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enitharmonTrue originality, somebody once said, means authorship being instantly recognisable from even a short fragment. Actually I'm pretty sure that it was the poet Gavin Ewart, arguing for the admission of Willam McGonagle to the canon. To bracket one of the greatest of film directors with McGonagle is just plain silly but nonetheless, if you didn't know that Stanley Kubrick had directed A Clockwork Orange you'd be convinced within a very short time.
We are in a chilling near-future dystopia not terribly far removed from the then-contemporary Soviet Union (Alex and his friends speak in a slang heavily larded with Russian words) through which Alex, a kind of Billy Liar on speed (or, in this case, a kind of supercharged milk called 'moloko vellocet') cut a psychopathic swathe along with his 'droogs' (friends). Until, that is, Alex is betrayed by the droogs, arrested and imprisoned for the senselessly brutal murder of a woman with an oversized ceramic penis in furtherance of theft. From there he is picked out by an authoritarian government as a guinea pig for a drastic course of aversion therapy. But will it work in the long term?
I stayed well away from this when it was new: the idea of rape and violence as entertainment was - still is - repellent. For many years, until Kubrick's death, it simply wasn't available. This time I wanted to see it because, despite all the violence, people I otherwise respect regarded it as a fine film. And In the end I very much enjoyed a film from one of the true greats: the frisson of Lolita; the surreal black comedy of Dr Strangelove; the use of familiar music in incongruous settings. Alex's friends, beating up an Irish tramp to Rossini's Thieving Magpie overture, look uncannily like the apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It made me think that I'd have loved to have seen Kubrick's interpretation of Joe Orton.
We are in a chilling near-future dystopia not terribly far removed from the then-contemporary Soviet Union (Alex and his friends speak in a slang heavily larded with Russian words) through which Alex, a kind of Billy Liar on speed (or, in this case, a kind of supercharged milk called 'moloko vellocet') cut a psychopathic swathe along with his 'droogs' (friends). Until, that is, Alex is betrayed by the droogs, arrested and imprisoned for the senselessly brutal murder of a woman with an oversized ceramic penis in furtherance of theft. From there he is picked out by an authoritarian government as a guinea pig for a drastic course of aversion therapy. But will it work in the long term?
I stayed well away from this when it was new: the idea of rape and violence as entertainment was - still is - repellent. For many years, until Kubrick's death, it simply wasn't available. This time I wanted to see it because, despite all the violence, people I otherwise respect regarded it as a fine film. And In the end I very much enjoyed a film from one of the true greats: the frisson of Lolita; the surreal black comedy of Dr Strangelove; the use of familiar music in incongruous settings. Alex's friends, beating up an Irish tramp to Rossini's Thieving Magpie overture, look uncannily like the apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It made me think that I'd have loved to have seen Kubrick's interpretation of Joe Orton.
