"Funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real on a screen"

Rating: 8/10 (9 January 2008)

A Clockwork Orange, like many "cult" films, is a bit of a problem for film buffs. Whether it's good or bad tends to get lost under its iconic, pseudo-hip status. Fans quote its quirky dialogue, delight in the overt violence and sexuality and marvel over its philosophical message-making, but if that were all there was to it Clockwork Orange would be a pretty poor film.
Clockwork Orange is perhaps the most extreme example of the Kubrick technical style  a kind of formal method which instantly distinguishes his films. And bizarrely, it's all based around the game of chess. While he had by now dropped all the actual references to the game which peppered his earliest films, Kubrick had begun directing as if he were playing chess. Look at the camera movements. With a few exceptions, the camera only moves as if it was a chess piece  forwards, backwards, left and right. The actors also move like opposing chess pieces, more often than not directly towards the camera or across the shot.
Kubrick was always meticulous and extravagant in conveying an idea and an atmosphere not just through performances but through set and costume design, sound, music and lighting. In the first part of Clockwork Orange (the first half-hour or so, up until Alex is arrested) every aspect of every shot expresses the collision between formal sophistication and crude roughness. So we have violent youngsters wearing bowler hats, the mural with penises grafittied onto it, classical music played on synthesisers and so on. It's a world full of images we recognise, but is at the same time as deliberately outlandish as possible. Compare this to the next section of the film, in the prison, where everything becomes realistic and contemporary, although the atmosphere is equally unnerving.
Clockwork Orange also represents the peak of the growing musical dimension of Kubrick's films. It is what the director Michael Powell referred to as a composed film  one where the images play out like a piece of music. As I've hinted at above it's structured in contrasting "movements" which reference and counterpoint each other, like a classical symphony. However there's also the musical element to individual scenes. The scene, fifteen or so minutes in, in which Alex returns to his bedroom to listen to Beethoven's 9th is one of the best examples in cinema of image and music working together  the quick zoom onto the Beethoven poster as the piece begins, then the prowling downward scan in the following shot, followed by the staccato cuts of details of the dancing Jesuses ornament are simply perfect.
A Clockwork Orange, like all of Kubrick's later films, is incredibly elaborate and painstaking in the way it is constructed. It's not quite the classic it's reputed to be, and the statement it makes about free will isn't really all that profound. It is entertaining though, and in spite of what I said in the first paragraph, you can't help but like that memorable, poetic Nadsat dialogue.