A Clockwork Orange

In the near future, gangs of teenage hoodlums roam London committing pointless acts of ultraviolence, wearing outrageous outfits and speaking "Nadsat"—a barely comprehensible patois mixing words borrowed from Russian, Cockney rhyming slang, and other sources. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his three "droogs" make up one such gang, and Alex spends his days drinking milk laced with drugs, listening to Beethoven, and preying on the weak and vulnerable in between rumbles with other gangs. When Alex goes too far and accidentally kills a woman during a robbery, he is incarcerated for what looks to be a long stay behind bars... until the prison offers to put him through the Ludovico Technique, an experimental treatment that promises to condition him with drugs and audiovisual stimuli that will render him incapable of committing, or even contemplating, violence. Anxious to escape prison, Alex readily undergoes the treatment; a changed man, he is released back into the poisonous, ultraviolent London that created him... where the former victims of his sadism are only too happy to see him.

Based on the short novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange is a cinematic masterpiece from Stanley Kubrick, whose one-two punch of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and this film three years later set a standard for deep, multilayered explorations of what it means to be human, or to be alive. A Clockwork Orange might be the most "Kubrickian" of the director's films; in it can be found most of the visual and cinematic touches that make his work so distinctive. The film's iconic first shot opens on an extreme close-up of Alex, wearing a bowler hat and a single false eyelash, performing what has been termed the "Kubrick stare": lower your head and cast your eyes upward so that you're staring straight ahead and almost looking through your eyebrows. The Kubrick stare can be found in many of his films, usually on characters who are angry or deranged. (Amusingly, Kubrick himself wears the stare in several of the more well-known photographs taken of him.) From this close-up, the camera zooms back slowly for 75 seconds in a single continuous motion as Alex's introductory voice-over plays; the zoom ends in a very long shot of Alex and his droogs in the Korova milkbar, surrounded by druggies and lewd, chalk-white ceramic statues. Kubrick used long shots extensively in his films, which probably contributed significantly to his reputation as a "cold" or "dehumanizing" filmmaker: the long-shot composition tends to minimize the importance of the people in the shot and forces the viewer to consider the actors in the context of their surroundings. The moral question posed by the film, too, is classic Kubrick: can a person truly be good if he lacks the capacity to choose to be bad?

As Alex, Malcolm McDowell presents one of the more memorably disturbing characters in modern film. The "uniform" of the young hoodlums—bowlers, false eyelashes, all-white clothing that variously suggests diapers or form-fitting long underwear—mixes age and gender confusion to create an alien look that invites fear rather than ridicule. Male sexuality and aggression are conflated in many of Kubrick's films, and the hoodlums' clothing accentuates their groins, as a reminder that the violence they practice is often sexual in nature. McDowell's languid voice-over and merry, even personable manner throughout the film make him a figure of menace before undergoing the Ludovico technique, and pathos afterward, and any actor who can make the viewer pity a character as violent and amoral as Alex deserves praise indeed.

Points to ponder:

• Stanley Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from distribution in the United Kingdom shortly after it was released, for reasons that are not entirely clear; some cite copycat crimes, others say Kubrick and his family received death threats. Kubrick vowed that it would only be re-released in England after his death, and indeed the film was not shown lawfully again there until 2000, shortly after he passed away.
• A Clockwork Orange was rated X upon its release; it was one of a handful of mainstream films to receive an X at the dawn of the MPAA ratings system, before the X rating came to symbolize pornography. The studio resubmitted the film to the ratings board before a 1977 re-release and it received an R rating, which it now carries.
• Although Anthony Burgess' novel has 21 chapters, it was published in the United States with only 20; the American edition omitted the final chapter, which serves as something of an epilogue to the rest of the story, and it is this version that Kubrick filmed. This infuriated Burgess, who felt the omission changed the whole point of the story. I will not reveal the nature of the final chapter here, but I will after the film. You can decide yourself how significant it is.
• The eerie soundtrack was composed by Walter Carlos, a trailblazing synthesizer composer. After scoring A Clockwork Orange, his first film, Walter Carlos dropped out of sight for several years and re-emerged as a woman, Wendy Carlos. As Wendy, Carlos composed the soundtrack to the groundbreaking 1982 film Tron; she's still composing after all these years and can be found at wendycarlos.com.
• As part of the Ludovico treatment, Alex is injected with "serum 114." The B-52's code radio in Dr. Strangelove was called a "CRM-114 discriminator," and most of Kubrick's subsequent films contained a "CRM-114" reference of some sort—compare the way "THX" and/or "1138" appear in all the Star Wars films and George Lucas' other movies in homage to Lucas' first film, THX-1138.
• Look for David Prowse—the body, though not the voice, of Darth Vader—as Mr. Alexander's bodyguard and assistant.