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A Clockwork
Orange
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Re-release
Date: March 17 2000
Distributor: Warner Brothers.
Certificate: 18
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick
Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke, John Clive
Director: Stanley
Kubrick
Running Time:
137 mins
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| 1971
was a strange year. The flower-power era was ebbing away even with the memory
of Woodstock still fresh on people's acid-addled minds, rock stars were
beginning to enter pop's androgynous period made so outrageously infamous
by musicians like David Bowie and Mick Jagger, and by the end of the year
the "wild-children of rock", Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi
Hendrix would all be dead. Films were beginning to win Oscars for their
realism and gritty harder-edged look at life such as in "Midnight Cowboy"(1969)
and "The French Connection"(1971) and with the Vietnam War creating
a violent public backlash across the U.S and Europe and international terrorism
reaching new highs of brutality and horror (culminating in the Munich Olympics
massacre the following year) never was there a more perfect time to make
a movie that could encapsulate all that was going on in just a few hours-worth
of celluloid. |
Stanley
Kubrick saw this window of opportunity and he took a baseball bat to it.
Within the year he had become his own censor and withdrawn the film from
the public gaze fearing that it might incite copycat violence and it is
only now since his death last year that it can be seen on general cinema
release rather than on the odd select independent screen or imported video.
Malcolm McDowell plays Alex, the leader of a gang of "droogs",
whose life and those of his cronies revolve around milk-bars, intimidation
of anyone they come across and intermittent bouts of "ultra-violence".
So much was made of the violent side of the movie but the rampage itself
lasts only a mere 20 minutes of the film's total running time, although
it is nightmarishly graphic in it's depictions of rape and assault, especially
when one considers that at this point in time people were not so much desensitised
to it all as they are today. |
Equally
barbaric is Alex's treatment by the authorities after he is captured, when
he has his eyelids pinned back and is forced to continually watch scenes
of brutality and rape until the "aversion therapy" has had the
desired effect and he is no longer the rebel without a cause but a subservient,
broken yet acceptable "pillar of the community".
But the real legacy of his actions comes back to haunt him when he is brutalized
and persecuted not only by one of his victims, Alexander (Patrick Magee)
but by his old gang members who can now legally carry out their violent
fantasies, having been drafted into the police force. |
McDowell's
performance is as hypnotic as it is disturbing and grotesque, and twinned
with bizarre stylized sets, electronically re-worked classics from the likes
of Beethoven and Rossini and the character's Orwellian-esque double-speak
(something akin to today's black Afro-American street talk of the modern
film era) it makes for a fascinating and prophetic satire on modern life.
Some people may find Kubrick's depiction of the future quaint or unrealistic,
but take away the strange clothes, eye make-up and garish sets and you'll
find yourself in any inner-city area anywhere in the "civilized"
world. |
