"Amazing how real violence never seems real-real until you viddy it on the screen"

Rating: 9/10 (17 March 2000)

The impact and notoriety of A Clockwork Orange can scarcely be imagined outside Britain.
Whereas the film has been freely available across the continent, and has perhaps subsequently lost it's power, it's release in Britain after twenty-seven years has given a build-up and expectation that I doubt no film could truly satiate. While the movie has been screened through myriads of smoke-hazed student bedrooms on fourth-generation pirate videos for the last two decades, I still can't help feeling it's wide re-release will leave many feeling disappointed.
Removed from this country by Kubrick himself, allegedly through fears of "copycat" violence, the director insisted that the film would be released in Britain over his dead body. Rather an ill-fitting tribute, then, that the film should finally be aired after his death. And yet what a great tribute, for A Clockwork Orange is also a work that touches genius (though occasionally scrapes mudanity) and is arguably his finest.
For nearly thirty years all Britain has had to remember this film is the very few pop art references that bleed into the mainstream culture. The odd Blur video that sees them dressed as "Droogs", or an old creaky episode of "Doctor Who", based on the movie, which sees the Master trying his own version of the Ludovico technique (a "Keller Machine") to rid evil from prisoners. But now we finally get to see what all the fuss is really about.
To be honest, time and the ban have robbed this film of much of its potency. The violence, outrageous at it's inception, is now tame by modern standards, and heavily choreographed. While it's vision of a future society is achieved on a remarkably small budget, there are times when that most crass of decades, the seventies, seeps through any sense of credibility. Camp in places, a whole plethora of "light entertainment" stalwarts make this distracting viewing in its home country. Dalziel out of comedy-drama detective show "Dalziel and Pascoe" rubs shoulders with the parrot-seducing wacky employment officer from "The Young Ones", and Coronation Street's "Fred Elliot", while the star of unfunny sitcom "The 10%ers" takes a bow. Okay, it's perhaps possible to believe the denizens of the future will indulge in severe retro-kitsch, though Alex playing Beethoven on an old eight-track machine is a little disconcerting. Elsewhere, a prison guard resembles and acts like Hitler, all stomping and shouting, reducing the fabric of the film to farce. The lowest ebb of this dating is Alex and his droogs joyriding through country lanes. Whereas Pulp Fiction had Bruce Willis in a taxi cab to a filmed backdrop as a touch of post-modern lo-fi, here the "racing scenery" played in the background of what is very obviously a stage produced sniggers from a more "sophisto" audience of the 90s.
Often, though, it is brilliant. Direction is flawless, and iconography and design are exceptional. The language uttered by the central characters is a bizarre concoction of pidgin, fabricated Russian, almost-Shakespearean English and common slang. A typical utterance, pre-gang fight is: "How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou".
In fact, it is the first half an hour or so that is the film's highlight. While the violence is extremely tame by latter standards, it is the context with which it is presented that still gives it its capacity to shock. Scenes of rape are juxtaposed with the music of Beethoven or Gene Kelly, while overlaid is the indifferent, casual, semi-monotone of an outstanding McDowell. It is this combining of images that lends the film its greatest highs. A Nazi rally marching to the lightest strings of Beethoven is a remarkable cinematic achievement, though having a fantasy sequence where Alex whips Jesus seems to be over-egging the pudding somewhat.
Yet after this startling opening the film starts to drag as Alex is incarcerated and the comedy is stepped up. Jailed for murder (in one of the film's most symbolic moments he fights the owner of a health farm with a statue of a giant phallus. She, in turn, fights back with a bust of Beethoven; sexual desire vs. culture), Alex is given the option of freedom. The basic idea is that he undergoes a sophisticated Pavlovian treatment, whereby images are displayed while he is conditioned to act in revulsion. Cured of violent impulses, or at least the desire to act them out, he is released back into society. The jail's Priest stands up and makes a speech on the ethical viewpoints of free will. This is another (minor) flaw in the film: the overstatement and unsubtle usage of moral debate. Allegory is jettisoned as characters take centre stage and siloquoise about the issues in a literal manner (the tramp particularly) before being silenced or beaten into submission.
Alex's reintegration into society mirrors the beginning of the film, though lacks its verve through contrivance. No spoilers here, though his choice of bathtub song does stretch the boundaries of credulity a little. Then comes the worst scene in the entire film, where a nurse is seen retreating from a curtained bed after intercourse, her chest exposed. It adds nothing to the film and performs no function other than used as light relief or titillation. This casts doubt over the whole of the preceding work; has Kubrick been using nudity in the film to make a serious social satire or is the sight of bare breasts and defiled women merely a cause for arousal, or to laugh at, and to applaud?
The picture is still one of the twenty or thirty greatest films ever made, and, because it has something to say, one of the ten most important. As for science fiction, I would place this amongst the three greatest of the genre (alongside Planet of the Apes and, ironically, Kubrick's 2001). But, with a film that has been forbidden fruit for so long, there is an inevitable sense of disappointment.