1971@50: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Mum shook at the memory of the gang rape. Dad didn't believe in the treatment but considered it typical of government programs. There was a tension in the room when they talked about it with dinner guests. One of those, a man old years old (I was nine and couldn't tell) defended the film for its irony but I couldn't tell that either so all I registered was that he was being wicked and grinned a lot. It was my first experience of a controversial film and I wouldn't see it for over twenty years.

For the meanwhile please imagine the speedy synth version of William Tell Overture. Kubrick: I get Dr Strangelove when it plays on TV but my focus is Peter Sellers; the tv ad for Clockwork Orange intrigues me with its adjectives from reviews making it sound indescribable; people praise 2001; Barry Lyndon promos are among the most boring I have seen; I am unexcited by The Shining and then Full Metal Jacket so don't see them until they're on video; Clockwork comes out on video in the '90s and I watch it with Swedish subtitles; a Kubrick retrospective brings all the disciples out of the woodwork and they out themselves as bores, replaying what journalists have said; DVD and then Blu-ray bring the movies into clear definition and I watch Clockwork as a 50 year old film.

Burgess: at my sister's encouragement I read the novel (local library's copy has glossary and extra chapter - more later) and then everything else by him I can find. At the time I was going through dystopian books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. I ricochet from Burgess' novels to his promotion of James Joyce. When I think on't I find the comparison between Kubrick and Joyce helpful (if not always complimentary to the former). 

Ok? Good.

So, at the end of Easter 2021, I slip the Blu-Ray of A Clockwork Orange into the ol' player and sit back to enjoy. Picture on the newish TV is deep and rich. Sound is ace. I love the Carlos synthesised classical music and how it plays under the West-Side Story style blue and red fields of the opening. And it's the same movie I've got used to. No better, no worse.

It's not the old process shots. I prefer them original. The driving scene looks like back projection and only gets worse with higher resolution. The pop art modernism of the club and interiors is more of its own time than futuristic but that's more a conscious comment on the classism of the society in the film. All that is fine.

The film is reasonably close to the novel and maybe that's the issue. The sets and scenes offer solid cinema with bold choices and technical virtuosity. The casting is spot on: McDowell is as perfect as Alex as David Bennent was for Oskar in The Tin Drum. We follow Alex's progress from his ultraviolent youth, through the alienating prison life, the institutionalised violence of his "cure" and so on and all of this goes to Burgess' blueprint. But where the novel is compelling the film gets colder by the minute. There is so much detachment on screen, so much distance between Kubrick, his work and us that the film itself seems to develop its own sociopathy. Is this method-filmmaking? Maybe, but that just comes across as a little desperate. We are meant to be horrified by the final shot and Alex's parting line but the horror is of the film rather than Alex.

The flawless face of A Clockwork Orange is that of the obsessive compulsive rather than the auteur (patience, patients, I'm aware of how clumsily I'm lifting those terms from real medicine), the colourless perfection of the narcissist rather than the self-reflection of the sage. If you think I'm missing the point about the film being as cold as its anti-hero read the novel. The approach works well in the later Full Metal Jacket when the military realm is examined and is apt for the horror of The Shining. But here (and in the unnerving sheen of Barry Lyndon) it resists its viewers.

The original edition of the novel had a twenty-first chapter that showed an aging Alex and his droogs slowing down and ready to move on into the all consuming grey of normal life. The U.S. publisher insisted on its removal for that market and the copy Kubrick read ended with Alex's arch assertion. Burgess was writing about mods and rockers, teddy boys, gangs and subcultures and their inevitable absorption by the great flow of nowt that will keep them alive. It was both a candid celebration of the freedom of youth in extremis and an admission of the weight of age (I don't say wisdom, mind).

But here's another thing. As exalted as Kubrick was and however he might have enjoyed his place on Olympus he was still making films for his time. What did A Clockwork Orange look like in 1971? How did it feel? Did its punters stagger from the cinema numb from assault, dazzled by the virtuosity? A Clockwork Orange in 1971 was, apart from anything else, like the novel and the phenomenon that nourished it, rock music and like Kubrick still himself, young. Who among us sits down in the comfy cushioned seat thinking they are about to watch one for the ages? You might think it afterwards but you don't expect to, you're just seeing a movie. And here in my Victorian era living room with the glorious delivery of Blu-Ray am I, passing sentence on a cry of youth as though it would ever sound fresh at fifty. It's not just that all films are not equal they're not conceived of equally either. I could go on about how much warmer Paths of Glory or even Eyes Wide Shut are (I am one of the very few people I know who really likes that one) but A Clockwork Orange and Alex were not trying to be warm. Kubrick had previously taken us to the moon and then beyond the infinite; we could at least let him take us to Leeds. Is it cold? So it's cold. It'll live without my love.