look on applauding. The film closes with his words: “I was cured all right”.
The closing credits are accompanied by Gene Kelly’s rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”.
One of the film's central moral questions – as well as in many of Burgess's other books – is the definition of "goodness". After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, but not by choice; his "goodness" is involuntary and mechanical, like that of the titular clockwork orange. In prison, the chaplain criticises the Ludovico Technique, saying that true goodness must come from within. Another theme is the abuse of one's liberties – both by Alex and by those using him for their various ends. The film is also critical of both parties using Alex as a tool to those ends: Frank Alexander, writer and victim of Alex and the droogs, not only wants revenge over Alex, but sees him as a means to definitively turn the people against the government and its new regime – Mr. Alexander is afraid of this new government. Speaking on the phone, he says:
…Recruiting brutal young roughs into the police; proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we’ve seen it all before in other countries; the thin end of the wedge! Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism.
On the other side, the Minister of the Interior, representing the government, puts Mr. Alexander away, using the excuse of him being a danger to Alex. Whether he has been harmed or not remains unclear, but from what the Minister tells Alex, it is obvious that the author has been denied his ability to write and, more importantly, to produce "subversive" material, critical of the current government and prone to cause unrest.
Another central theme is outrage against behavioural psychology (popular throughout the 1940s through the 1960s), as propounded by psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Burgess disapproved of behaviourism, calling Skinner's most popular book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, "one of the most dangerous books ever written".[2] Although Watson conceded behaviourism's limitations, Skinner argued that behaviour modification (learning techniques of systematic reward and punishment) is the key to an ideal society (see Walden Two). Dr. Ludovico's technique, which is highly reminiscent of the notorious Project MKULTRA, is the form of behaviour modification the scientists applied to Alex to condition associating violent acts with a sensation of severe physical illness, thereby preventing him from being violent. This film embodies a mistrust of behaviourism, especially the perceived dehumanisation and lack of choice associated with behaviour modification methods.
Belgian cinema writer Anthony Bochon points out the criminological question underlying the Ludovico treatment. He describes the quality of the film description of the Ludovico treatment as "a problem of integrating the bad, the criminal, who is rejecting human dignity, into Humanity itself. Kubrick didn't make an apology of some fascist practices but simply brought his vision of the future of our society and how violence is fed by our society"[3].
During the filming of the Ludovico scene, Malcolm McDowell scratched a cornea and was temporarily blinded. The doctor standing next to him in the scene dropping saline solution into Alex's forced-open eyes was not just there for filming purposes, but was a real doctor needed to prevent McDowell's eyes from drying. McDowell also suffered cracked ribs during filming of the humiliation stage show and nearly drowned when his breathing apparatus failed while being held underwater in the trough scene.
When Alex jumps out of the window to try to end his torment, the viewer sees the ground coming toward the camera until they collide. This effect was achieved by dropping a portable camera from two or three storeys up, lens pointing downward, thus presenting a realistic sense of what such a fall could be like (although the way Alex (either McDowell or a stuntman) jumped, he actually would have landed on his back, presumably into a net). Reportedly the camera sustained lens damage but it was otherwise still functional.
This film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' book happened almost by accident. The director Stanley Kubrick had been given a copy which he initially put to one side. On the rebound from the cancellation of the production of Napoleon he happened again on the copy and it made an immediate impact on him. Kubrick said of his enthusiasm for the project "I was excited by everything about it, the plot the ideas, the characters and of course the language...The story functions, of course, on several levels, political, sociological, philosophical and, what's most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level". When Kubrick wrote the screenplay he made a point of sticking very closely to the original text, "I think whatever Burgess had to say about the story was said in the book but I did invent a few useful narrative ideas and reshape some of the scenes."
Anthony Burgess had mixed feelings about the film adaptation of his novel. Publicly, he said he loved Malcolm McDowell and Michael Bates, and the film's use of music; he praised the film as "brilliant," even as a film so brilliant that it could be dangerous. His initial reaction to the film was very enthusiastic, insisting that the only thing that bothered him was the removal of the story's last chapter, for which he blamed his American publisher and not Kubrick.
According to his autobiography, Burgess got along quite well with Kubrick. Both men held similar philosophic and political views; both were very interested in literature, cinema, music, and Napoleon Bonaparte (Burgess dedicated his book Napoleon Symphony to Kubrick). However their relationship was soured when Kubrick left it to Burgess to defend the film from accusations of glorifying violence. As a (lapsed) Catholic, Burgess tried many times to explain the story's Christian moral points to outraged Christian organisations who felt it a Satanic social influence; to defend it against journalistic accusations that it supported "fascist" dogma; and Burgess even received awards for Kubrick.
Burgess was deeply hurt, feeling Kubrick had used him as a film publicity pawn. Malcolm McDowell, who did a publicity tour with Burgess, shared his feelings, and at times said harsh things about Kubrick. Burgess and McDowell cited as evidence of Kubrick's uncontrolled ego that only Kubrick's name appears in the authorial opening credits. Burgess spoofed Kubrick's image in later works: the musical version of A Clockwork Orange, featuring a character resembling Kubrick who is beaten early in the work; The Clockwork Testament, wherein the fictional poet FX Enderby is attacked for supposedly glorifying violence in a film adaptation; and Burgess's novel Earthly Powers, which features a crafty director named Sidney Labrick
The first dramatisation of A Clockwork Orange (excerpted from the story's first three chapters only) was by the BBC, for part of the programme Tonight, broadcast shortly after the novel's original publication in 1962. No recording of this dramatisation has survived. Six years before Stanley Kubrick's film version, Andy Warhol produced a low-budget version in 1965, titled Vinyl. Reportedly, only two scenes are recognisable: "Victor" (a renamed Alex) wreaking havoc, and undergoing the Ludovico Treatment.
Director Stanley Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, and so he demanded many takes during the making of his films. In the words of actor Malcolm McDowell, however, he usually got it right, so Kubrick did not have to do too many takes. Despite his perfectionism Kubrick was able to complete filming between September 1970 and its wrap on April 20, 1971, making it his fastest produced film. Kubrick wanted to give the film a dream-like, fantasy quality, and filmed many scenes with fisheye lenses. He also used fast and slow motion after being influenced by certain scenes in Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses.
A Clockwork Orange was shot almost entirely on location in and around London with comparatively little of the film filmed in a studio.
The film was positively received and was nominated for important awards including four Oscar nominations (see below). The film receives a 90% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, at the time of the film's release, some critics had mixed opinions, with Roger Ebert, for example, giving the film two stars and calling it an "ideological mess", as well as being "talky and boring".[5] The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture (it lost to The French Connection) and reinvigorated sales for recordings of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony".
Though hailed by many critics, the film had some notable detractors. In her New Yorker review, titled "Stanley Strangelove" and included in the collection Deeper into Movies, Pauline Kael called the film pornographic because of the way it dehumanised Alex's victims while highlighting the protagonist's suffering. She also noted that the film's Alex no longer enjoyed running over small animals or raping underaged girls, and argued that some violent scenes -- such as the extended sequence in which Billyboy's gang strips a very buxom young woman they intend to rape -- were offered for titillation. John Simon (in a piece collected in his book Reverse Angle) noted that most of the book's most ambitious effects were based on language and the alienating effect of the narrator's Nadsat slang, making it a poor choice for a film. Echoing some of Kael's criticisms about the depiction of Alex's victims, Simon noted that the writer, who is young and likeable in the book, was played by Patrick Magee, "a very quirky and middle-aged actor who specialises in being repellent." on top of which, Simon complained, "Kubrick over-directs the basically excessive Magee until his eyes erupt like missiles from their silos and his face turns every shade of a Technicolor sunset."
It also caused considerable controversy (see below) and was withdrawn from release in the UK. By the time of its re-release in the year 2000, it had already gained a reputation as a cult classic. It was recently placed at number 21 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills and number 46 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, though in the second listing it ranked in 70th place. Alex De Large was placed at number 12 in the villain section of the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains list. In 2008, the film was placed as the 4th greatest Science-Fiction movie to date, in AFI's 10 Top 10. Some could argue that if the film hadn't been banned, it would've never become the classic it is considered as today.
The film was rated X on its original release in the United States. Later, Kubrick voluntarily replaced roughly 30 seconds of footage from two scenes with less bawdy action for a 1973 R-rated re-release. Current DVDs present the original X-rated form, and only some of the early 80s VHS editions are in the R-rated form.[6]
The film was rated C (for "condemned") by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting because of its explicit sexual and violent content; such a rating conceptually forbade Catholics from seeing the film. The "condemned" rating was abolished in 1982, and since then films deemed by the conference to have unacceptable levels of sex and/or violence have been rated O, meaning "morally offensive".
In the United Kingdom, the sexual violence in the film was considered extreme. Furthermore, it was claimed that the film had inspired copycat behaviour. In March 1972, a prosecutor at a trial of a 14-year-old boy accused of the manslaughter of one of his classmates referred to A Clockwork Orange, telling the judge that the case had a macabre relevance to the film.[7]
The attacker, a boy aged 16 from Bletchley, pleaded guilty after telling police that his friends had told him of the film "and the beating up of an old boy like this one"; defense counsel told the trial "the link between this crime and sensational literature, particularly A Clockwork Orange, is established beyond reasonable doubt".[8] The press also blamed the influence of the film for a rape in which the attackers sang "Singin' in the Rain". Kubrick subsequently requested that Warner Brothers withdraw the film from UK distribution.
At the time, it was widely believed that the copycat attacks were what led Kubrick to withdraw the film from distribution in the United Kingdom. However, in a television documentary made after Kubrick's death, his widow Christiane confirmed rumours that Kubrick had withdrawn A Clockwork Orange on police advice after threats were made against Kubrick and his family (the source of the threats was not discussed). That Warner Bros. acceded to Kubrick's request to withdraw the film is an indication of the remarkable relationship Kubrick had with the studio, particularly the executive Terry Semel.
The ban was vigorously pursued during Kubrick's lifetime. One art house cinema that defied the ban in 1993, and was sued and lost, was the Scala cinema at Kings Cross, London, on the same premises as the present-day Scala nightclub. Unable to meet the cost of the defence, the cinema club was forced into receivership. [9]
Whatever the reason for the film's withdrawal, it could not easily be seen in the United Kingdom for some 27 years. The first VHS and DVD releases followed shortly after Kubrick's death. It was also shown in many UK cinemas.
On July 4, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, made its UKTV premiere, when it was broadcast on Sky TV's Sky Box Office. It ran until mid-September. It was shown uncut.
In 1993, there aired on Channel 4 a 27-minute documentary about the controversy regarding the withdrawal of the film in Britain, entitled Forbidden Fruit.[10] Interestingly, the documentary contains considerable amounts of footage from A Clockwork Orange thus marking the only time British audiences could sample portions of the film during the ban. Kubrick attempted to stop the documentary's usage of this footage and failed.
Kubrick's film is relatively faithful to Burgess's novel, omitting only the final, positive chapter in which Alex matures and outgrows sociopathy. The film ends with Alex offered an open-ended government job, implying that Alex remains a sociopath at heart, while the novel ends with Alex's positive change. This plot discrepancy occurred because Kubrick based his screenplay upon the novel's American edition, its final chapter deleted on insistence of the American publisher. [11] Director Kubrick claimed not having read the complete, original version of the novel until he had almost finished writing the screenplay, and that he never considered using it. In the introduction of the 1996 edition of the novel, it is said that Kubrick found the end of the original edition too blandly optimistic and unrealistic.
The film's soundtrack comprises classical music and electronic synthetic music composed by Wendy Carlos (credited at the time to Walter Carlos).
Some of the pieces of classical music excerpted make only the briefest appearance in the film, a case in point being the "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1" theme better known as "Land of Hope and Glory", which is used in highly ironic fashion to herald the appearance of a politician in the prison, and is not heard again.
The main theme is an electronic transcription of Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, composed in 1695 for the procession of Queen Mary's cortège through the streets of London enroute to Westminster Abbey.
The film's music can be interpreted as a thematic extension of Alex's psychological conditioning, affecting the viewers.
"March from A Clockwork Orange" was the first recorded song featuring a vocoder for singing, and often is cited as inspiration for many synthpop bands.
Neither the end-credits nor the soundtrack album name the orchestra playing the classical excerpts from the Ninth Symphony, however, in Alex's bedroom, early in the story, there is a fleeting close-up of a microcassette tape labelled: "Deutsche Grammophon – Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphonie Nr. 9 d-moll, op. 125 – Berliner Philharmoniker – Chor der St. Hedwigskathedrale – Ferenc Fricsay – Irmgard Seefried, Maureen Forrester, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ernst Haefliger".
In the film, we do not necessarily see all of the films which Alex is forced to view during the Ludovico conditioning. Nonetheless, it could be fairly asked why he isn't simply conditioned against just the 4th movement of Beethoven's Ninth since it is the only music heard on the soundtrack of one of these films. While being impelled to commit suicide by Mr. Alexander, Alex is forced instead to listen to the 2nd movement.
Three months after the official soundtrack's release, composer Wendy Carlos released a second version of the soundtrack (Columbia KC 31480) containing unused cues and musical elements unheard in the film. For example, Kubrick only used part of "Timesteps", and a shortened version of the synthesiser transcription of the Ninth Symphony's Scherzo. Additionally, this second soundtrack LP contained a synthesiser version of Rossini's "La Gazza Ladra"; Kubrick used an orchestral performance in the film's soundtrack. In 1998, an edition of the soundtrack containing digitally-remastered tracks of the synthesiser music was released. It contains Carlos' compositions, including those unused in the film, and the "Biblical Daydreams" and "Orange Minuet" cues unincluded in the 1972 soundtrack LP record.
Carlos composed the first three minutes of "Timesteps" before reading Burgess's novel. Originally, she had intended as the introduction to a vocoder rendition of the Ninth Symphony's Choral movement; "Timesteps" was completed at roughly the time when Kubrick completed the film's photography; "Timesteps" and the vocoder Ninth Symphony were the foundation for Carlos' and Kubrick's collaboration.
Reportedly, Stanley Kubrick asked Pink Floyd bassist/lyricist Roger Waters if he could use elements of the "Atom Heart Mother" suite in the soundtrack; Waters rejected the request. Later, Waters asked Kubrick if he could appropriate sounds from 2001: A Space Odyssey - a request Kubrick rejected.
American Film Institute recognition
In 2000, the film was released on videotape and DVD, both individually and as part of The Stanley Kubrick Collection DVD set. Consequent to negative comments from fans, Warner Bros re-released the film, its image digitally restored and its soundtrack remastered. A limited-edition collector's set with a soundtrack disc, movie poster, booklet and film strip followed, but later was discontinued. In 2005, a UK re-release, packaged as an "Iconic Film" in a limited-edition slipcase was published, identical to the remastered DVD set, except for different package cover art. In 2006, Warner Bros announced the September publication of a two-disc special edition featuring a Malcolm McDowell commentary, and the releases of other two-disc sets of Stanley Kubrick films. Several UK retailers had set the release date as November 6, 2006; the release was delayed and re-announced for 2007 Holiday Season. An HD DVD, Blu-ray, and DVD re-release version of the film was released on October 23rd, 2007. The release accompanies four other Kubrick classics. 1080p video transfers and remixed Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (for HD DVD) and uncompressed 5.1 PCM (for Blu-ray) audio tracks are on both the Blu-ray and HD DVD editions. Unlike the previous version, the DVD re-release edition is anamorphically enhanced.
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