...its tongue-in-cheek humor, its stylized imagery, and McDowell’s wonderfully understated performance are worth one’s time.
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Like him or not, it´s hard to argue that director Stanley Kubrick hasn´t made some classic, even landmark, films, especially in his early-to-middle period. "Paths of Glory" (1957) remains one of the two or three best antiwar movies of all time; "Spartacus" (1960) is one of the most literate and intelligent historical epics of the big screen; "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) is the cinema´s definitive black comedy; and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) set new standards for its use of imagery, music, and special effects. Which brings us to "A Clockwork Orange" (1971).
All of Kubrick´s films have generated controversy, but this one engendered outright hostility. A tongue-in-cheek social satire, it was banned in England after several juvenile gangs admitted to copying the crimes depicted in the movie. Still, it was appreciated everywhere else for its devastating attacks on rampant youth violence, social injustice, medical ineptitude, and government hypocrisy. It´s not an easy film to evaluate and may, perhaps, have picked up a certain following for the wrong reasons, but it´s undoubtedly a film that can be argued and enjoyed by most anyone. Looking and sounding better than ever in this new edition remastered from restored elements, the film continues to be thoughtful, savage, and funny, a combination seldom attempted by Hollywood filmmakers.
Based on the 1963 novel by Anthony Burgess, the story is set in England somewhere in the mid twenty-first century and told in a language containing words newly made up by the author. Kubrick doesn´t go quite as far as Burgess, who required a glossary of terms at the end of the book, but the director does give us the flavor of this future language. Here´s a sample taken from the early pages of the novel and inserted directly into the movie: "...we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.... They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prooding some of the veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemese or drencrom...." You get the idea.
Once establishing the place and time, Kubrick introduces us to the main character, a young, rebellious, teenaged hoodlum named Alex (Malcolm McDowell), who hangs out evenings with his three cronies getting high and committing crimes of "ultra-violence." Theft, murder, mayhem, and rape are the order of the day for these young fellows in the movie´s future world, a comment, of course, on the crime in our own present-day society.
The violence is always presented by Kubrick in a highly stylized manner--using quick cuts, slow motion, and speeded-up effects, mainly, accompanied by classical music or, in the case of one of the story´s first major crime sprees, "Singing in the Rain." Now, you may complain that the stylization and music trivialize the brutality and horror of the crimes, thus rendering them less serious and more prone to imitation. But one can also argue that the director is juxtaposing the beautiful with the grotesque in his own surreal arrangement to startle us and fix the imagery in our minds all the more clearly. He was a director who consciously strove for the ambiguous in an effort to force his viewers to make choices. It´s in the nature of symbolism that the symbols can and should be interpreted in varying ways. One thing is certain: Kubrick created moving pictures that stick with us, whether we like them or not.
There are two beatings, a near killing, a gang fight, a break-in, a rape, and an attempted rape all within the movie´s first twenty minutes. It´s a harsh future the film portrays, with the cities trashed and sexual evocations everywhere, even to a snake Alex keeps in a dresser drawer. A clever touch is that the soundtrack album to "2001: A Space Odyssey" is prominently displayed at a record shop Alex frequents. Sex, nudity, violence, murder, and rape are openly paraded in a film that originally received an X rating, eventually sorted out to an R. Part one ends with Alex´s capture and conviction on homicide charges.
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