A unique combination of gratuitous vileness and tedious worthiness

Rating: 1/10 (17 March 2005)

'Clockwork Orange' is an extravagant achievement in the cause of terrible film-making & gimcrack sociology. It is hard to imagine how such disparate elements can have been be combined into a coherent whole. Not the least of the films negative qualities is its wearisome length: 155 minutes I think in one version. Ouch!
The film's closest cinematic cousin is the Who & Ken Russell's hysterical nonsense 'Tommy'. That easily matches 'A Clockwork Orange' in terms of hamfisted amateur psychology & adolescent clichés about the 'the system'(does the revolting 'gay schoolmaster' figure appear in both films?) but falls far short in both nastiness and length.
The details of the film are all just wrong: what on earth is achieved by its twee faux dialogue? It is supposed to contribute to the rigour of the film's nastiness by showing how what to us are unpleasant concepts have been entirely inculcated into the character's thought-paths, but in fact it adds to the shonky nonsense of the physical design and costume to produce a complete absence of believable internal realism. No burglars would dress in identical white suits. Doctor Who sets were better (just less pornographic) than the celebrated Milk Bar.
The worst thing about the film is that the there is no way that any events in the life of the lead character, especially those subsequent to his arrest, are likely to be of any concern to the viewer. He is simply too repulsive, and deserves whatever he gets and worse. (The business about Beethoven, and its parallels in the graffitoed murals, is intended to affect this equation in some way, but its a cliché with no conviction. Ken Loach, 2 years before, gave his working-class anti-hero a bird-of-prey for similar effect, but in his case this had some believable, organic, connection with the character, rather than being a cheap symbol of 'high culture'). The film thus becomes no more than an utterly unincisive blundering satire on some imaginary penal system, which is so much like the contemporary British system of the mid 20C & its clichéd representations as to divorce the film from a sense of enlightened prediction; but so different from it as to have only the slimmest value as an out-of-date satire.