Film review

Stanley Kubrick (1971)

What a start.  On the soundtrack, Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, given a distorted electronic treatment, reinforces the august, eerie, ceremonial quality of what’s on the screen.  The first image is a young man in close-up, large, cold blue eyes confronting us from under the brim of his black bowler hat.  His noticeable breathing suggests simmering excitement.   His shirt, braces and trousers are off-white – compared, at least, with the bright white of the liquid in the long glass he brings to his lips.  As a voiceover narration begins, the camera slowly draws back to reveal three other youths seated beside him, in similar outfits.  One of them wears blue and yellow eyeshadow; far more conspicuous are the outsize black lashes painted below the right eye of the lad who first took, and still holds, our attention.  The look of their clothes and of the place where the quartet are sitting is poised between the contemporary and the futuristic.  Words decorating the wall behind them are semi-familiar but not English – ‘Moloko Synthemesc’, ‘Moloko Drencrom’, ‘Moloko Vellocet’.  Other young people nearby, dressed less distinctively than the four in the centre of the frame, are as motionless as the fibreglass figures of naked women that dominate the surrounding décor.

As the camera draws back from the central figure – Alexander Walker, in his book Stanley Kubrick Directs, describes it as ‘retreating like a courtier who fears to turn tail till the lord and master is out of sight’ – the latter’s voiceover sets the scene:

‘There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.  The Korova Milk Bar sold milkplus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom which is what we were drinking.  This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.’

Stanley Kubrick Directs was published in Britain in 1972, the same year that A Clockwork Orange first appeared in cinemas here.  An essay on the film forms the book’s last chapter but Alexander Walker begins his study of Kubrick as follows:

‘Only a few film directors possess a conceptual talent – that is, a talent to crystallize every film they make into a cinematic concept.  It is a skill that goes far beyond the mere photographing of a script, however cinematic the script may be in itself.  … Essentially, it is the talent to construct a form that will exhibit the maker’s vision in an unexpected way, often a way that seems to have been the only possible one when the film is finally finished.  It is this conceptual talent that most strongly distinguishes Stanley Kubrick.’

The prologue to A Clockwork Orange is a brilliant illustration of Walker’s opening claim.  Even if you’re sceptical about aspects of auteur theory, there’s no doubting the strength of authorial presence here:  in the space of a couple of minutes, Kubrick has created a powerfully distinct world.  This opening sequence is still one is one of the most impressive that I know.  It’s also the best sequence in a film that proves to be increasingly problematic and unsatisfying, though thoroughly memorable too.

The words spoken by Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and on the Korova walls are Nadsat, the ingenious linguistic invention of Anthony Burgess, who wrote the 1962 novel on which Kubrick based his screenplay.  A youth argot of Russian-influenced English with bits of Cockney rhyming slang worked in, Nadsat is extensive enough now to have its own Wikipedia entry[1].   Alex’s introduction in the film and the book are fairly similar but with one particularly important difference.  Burgess starts with a question, ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ – a question repeated at several points of his novel.  As its first line, it seems to refer simply to the lads’ wondering how exactly to spend the rest of the evening.  It also anticipates a central theme of the novel:  free will.  The question occurs only once in the film but the character asking it is a priest – a prison chaplain (Godfrey Quigley).  He enjoins his criminal congregation – including Alex, now doing time for murder – to choose to mend their ways[2].

Alex, as a government guinea pig, subsequently undergoes a course of aversion therapy – the ‘Ludovico technique’ – designed to obliterate his sociopathic tendencies.  Strapped to a chair and with his eyes clamped open, he’s forced to watch sex and violence, including footage of Nazi war crimes, on a screen.  On completion of the treatment, any attempt to act on his sexual and violent impulses makes him physically ill.  In a public demonstration of the effects of his re-education, an actor (John Clive) hired for the occasion provokes Alex to anger but that’s as far as he can go.  Once he tries to retaliate, he retches; he becomes so helplessly submissive that he obeys the actor’s instruction to lick the sole of his shoe.  A statuesque, topless actress (Virginia Wetherell) then takes the stage and presents herself to Alex.  He makes to touch her breasts before nausea strikes again.  At the end of the show, the chaplain remonstrates:

‘Choice!  The boy has no real choice, has he?  Self-interest, fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement.  Its insincerity was clearly to be seen.  He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.’

Although it might seem from this that Kubrick cleaves to Burgess’s main concerns, the film’s ending is very different from the novel’s.  To be more precise, Kubrick ends his story with Burgess’s penultimate chapter.  The consequences of returning to society are so harrowing for the reformed Alex that he attempts suicide.  The bad press the government gets as a result impels them to reverse the Ludovico treatment on Alex, with evident success.  He’s able once more to enjoy sex and violence fantasies and the idea of making them reality.  He remarks, in the last line of the film, ‘I was cured all right!’  The words are straight out of the novel but in Burgess’s additional, concluding chapter, Alex, preparing to resume wrongdoing, finds that, though the prospect is no longer nauseating, it has lost its former appeal.  He considers abandoning violent crime and taking his place as a responsible, voluntarily law-abiding member of society.

This crucial change isn’t down simply to Kubrick:  when Burgess’s novel was first published in America, it too omitted the twenty-first and final chapter of the book’s British edition.  (The chapter count is significant.  Until 1970, twenty-one was the age of majority in the UK.  In Burgess’s scheme, it’s the age at which Alex properly matures.)   Later American editions included the extra chapter, with a foreword by Burgess explaining that, when he first submitted the novel to a US publisher, he was told American readers wouldn’t buy the original ending.  Kubrick has claimed that he was unaware, until shortly before completing his screenplay, that the twenty-first chapter even existed.  He has also been quoted as saying that he finds Burgess’s ending unconvincing.  The gulf between the two men – in their moral predispositions and creative temperaments – makes for variances between film and book that go far beyond the ending (and the several other changes to the novel that Kubrick’s script reflects).  Although the adult Burgess no longer practised the religion in which he was raised and educated, he made clear in an essay of 1967 that he had lost the ability to believe rather than respect for the Catholic creed[3] and A Clockwork Orange was written from a Catholic perspective.  Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre, in comparison, is consistent and thoroughgoing in its pessimism.  The funerary music that kicks off his interpretation of Burgess’s dystopian vision is apt.

The novel’s publication and the film’s release more or less coincided with, respectively, the dawn and dusk of the 1960s ‘sexual revolution’.  One of the most striking aspects of the film, at this distance in time and especially in view of its accrued notoriety, is Kubrick’s almost puritanical censure of an England where, although the behaviour of the likes of Alex is considered aberrant, pornography has been normalised.  The fibreglass female nudes in the Korova Milk Bar serve as tables and chairs or drinks machines.  Alex, Pete (Michael Tam), Georgie (James Marcus) and Dim (Warren Clarke) lounge about with (to quote the screenplay) ‘feet resting on faces, crotches, lips of the sculpted furniture’.  When they return to the Korova at the end of a night of violent crime, Dim pulls a handle positioned between the legs of one of the nudes and milkplus emerges from a fibreglass nipple.  In the tower block where Alex lives with his parents, a mural in the entrance hall is a faux­-classical depiction of naked men and women.  The ornaments in his bedroom include a quadruple crucifix with Christs sans loincloth.  The weapon in the murder Alex commits is a sculpture of a massive phallus (also made of fibreglass) owned by the victim-to-be (Miriam Karlin).  She yells at the intruder in her home to mind what he’s doing with the object not because she’s frightened but because it’s ‘a very important work of art’.  When Alex thrusts the mega-phallus down upon her, to lethal effect, it’s as if Kubrick is saying (rather as people still sometimes say of a rape victim) that she’s brought it on herself.

Kubrick’s disapproval sits uncomfortably with another aspect of his treatment of sexual violence in A Clockwork Orange – an aspect that greatly troubled some critics on its original release.  It led Pauline Kael, in a vehemently negative review, to ask rhetorically, ‘Is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repellent – than a clean-minded pornographer?’   The night of ultra-violence that follows the milk bar scene is, like that intro, bravura film-making (the editing is by Bill Butler) yet not so overwhelming that it prevents mental objections to some of what you’re seeing.  After beating up an old tramp (Paul Farrell) in an underpass, the next port of call for Alex and his droogs is a derelict casino, where a rival gang of hoodlums, in our narrator’s words, ‘were getting ready to perform a little of the old in-out, in-out on a weepy young devotchka they had there’.  We watch Billyboy (Richard Connaught) and his cronies strip their screaming prey (Cherry Grunwald) before Alex and co arrive to interrupt proceedings.  Kubrick seems to include as many shots as possible of the naked girl:  even when the scene’s focus has switched to the impending gang fight, the camera’s focus stays on the ‘devotchka’ until she escapes the scene.  After stealing a car and driving it recklessly out into the country, the foursome gain entry to the home of the writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee):  the gang’s assault on Alexander’s wife (Adrienne Corri) is staged so as to display her physical humiliation without showing any sympathy for her plight.

Both the casino fight and the attack on the Alexanders are decidedly choreographed and scored to parts of the film’s remarkable, eclectic soundtrack – Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie and Alex’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ respectively.   It would be going too far to say that this theatricality is a distancing effect enough to preclude horror on the viewer’s part yet it does convey a distance between Kubrick and the people on the screen – a large part of what makes A Clockwork Orange objectionable.  With the deeply qualified exception of Alex, no one is likeable.  The dehumanisation takes two forms – Kubrick either objectifies people (the casino devotchka, Mrs Alexander, the actress in the post-therapy show) or presents them as vile.  Those in the latter category are legion.

They include, to name a few:  the other droogs (they might all be called Dim); Alex’s clammy, pederastic probation officer Deltoid (Aubrey Morris);  a sadistic police detective (Steven Berkoff);  the chief prison guard (Michael Bates), a barmy martinet; the protagonist’s mealy-mouthed, inconstant parents (Philip Stone and Sheila Raynor – a sartorially ill-matched couple, by the way);  the lodger (Clive Francis) they take in while Alex is in jail and who gives their son a self-righteous lecture on his return home after release; the suave, slippery Minister (Anthony Sharp) who oversees Alex’s rehabilitation and later reversion.  Most startling is that the victims of Alex’s violence are no less rebarbative:  the entitled, poshly drawling woman he kills;  the elderly tramp who, with the help of a collection of fellow vagrants, eventually gets his own back on Alex;  and especially Frank Alexander, who takes a more insidious revenge.

As interpreted by grey-haired, fiftyish Patrick Magee, Alexander, who is young and pleasant in Burgess’s novel, becomes an apoplectic madman.  Kubrick clearly intends Alexander and others mentioned above to be comic grotesques but his handling of the actors concerned is much less sure and successful than it was with the cast of black-comedy monsters in Dr Strangelove.  It’s hard not to suspect that nationality made a difference.  Kubrick had worked with British actors before but these were usually major names with Hollywood experience:  Olivier, Charles Laughton, Jean Simmons, Peter Ustinov and Herbert Lom in Spartacus; James Mason and Peter Sellers in Lolita; Sellers again in Dr Strangelove.  A Clockwork Orange was the sole film Kubrick made set entirely in Britain (the peripatetic Barry Lyndon is the only other where a substantial part of the story takes place in England) and his first experience of a predominantly British and Irish cast.  It does include some congenital overactors – Michael Bates and Miriam Karlin, as well as Magee (who overacts at an admittedly higher level of technical skill) – but nearly everyone overdoes it here.  Perhaps because Kubrick was unfamiliar with a style of performance typically more theatrical than what he was used to in America, the actors’ satirical effects, compared with those in Dr Strangelove, are leaden.  The playing is cartoonish only in terms of shallow characterisation.  It isn’t cartoonish in terms of speed – and Kubrick’s highly deliberate direction makes matters worse.

This kills the comic possibilities of scenes like Deltoid’s early visit to Alex’s home.  As they sit side by side on the bed in his mother’s room – Alex in his underpants, Deltoid in his belted mackintosh – the probation officer delivers a long spiel, accompanied by menacing pawing of Alex that culminates in a blow to the groin.  Sharing the screen with them is a glass on the bedside table that contains Mum’s false teeth.  Deltoid eventually drinks not once but twice from it; only when he drains the glass of liquid does he realise what he’s been drinking from.  Kubrick lets Aubrey Morris’s reaction go on so long it seems to be happening in slow motion.  The dentures gag wouldn’t have been out of place in a sub-Carry On British film of the era except that it would have been over with more quickly.  The same goes for the suddenly beaming prison guard’s enthusiastic applause for the big-breasted girl taking part in the Ludovico show.  The bit-of-all-right would have worn a bra in a more downmarket picture but the authority figure’s phwoar reaction would have been the same.

How these illustrations of the brazen carnal appetites of representatives of the criminal justice system fit into the film’s socio-political critique is much less obvious than the staging of them.  A more effective black joke, involving two new recruits to the forces of law and order, occurs later in the story.  When Alex is set upon by the down-and-outs, he’s rescued by two uniformed policemen, revealed a few moments later to be Georgie and Dim.   If only what happened next was a matter of a few moments too.  It turns out the droogs have mended their ways less than Alex has.  They drive their ex-ringleader out into the country, hold his head down in a water trough and, while he’s submerged, beat him repeatedly with their truncheons.  This is the prelude to arguably the weakest episode in the whole film, and not just because it too is ponderously protracted.  The battered Alex stumbles down a country lane and upon a house with an illuminated ‘HOME’ sign in the driveway.  That makes it easily recognisable as the residence of Frank Alexander, now wheelchair-bound, widowed (his wife never recovered from her ordeal at the hands of Alex et al) and looked after by Julian (Dave Prowse), a bodybuilder gentleman’s gentleman[4].  Julian carries the almost unconscious Alex over the threshold; Alexander offers the woebegone young man a hot bath and food.

Whereas in the novel Alexander comes to realise the identity of his visitor through a series of careless remarks that Alex makes, the film is all over the place on this.  For a start, Patrick Magee, with his rolling eyes and twitching face, is so elaborately histrionic that he confuses the issue:  does the crazed Alexander always look this way or is he reacting to recognition of his visitor?   Not long after Alex’s arrival, Alexander says, ‘I know who you are! Isn’t it your picture in the newspapers? Didn’t I see you this morning on the video? Are you not the poor victim of this horrible new technique?’  He doesn’t, however, link the subject of this media coverage with the thug who changed his life until Alex, taking his bath, obligingly starts singing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’  – he works up enough volume for Alexander to hear through a closed door or two.  It makes no sense for Alex to do this.  His voiceover narration has already made clear that he recognised his surroundings but was confident Alexander wouldn’t recognise him (and he presumably intended to keep it that way):

‘And would you believe it, O my brothers and only friends, there was your faithful Narrator being held helpless, like a babe in arms, and suddenly realising where I was and why HOME on the gate had looked so familiar.  But I knew I was safe.  I knew he would not remember me for, in those carefree days, I and my so-called droogs wore our maskies which were like real horrorshow disguises.’

If Alex recalls what he sang as he put the boot into Alexander and tortured his wife, he wouldn’t reprise it now:  he isn’t the shameless, arrogant individual that he was before therapy.  If he’s forgotten, he’s not in a mood light-hearted or confident enough to belt the number out.  Why does he give himself away like this except for Kubrick to achieve easy irony?

When the gang returns to the Korova after assaulting the Alexanders, the film introduces one of Alex’s chief characteristics – which is also highly uncharacteristic:

‘There was some sophistos from the TV studios around the corner, laughing an govoreeting.  The devotchka was smecking away, and not caring about the wicked world one bit. Then the disc on the stereo twanged off and out, and in the short silence before the next one came on, she suddenly came with a burst of singing, and it was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milkbar and I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise, and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards and then down again.  Because I knew what she sang.  It was a bit from the glorious 9th, by Ludwig van.’

Alex’s devotion to Ludwig van proves stronger than his propensity for mayhem.  The horrific images he’s forced to watch are accompanied by Beethoven music; the thought that hearing it in future might cause him the same revulsion as perpetrating violence is more than Alex can bear.  He pleads with Dr Brodsky (Carl Duering), who administers the Ludovico treatment, to stop using the music but the damage is already done.  Alex’s eventual suicide attempt is triggered when Frank Alexander, after drugging him and having him locked in a nearby room, plays the Ninth Symphony at high volume.  On completion of the Ludovico-reversal treatment, the government minister, in a gesture of goodwill, has the same music played to Alex as he recuperates in his hospital bed.  In a piece that he wrote in 1973, Anthony Burgess made clear that Alex’s receptivity to beauty, especially in the form of his love of classical music (which is more expansive in the novel), was part of what made him fully human – along with his appetite for language and his aggression.  Kubrick’s cold condemnatory tone gives Alex’s enthusiasm for Beethoven a different meaning.  It’s presented as a sarcastic antithesis to his depravity rather than as an integral part of who he is.

The power of the soundtrack as a whole is another matter, though – or has been for this viewer.  I was seventeen when I first saw A Clockwork Orange at the York ABC.  Most of the classical pieces in the film were new to me and impressive.   There’s no doubt Kubrick’s juxtaposition of sound and sight was a big factor in that but the music – both the ‘straight’ recordings and the Moog-synthesised treatments by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos – stayed with me in a way that the images couldn’t:  I bought the soundtrack as an LP and listened to it long after Kubrick (in 1973) vetoed further screenings of the film in Britain in response to claims that it had inspired copycat crimes of violence.  Like most people in this country, I didn’t see the film again until it was re-released theatrically following Kubrick’s death in 1999.  I thought less of A Clockwork Orange then than I had done as a teenager but more of Malcolm McDowell’s performance as Alex.  Another viewing nearly twenty years on has reinforced those views.  McDowell is tremendous – in his physical swagger, in the brio of his delivery (the rhythm of his readings gives Nadsat a poetic swing), in his ability to make Alex both individual and archetypal, in his fearless empathy with the character.  This is the role that he’ll be chiefly remembered for.  There are good reasons for that beyond the film’s singular reputation.   McDowell’s Alex is chilling and charming.  It’s a combination – a synergy – more challenging to the audience than Kubrick’s masterful misanthropy.

11 April 2019

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat

[2] ‘Is it going to be in and out of institutions like this?   Or more in then out for most of you?  Or are you going to attend the divine word and realise the punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners in the next world as well as this?’

[3] ‘I find that I have no quarrel with the whole corpus of Catholic doctrine; granted the ignition spark of faith, all the tenets of the Church would hold for me’ (On Being a Lapsed Catholic).

[4] This camp detail is one of several things in the screenplay that now read as homophobic – the probation officer who can’t keep his hands off an exposed young male body, the script’s description of the actor who humiliates Alex in the Ludovico treatment demonstration as ‘an elegantly dressed fag’.