As I Slooshied, I Knew Such Lovely Pictures

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2008)

Alex is a bright but vicious young hoodlum who spends his nights looting, raping and drinking with his gang of droogs, but when he kills a woman he is caught and sentenced to life in prison. He volunteers for a revolutionary new drug/therapy treatment designed to cure him of his violent tendencies, but what will it really do to his mind and freewill ?
This astonishing film, like so many by this amazing director, has no other to compare it to; it is simply unique. There were a spate of dystopian science-fiction movies made in the early seventies - Soylent Green, THX 1138, Rollerball, Logan's Run, etc - all of which vaguely look and feel like each other, but none of them are anything like Kubrick's future shock classic. Instead of spending a fortune on flashy spotless techno-sets, it was shot in incredibly ugly (even by sixties standards) concrete housing estates in Thamesmead and Wandsworth in south London and concentrates on its characters and social setups. Its genius is not to focus on what the future looks like, but what life would be like, and its prophecy of a bland, uncaring society and a government obsessed with popularity, social engineering and restricting personal freedom is absolutely bang-on (if you don't believe me, think about how much our leaders now spend on polls and thinktanks and how much legislation they pass simply because they don't trust us). Morally, it also has a completely original structure - it gives us a loathsome, horrible protagonist, shows him at his very worst, and then asks us to identify and sympathise with him as he is pulped through a cruel political machinery seeking only to exploit him. Through your reaction to this, Kubrick is really defining your own character, an incredible thing for a movie to do. If you think Alex really is an irredeemable thug (as so many self-appointed moral guardians did when the movie was released) then you know very little of human nature and how environment influences us. But if you sympathise with him (as I do), what does that say about you ? Through Alex, the movie examines the odd connection and conflict between morality and intelligence / identity / creativity, and does so on multiple levels - personal, social, religious, even biological. Kubrick's chief desire in his movies was to get the audience to think and ask questions, and the ultimate question here is when Alex is cured at the end, is that good or bad ? My answer is that it's both good and bad, but it's undeniably sensational and mindbending. The lynchpin of these questions, and the film in general, is the career-best performance by the sublime McDowell as Alex. I think it's simply one of the best in any movie, an exceptional example of the perfect actor for the part at the perfect point in his career, firing on all cylinders. He simply is Alex; he's physically amazing, he grasps the tone (especially the humorous aspects) of the character completely, he understands the movie's purpose and he plays each scene with incredible power, his cunning blue eyes and gleeful smirk burning up the screen. This is not straight drama or method acting, it's an extremely stylised performance to suit the movie, but it's just sensational in every way. The moment in the penultimate shot, when McDowell grimaces and stares insanely upwards, his bestial machismo restored, is the ultimate Kubrick Look, which recurs in many of his films, but never better personified than here. The rest of the cast are a terrific bunch of weirdos, notably Clarke, Morris and Stone, and Sharp gives his oily politician just the right mixture of snobbish disdain and patronising double-talk. This was the first of three films that Kubrick made with cameraman John Alcott and right from the amazing opening pull-back in the milkbar almost every frame is both incredible and original; I think my favourite shot is the circular reverse tracker on Alex as he walks through the music boutique. This is a terrific Steadicam shot - the only problem is it was filmed five years before the Steadicam was invented, so how on earth was it done ! The other crucial element is the fantastic pioneering electronic score by Walter/Wendy Carlos, which is combined with inspired source music (Rossini's La Gazza Ladra, Elgar's Pomp And Circumstance, Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain) to make the delirious visuals even wilder. This movie is so original it even has its own language, the Nadsat (a great jumble of English, Russian, slang, Biblical phrasing and made-up words) which results in such wonderful lines as, "Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou !". Sadly and shamefully, here in the UK the film was stigmatised as glorifying violence (Straw Dogs and The Exorcist suffered similar fates) and a hate campaign against Kubrick resulted in his pulling it; outside of bootlegs it was impossible to see here until after his death in 1999. This is both extraordinary - that a director would have the power to pull his own movie out of circulation - and detestable - that philistine idiots who object to artistic freedom would resort to the type of violence they pretend to be protecting everybody else from. The movie remains a work of total genius, and its stunning originality and extraordinary imagery are to be savoured. Based on a great novel by Anthony Burgess.