A Clockwork Orange

Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
A Clockwork Orange
from a novel by Anthony Burgess,

with choice classical music re animated for synthisizer by Walter Carlos, including the work of Purcell, Rossini, and Ludwig Van Beethoven.

Kubrick continued to showcase great classical music throughout his career, bringing Bela Bartok, Richard Strauss (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and Johann Strauss Jr.(The Beautiful Blue Danube) into the limelight. Music lovers might well wonder and dispair just how much better Sparticus might have been with Pines of Rome by Ottorini Respighi, had Kubrick come up with this winning formula sooner. In this regard, too many first rate filmmakers opposed Kubrick, continuing the 40's tradition of second rate fomula music.

Kubrick and Beethoven, a Marriage Made in Hell

Brilliant, a tour de force of extraordinary images, music, words, and feelings.


1971 - UK - Satire/Black Comedy/Psychological Sci - Fi
Best 1,000 Reviewed by Vincent Canby





Type:
Features
Starring Patrick Magee, Malcolm McDowell, Aubrey Morris.Michael Bates, Warren Clarke, Adrienne Corri, Directed by Stanley Kubrick. (R, 137 minutes).

Stanley Kubrick dissects the nature of violence in this darkly ironic, near-future satire, adapted from Anthony Burgess' novel, complete with "Nadsat" slang. Classical music-loving proto-punk Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his "Droogs" spend their nights getting high at the Korova Milkbar before embarking on "a little of the old ultraviolence," such as terrorizing a writer, Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), and raping his wife while jauntily warbling "Singin' in the Rain." After Alex is jailed for bludgeoning the Cat Lady (Miriam Karlin) to death with one of her phallic sculptures, Alex submits to the Ludovico behavior modification technique to earn his freedom; he's conditioned to abhor violence through watching gory movies, and even his adored Beethoven is turned against him. Returned to the world defenseless, Alex becomes the victim of his prior victims, with Mr. Alexander using Beethoven's Ninth to inflict the greatest pain of all. When society sees what the state has done to Alex, however, the politically expedient move is made. Casting a coldly pessimistic view on the then-future of the late '70s-early '80s, Kubrick and production designer John Barry created a world of high-tech cultural decay, mixing old details like bowler hats with bizarrely alienating "new" environments like the Milkbar. Alex's violence is horrific, yet it is an aesthetically calculated fact of his existence; his charisma makes the icily clinical Ludovico treatment seem more negatively abusive than positively therapeutic. Alex may be a sadist, but the state's autocratic control is another violent act, rather than a solution. Released in late 1971 (within weeks of Sam Peckinpah's brutally violent Straw Dogs), the film sparked considerable controversy in the U.S. with its X-rated violence; after copycat crimes in England, Kubrick withdrew the film from British distribution until after his death. Opinion was divided on the meaning of Kubrick's detached view of this shocking future, but, whether the discord drew the curious or Kubrick's scathing diagnosis spoke to the chaotic cultural moment, A Clockwork Orange became a hit. On the heels of New York Film Critics Circle awards as Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, Kubrick received Oscar nominations in all three categories. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide


MPAA Rating: R (Graphic Violence/Rape & Sexual Abuse/Not For Children)
Review | TrailerThe opening close-up of slyly grinning Alex (Malcolm McDowell) with one eye decorated with a false eyelash staring directly at the camera, followed by the pull-back view of him lounging with his droogie friends in a milk bar with white furniture of nude women - accompanied by the voice-over beginning with: "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs...," the delinquent gang's stylized "ultra-violence" rampages including the fight scene in an old theatre with a rival gang synchronized with music from Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie", the scene at novelist Mr. Alexander's (Patrick Magee) futuristic home when the droogs wear masks and deliver brutal kicks to the old man's body during the rape of his wife - rhythmically punctuated with the lyrics of "Singin' In The Rain", the persistent use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Alex's ecstasy: "Oh bliss, bliss and heaven...", the sped-up, slapstick orgy scene accompanied by the William Tell Overture in Alex's bedroom with two teenage girls that he met at a record store, the scene of Alex's brutalization of the 'Catlady' (Miriam Karlin) with an enormous penis sculpture/weapon, Alex's "aversion therapy" brainwashing against sex and violence with his eyes painfully held open, and the scene with an almost-nude woman to demonstrate its effectiveness, the use of unique doublespeak slang-dialogue from Anthony Burgess' novel, and Alex's final closeup and
line "I was cured all right"


Average Reader Rating: 4.61 Stars Rate This Movie
Number of Votes: 44
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Read all readers' reviews. Alex: Let's get things nice and sparkling clear. This sarcasm, if I may call it such, does not become you, O my little brothers. As I am your droog and leader, I am entitled to know what goes on, eh? Now then, Dim, what does that great big horsy gape of a grin portend?





Alex (voice-over): As we walked along the flatblock marina, I was calm on the outside but thinking all the time. So now it was to be Georgie the General, saying what we should do, and what not to do, and Dim as his mindless, grinning bulldog. But, suddenly, I viddied that thinking was for the gloopy ones, and that the oomny ones used like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. There was a window open, with a stereo on, and I viddied right at once what to do.


Alex (voice-over): It had not been edifying, indeed not, being in this hellhole and human zoo for two years now, being kicked and tolchocked by brutal warders, and meeting leering criminals and perverts, ready to dribble all over a luscious young malchick like your storyteller.

NOTE on language
Oomny (OOMNEE) is ex exactly the word in russian for smart.
Bog (Rhymes with vogue) is the word for God. Viddiet means look. Malchick exactly translates boy. The sound
mal in malchick is in no way to be taken as bad or evil. And horra-show has nothing to do with horror, but precisely translates as good.







News

($) Denotes articles which can be purchased from the Premium Archive.

The Arts/Cultural Desk | March 15, 1999, Monday $
CONNECTIONS; Kubrick and Beethoven, a Marriage Made in Hell
By Edward Rothstein

The Arts/Cultural Desk | March 8, 1999, Monday $
Stanley Kubrick, Film Director With a Bleak Vision, Dies at 70
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

The Arts/Cultural Desk | June 17, 1998, Wednesday $
Voters Pick the 100 Best American Movies





Production Credits

Stanley Kubrick - Screenwriter, Producer, Director..


Awards

Best Film (win) - Stanley Kubrick - 1972 British Academy Awards
Best Actor (nom) - Malcolm McDowell - 1971 New York Film Critics Circle
Best Direction (win) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 New York Film Critics Circle
Best Film (win) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 New York Film Critics Circle
Best Screenwriting (nom) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 New York Film Critics Circle
100 Greatest American Movies (win) 1998 American Film Institute
Best Director (nom) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 Directors Guild of America
Best Picture - Drama (nom) 1971 Golden Globe
Best Actor - Drama (nom) - Malcolm McDowell - 1971 Golden Globe
Best Director (nom) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 Golden Globe
Best Adapted Screenplay (nom) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 Academy
Best Director (nom) - Stanley Kubrick - 1971 Academy
Best Editing (nom) - Bill Butler - 1971 Academy
Best Picture (nom) 1971 Academy



(R, 137 mThe movie shows a lot of aimless violence—the exercise of aimless choice—but it is as formally structured as the music of Alex's "lovely lovely Ludwig Van," which inspires in Alex sadomasochistic dreams of hangings, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters.

In both English and Nadsat, the combination of Anglicized Russian, Gypsy, rhyming slang, and associative words spoken by Alex and his teenage friends in what seems to be 1983, A Clockwork Orange is a great deal more than merely
horrorshow—that is, Nadsat for good. It is brilliant, a tour de force of extraordinary images, music, words, and feelings, a much more original achievement for commercial films than the Burgess novel is for literature, for Burgess, after all, has some impossibly imposing literary antecedents, including the work of Joyce.