Crash course

Rating: 10/10 (29 November 1998)

Hey, droogs, when you're trying to wrap your yahzick around bolshy great words like "malenky" and "malchick" without spilling too much red, red kroovy from a burst blood vessel, guess what, that's Russian you're speaking. Just when you were enjoying all that ultraviolence, real horrorshow, and the old in-out, you were really hitting the books. Subversive, isn't it?
The current Penguin edition of Anthony Burgess's novel now makes it clear that your humble narrator's arresting way of speaking is actually Russian (right down to "horrorshow"), but in olden times you had to figure that out for yourself, assuming that you ever did.
"Clockwork" may well be a director's Meisterwerk, a stylistic pièce de résistance, but it is at least partially a succès de scandale. I still feel that Kubrick was irresponsible not to include the final chapter of Burgess's novel. Perhaps the film would not still be banned in the Mother Country if he had. It may well have required someone of Kubrick's ingenuity to handle the abrupt change in mood at that point -- assuming that he had shot the ending straight without putting his own ironic twist on it, which is doubtful. And of course this paragraph is predicated on a fairly literal reading of Burgess, but Burgess edited Joyce, so perhaps Burgess should never be taken at face value either.
For all its brilliance, the film needs to be taken cum grano salis. Investigate the book, and draw your own conclusions. (You will even find the explanation for the film's title there.)
Afterthought, since reviewing the other comments: When I first saw this film 20 years or so ago, it was unspeakably violent and physically repellent to watch. This was before the modern wave of crime and horror films. "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Wild Bunch" may have opened the floodgates for cinematic violence, but "A Clockwork Orange" was in an entire other class. It disturbs me that I can now watch this film without revulsion, and that's not due to overexposure to the film itself which I've only seen a couple of times, but rather to mass culture as a whole.