A very British grimness

Rating: 8/10 (21 March 2011)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was made by Stanley Kubrick in England during1970/71. It debuted in the USA in December 1971 and in Britain the following month. After over a year on release, it was eventually withdrawn from UK distribution by Kubrick and was never re-issued or shown on TV or released on video.
Not until March 2000 did A CLOCKWORK ORANGE reappear on British screens (following Kubrick's death), released from it's cinematic exile and glowing in bright colours as good as it had been in 1971. However, the film's futuristic vision nowadays resembles an alternative version of the 1970s (something British viewers of a certain age will recognise). It's a very British grimness with it's drab flats, ugly prisons and concrete housing estates.
The film's depiction of sex and violence seems restrained compared to those other two notorious British films of 1971 - THE DEVILS and GET CARTER. In fact, there is only one on screen death and that's committed by Malcolm Macdowell as Alex wearing a large rubber nose, a bowler hat, a white boiler suit and a cod piece (his murder weapon is a giant penis sculpture).
The look and sound of this film never diminish, with its claustrophobic interiors and a startling use of music: listen to Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary over the titles or Rossini's Thieving Magpie used to accompany a night of gang fights and joy riding.
The film is set in a London terrorised by hooligans like the surprisingly articulate Alex and his idiot droogs. The opening half hour comprises of the beating up of a tramp, a gang fight, a joy ride, a burglary and a rape. When Alex later gets his comeuppance for murder, the route out of prison is a new form of aversion therapy advocated by the Home Secretary (Anthony Sharp, every inch the suave upper class 1970s Tory). With his eyes prized open Alex is forced to watch endless sex and violence on screen, having being injected so that he feels nauseous and near to death whenever the impulse to sex and violence kicks in. In the end, his 'cure' is a reversion to a helpless state which means on the outside he becomes a victim of the various people he has wronged.
But the films concludes with Alex being readjusted back to his normal state, a moment brilliantly realised with Beethoven's Ninth on the soundtrack and a fantasy of Alex having sex in public: "I was cured alright" he says. Cue Gene Kelly's 'Singing in the Rain'.
Today, the other thing which will distress a viewer is Patrick Magee's very bad acting but you'll be exhilarated on so many levels. It's a film far from everyone's taste and I'm not altogether how seriously we're meant to take it.