Organic Mechanism.

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2012)

Poor Anthony Burgess had been clobbered over the head by personal tragedy when he was writing the novel. Still, he did manage to produce a work that was not only serious drama but was punctuated by comic elements in Alex's narration. Kubrick's movie maintains about the same ratio of serious social comment and laughs, or at least smiles.
Malcolm McDowell is Alex, a vicious psychopath who rapes, pillages, assaults old men, and finally murders a woman in the course of a robbery. (In the novel, he and his droogs speed down a road running over small squealing animals, but this doesn't appear in the film, presumably because it might drain us of any empathy we might feel for Alex. Killing innocent humans is one thing -- but squashing little animals?) Alex winds up in prison and is subject to "the Ludovico treatment," which is a form of conditioning. He's released when he's cured of his violent impulses and fantasies. The problem is that wherever he turns he seems to run into former victims. He's driven to a suicide attempt that finally cures him of his cure.
The question posed is whether humans are nothing more than mechanisms whose works are determined by circumstances, or whether they are blessed (or cursed) with free will, as most religions like to believe.
Burgess comes down on the side of choice rather than determinism. It's an easy position to take. We're all aware of our own indecisions and anxiety, which we feel as a matter of choice. It's much more difficult to treat consciousness as an epiphenomenon -- a kind of side effect of our underground neural circuits hard at work -- which is what behavioral psychologists believe. It's hard to tell what model Kubrick endorses.
Kubrick's movie is funnier than the novel. In the book, most of the humor was ironic and literary. In Alex's prose, the Minister of the Interior becomes "the minint or something." But the film gives us additional humor because we see Alex and his droogs and victims from the outside. Patrick Magee, as one of Alex's victims, has been accused of overacting. And he DOES do the quivering madman quite well. But, if we can distance ourselves from the movie's message, his performance becomes amusing because it's outrageously overdone. And, in fact, just about all of the performances are overblown, McDowell's included.
It's amusing too because some incidents have been added that are, in themselves, designed explicitly for humor. Having unwittingly drunk some drugged wine with his dinner, Alex confesses to his host that, actually, he feels quite well except for a feeling that something terrible will happen at any moment. With no further prefiguring, his face plops down into the plate of spaghetti.
The film is identifiably Kubrick's. He's fond of flat, high-key lighting. And he uses many sets that are acoustically active, so if someone sets a wine glass down on a table top, the "tink" echoes. A lengthy shot is take from Alex's point of view while he lies supine in a hospital bed. At the bottom of the shot are his two feet, toes up, and an identical shot appears in "The Shining." I wish he hadn't decided to transform Beethoven's ninth symphony into some kind of electronic warble. What a travesty.