A Clockwork Orange
Sunday May 17th
Viddy Well, O My Brothers. Alex and his Droogs are Back.
Stanley Kubrick’s Extraordinary Classic on the Big Screen.
A Clockwork ORANGE
“It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from UK cinemas in 1973 after two years of tabloid press tying the film to any random act of teenage violence, and, according to Malcolm McDowell, death threats taken seriously enough that Scotland Yard advised him to pull it.
Nobody saw it here for twenty-six years.
If you wanted the film you went to the Studio Galande on the Left Bank of Paris, where it played once a day, every day, for nearly two decades (that’s where I saw it, the same day I saw Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, on the same screen!)
It came back in 1999, the year Kubrick died. That’s why the film has the legend it has.
Why it’s still dangerous half a century on has nothing to do with the violence. Kubrick refuses to tell you what to think. He presents Alex’s world in full: the droogs, the William Tell overture sequence, the Ludovico conditioning. All of it shown with a completely impersonal eye. He trusts you to do the work.
You can come away thinking it’s a satire of state control. A black comedy about ritual and routine. A genuine argument that moral choice requires the option to do wrong. Or some of all three.
Malcolm McDowell‘s performance holds the whole thing together, over the top, fully committed, somehow completely real. Wendy Carlos‘s synthesiser score does the other anchoring.
I’ve seen it probably a dozen times. It’s been a different film every single time.
I can’t wait to see what you make of it.
