From its opening shot of Malcolm McDowell staring with evil intent directly into the camera (which pulls back to reveal him drinking a glass of milk), Stanley Kubrick's brilliant CLOCKWORK ORANGE announces itself as a completely new kind of viewing experience. Banned in Britain for decades, the film, set in an unidentified future, overwhelms the senses with its almost comic depictions of rape and violence set to an upbeat classical and pop music score; its magnificent, colorful, futuristic set designs; and its utter determination to shock, frighten, and thoroughly entertain its audience. Kubrick based his chilling masterpiece on Anthony Burgess's culture-shaking novel about a young man, growing into adulthood, who has a bit of a problem with authority figures. (Interestingly, Burgess's stunning piece of fiction contains 21 chapters, but Kubrick ends his film after chapter 20.) When Alex (a career-defining performance by McDowell) and his droogs go out for a little bit of the old ultraviolence, he is caught and forced to undergo controversial treatment that will make it impossible for him to commit violent acts--but has severe side effects. Kubrick's film purposely confuses crime and punishment, cause and effect, hero and villain, irony and satire, filled with oxymoron and paradox, taking on science, politics, societal mores, education, sexual awakening, and parental responsibility all in a new language (both verbal and visual) that would change the cinema forever. No one who has seen it has ever been able to hear "Singin' in the Rain" or Ludwig van again in quite the same way.
Unseen between 1974 (when Stanley Kubrick himself quietly withdrew it) and 2000 (after his death), it is little wonder that an inflated degree of mythology surrounds this notorious futuristic drama. Dramatised from the 1962 Anthony Burgess novella about anarchic yobs (“droogs”) in a dystopian future, it was shocking then and it's shocking today, particularly the scenes of rape and sadistic “ultraviolence” in the first half. Burgess and Kubrick may have been making intellectual points about the state and free will — Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is brainwashed into submission in the film's more ponderous second half — but the film doesn't quite live up to the masterpiece status that unattainability has bestowed on it. Fascinating and prescient, yes, and its moral ambiguity is brave, but it's really only essential viewing for cineastes and film students.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Kubrick's fantastic meditation on a violent future has seemed more prescient with every passing year. In extraordinary images of clown-like delinquents, he orchestrates to electronic music mindless street violence, which leads to mindful state violence a
Radio Times
