Deserves to be an icon

Rating: 10/10 (16 April 2000)

This is the one moment in Kubrick's career when he overdid the `found' music thing. He makes the most liberal use of Beethoven, Elgar, Purcell, Rossini, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov ... have I left anyone out? -although I must say that his use of music is often as cunning as ever: at its first appearance the use of Rimsky-Korsakov's `Scheherezade' struck me as being a cheap device, but it turned out a moment later to offer a sly remark on Alex's fantasy. But `Pomp and Circumstance'? Too obvious.
That's my quibble out of the way. When I saw it `A Clockwork Orange' did everything to justify its reputation as a masterpiece, although, curiously, very little to justify its reputation as a sick excursion into the old ultra-violence. In fact it struck me as the product of a more civilised age. (Whether or not it WAS the product of a more civilised age, I wouldn't know: I wasn't alive back then.) Note how we are asked, as if it's no big deal, to feel sorry for Alex. After committing terrible crimes he is altered so as to be physically incapable of committing any more, but this isn't enough for the people whom Alex has wronged. They want to see him suffer. Not to any particular end; they simply want suffering for its own sake. I wonder how many people these days would notice that there's anything wrong with this. We're starting to think, once again, that the purpose of the criminal courts is to exact revenge - just look at all the `vitcim's rights' activists about.
Not that Kubrick's film has a message to offer them, or anyone else. In many scenes every character present has a point and nobody is exactly right. Look at the scene where Alex is being paraded before the press as a triumph of the Ludivico technique, and the priest objects that all that has happened is that Alex has been robbed of his free will (just as he was when he was locked up). The priest is almost right, just as the minister is almost right when he responds that hit doesn't matter, so long as the crime rate drops; but you'll notice that the reason the priest advances is a silly one: that Alex is behaving himself now only in response to a crude system of reward and punishment. The claim that Alex has no power to make decisions, and the claim that he acts out of a fear of immediate punishment, can't BOTH be right; besides, the irony invisible to the priest, but obvious to us, is that his own fire-and-brimstone preaching is no more than an earlier version of the Ludivico technique, with this difference - it doesn't work. Still, although we think little of the priest, and although he's wrong, we know he's on to something. So is the prison guard whose reactions we see throughout the scene. He doesn't take to the new technology at first, but when he sees that Alex is subject to fits of naseau - when he sees that his native cruelty will be indulged after all - he's all for it.
No doubt about it - a film of marvellous complexity, and, two or three shocks of violence aside, it's a delight to watch.