connecting with youth audiences, if not always (at the time) with critics. 2001 was a unique cinematic proposition, something truly new and original, a trip that could only be appreciated by fresh eyes and curious minds. Now, as a tumultuous decade drew to a close, Kubrick had to decide where he would go next.
In the first and most practical sense, the answer was Hertfordshire. Concerned about rising levels of violence in New York where he
lived with his young family, Kubrick (left) purchased an estate in Borehamwood, and England became home for the remaining 30 years of his life. Film-wise, he turned to an Anthony Burgess novel, a short, sharp shock of a book about a depraved teenager whose debauched spree of rape and pillage ends in prison, where he agrees to undertake experimental aversion therapy in exchange for an earlier release.
At this stage, nobody – not even a 4D thinker like Stanley Kubrick – could have guessed A Clockwork Orange would become the most notorious film in the history of British cinema.
Malcolm McDowell as a flustered Alex
Future shock
Not even Stanley Kubrick foresaw the furore his film caused
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Eye-watering figure
Alex undergoes torturous aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange
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VIDDY
WELL,
MY
DROOGS
EYE OF THE STORM
As A Clockwork Orange turns 50, see how Stanley Kubrick’s singular vision made him a master moviemaker
DECRIED BY ONE MP AS ‘THE PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE’, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE WAS BANNED BY KUBRICK HIMSELF, following death threats. fifty years on, TOM CHARITY REASSESSES AN UNSETTLING MASTERPIECE
I
n the summer of 1968, Stanley Kubrick turned 40. The former Life magazine photojournalist and Washington Square chess hustler, who never went to college, was by now one of the most famous film directors in America, and the movie to which he
had dedicated the last four years, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was
Burgess had written the novel in a spurt of creativity in 1961, while under the impression he had only months to live (an egregious misdiagnosis), and influenced by Crime and Punishment and an expedition to Soviet Russia. There, he’d encountered dandy Russian hooligans, a mirror image of the Teddy Boys rampaging through the UK in the 1950s. (He was also seeking to exorcise the trauma of an assault by US deserters on his wife during the Second World War.)
Set in an unspecified country in the near future, A Clockwork Orange was written in “nadsat”, an onomatopoeic, punning slang of the author’s own devising but drawing on Slavic and Romany, as well as Elizabethan English, and in the insolent, insidiously amoral voice of
its chummy antihero, Alex.
The book had already been filmed – sort of – by Andy Warhol, released in 1965 as Vinyl. And Mick Jagger toyed with the idea of playing Alex (with the Stones as his partners in crime, or “droogs”). But Kubrick had no trouble purchasing the rights and immediately cast 27-year-old Malcolm McDowell (Lindsay Anderson’s public school rebel in If…) in the lead.
McDowell’s smirking mug opens the movie, peeking under a bowler hat, one eye generously belashed, as the camera pulls back to reveal the Korova Milkbar – a porny, pop art suite which immediately establishes the movie’s sexually fetishised futurism. It’s one of the greatest, most memorable opening salvos in any movie, heralded by the mock pomp of Wendy Carlos’s Moog music. This was the first movie to use Dolby noise reduction, and the first time a vocoder was used to score a film; its influence on pop music can be inferred from the fact that two made up band names from the record shop scene would go on to spawn real-life bands: Heaven 17 and Sparks.
Visually, Kubrick, his production designer John Barry and his director
of photography John Alcott broke the film into three parts. They used a fluid, dynamic, highly colour-saturated look for the early scenes, before reverting to a more static, flatter, greyer look when Alex is imprisoned, and in the final third they combined elements
of the two. As he often did, Kubrick pushed the limits of available camera technology during filming, in this case to find lenses
capable of zooms and extreme wide angles.
Utilising for the most part real locations – notably Thamesmead, where Alex lives with his parents – Kubrick grounds the fantasy in a grim reality. The film is set in an unspecified future, but for anyone who lived in the UK through the 1980s, this is what it felt like: terribly cool on the surface, but grey and soulless underneath. Kubrick also speeds up and slows down the movie: a 28-minute orgy lasts about 40 seconds at two frames a second, and becomes a slapstick gag; a 14-second fight scene is elongated by slow motion and becomes graceful, balletic.
Alex with his trademark glass of milk, bowler hat
and eye-catching make-up
In the film’s bravura opening act, we watch Alex beat up a tramp spluttering about law and order, lead a rape to the tune of Singin’
in the Rain, battle with a rival gang and fight with his own minions, copulate energetically with two young devotchkas, and fatally assault another with the sculpture of a giant phallus… And, if we’re honest, we enjoy it. Not because we are depraved, but because Kubrick renders these iniquities with a glancing acerbic wit and musicality. It’s a merry dance, this crime spree, and if Alex exults in his antics, so do we, even if we know better (of course we do – and
by the end of the story, Alex will too).
No wonder the movie caused something of a furore when it was released. It’s not so much sci-fi as black comedy, a satire on authoritarianism and the eternal struggle between our animal instincts – the id – and the forces of civilisation. For Kubrick, who grappled with this theme throughout his work – in Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining – fear and desire, violence and self-destruction are embedded deep within our psyche; but so too are
art and intellect, and these things are closely related, perhaps inextricably. We are grotesque, and we are beautiful.
Released uncut with an X certificate in the US just before Christmas, 1971, and in London in January 1972, A Clockwork Orange was acclaimed by critics but hit a cultural nerve. The home secretary
at the time, Reginald Maudling, ordered a private screening in the company of the new secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, Stephen Murphy, but decided to take no action. Indeed, Murphy championed the artistic credentials of the film in the press, despite
it putting his own job in jeopardy.
Coining the term “the pornography of violence”, Labour MP and chairman of the All Party Film Committee, Maurice Edelman prophesied that “when A Clockwork Orange is generally released it will lead to a clockwork cult which will magnify teenage violence”. The tabloids would repeatedly link the movie with reports of copycat violence, claims taken up by solicitors and parroted by judges (see Times archive, left).
‘Kubrickian’ is now an official adjective
in the Oxford English Dictionary
Malcolm McDowell as Alex with Gillian Hills and Glenys O’Brien in the record shop scene
When the film went on general release, many local authorities took
it upon themselves to block its exhibition. Ironically the culture of rampant violence that had inspired Burgess to write the book in
the first place, and had inspired Kubrick to relocate to Hertfordshire from New York, was attributed to the movie.
None of this prevented the film from being a hit. In one London cinema the film played for two years. But the director would go on
to quietly withdraw the film from circulation in the UK after receiving death threats through the post. It wouldn’t screen in a British cinema (legally) or be available for home viewing in this country until after
the filmmaker’s death in 1999.
But that didn’t stop the film’s influence from making itself felt
on directors as different as Wes and PT Anderson, Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan, Edgar Wright and David Fincher, to name just
a few. “Kubrickian” is now an official adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary, denoting “meticulous perfectionism, mastery of the technical aspects of film-making, and atmospheric visual style in
films across a range of genres”.
Seen today, in a new 4K digital restoration released for its 50th anniversary, A Clockwork Orange no longer seems likely to stir up violence, or even controversy, but more likely renewed admiration for its extraordinary, bold stylisation, its audacity, and all too prescient satire of social hypocrisy and paternalistic authoritarianism.
As Alex would say, viddy well, my brothers, and keep thee
glazzies peeled…
A Clockwork
Orange
FROM The Times Archives
1972 - 1981
January 11,
1972
Kubrick Precision
“The whole thing works with, yes,
the absolute precision of clockwork. Malcolm McDowell gives a performance of remarkable variety
and controlled power. The film just hits, and hits hard. It works, as
only a master could make it.”
John Russell Taylor, Times film critic
“I don’t know which I find more unpleasant – the aesthetic attitude to ‘choreographed violence’ or the way we are often told that the filmmaker is, of course, dead against rape and shooting, but has to show us, in detail, what
he doesn’t like about it.”
Bernard Dunstan, Times letters
January 12, 1972
Aesthetic anger
“Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is the first Warner Bros release ever to play for over a year in the West End of London. The film opened on January 13, 1972, at the Warner West End Theatre, and so far 550,716 cinemagoers have totalled up
a gross of £438,797 for the film.”
Times news report
January 18, 1973
record breaker
After a judge refers to the film
A Clockwork Orange as the cause
of a teenager’s crime… “So long as crimes of violence are attributed to the influence of film the deeper, more fundamental causes of violence will remain largely unexplored.”
John Trevelyan (Board of British
Film Censors), Times letters
July 30,
1973
Blame game
“Two members of a Clockwork
Orange gang were convicted at the Old Bailey yesterday. Smith and Morris were convicted of a £3,000 robbery in 1976. At the time it was described as a Clockwork Orange-style crime after
a film depicting violent robberies.”
Times court report
July 27,
1979
copycat crime
“Barbara Daly will give Lady Diana
a light and lasting make-up before
she puts on the wedding dress. Daly is the best-known British make-up artist, has worked for many magazines, and created the bold make-up for Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange.”
Times fashion news
July 29,
1981
daly routine
Although it should be a compliment, Stanley Kubrick disliked being
called a “perfectionist”. He thought journalists used the term as code for spendthrift, and that it fed other myths, that his work was “cold” and “inhuman”. In fact, he was parsimonious with budgets and organised shoots to accommodate his chosen working method.
That said, compared with ordinary mortals, Kubrick was an exceptionally exacting and disciplined artist who became known
for putting his actors through dozens (and dozens) of takes. But he
was also collaborative and keen to get input from cast and crew. Omnivorously curious, he would examine an issue from every conceivable angle then turn it inside out. Here are some examples of the attention to detail that pervades every frame of his many films.
The movie maverick was known for his exacting standards – but had a light side
Like Clockwork
Kubrick’s Methodology
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange is available to own now on 4k Ultra HD and Digital, including the Ultimate Collectors' Edition. FOR MORE
The other six Kubrick films featured below are all also available to own, both individually and as a box set. FOR MORE
“The violent film, A Clockwork Orange, was in the mind of a boy aged 16 who beat an elderly tramp to death, it was alleged at Oxford Crown Court, yesterday. Mr Owen [for the prosecution] said: ‘[The film] has produced a canker among the impressionable young,
which all reasonable people
desire to see stamped out.”
Times court report
July 4,
1973
bad impression
Kubrick’s attention to detail did not end with the completion
of the film. His office collected weekly box office data across
the world and he recommended release rollouts to Warner Bros, which they generally followed. Each cinema would receive detailed instructions on projection ratio and sound levels. Kubrick was
so disgusted at how cavalierly cinemas treated 2001: A Space Odyssey (shot in the widescreen Panavision 70mm format and involving 200 process shots that took over two years to perfect) that he shot
his later films in the industry standard 1:66 ratio.
post-production attention to detail
There’s a story about a disgruntled crew member crying out for Kubrick to get off his camera crane and move on to the next shot during the filming of war movie Full Metal Jacket. Incensed, Kubrick demanded to know who had interrupted his concentration.
After a moment of silence someone piped up with “I’m Spartacus!”,
a cry soon taken up by another crew member, then
another. Even Kubrick was delighted.
He could take a joke, even mid-scene
In Eyes Wide Shut – Kubrick’s droll, furtive dream of sex and infidelity starring real-life husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman – the 13½-minute billiard room scene between Cruise and Sydney Pollack took three weeks to film across nearly 200 takes. This was after the scene had already been rehearsed and shot with another actor, Harvey Keitel, who is said to have walked off the production after one 60-take ordeal too many… Kubrick complained that American actors didn’t know their lines, and it was only after multiple takes that they stopped trying to remember them. The official Guinness World
Record for most retakes of a scene goes to The Shining, with 148.
taking it to an extreme
To bring out the romantic and sentimental strains in Lolita, Kubrick’s adaptation of Nabokov’s “unfilmable” novel about a louche European’s infatuation with his landlady’s 12-year-old daughter, he would play mood music on set to help the actors. Shelley Winters responded especially strongly to songs from West Side Story, apparently, while James Mason was a sucker for Irma la Douce. But, contrary to
his reputation, Kubrick also left himself open to happy accidents:
he cast Peter Sellers as the wild card, Quilty, and encouraged
him to improvise his dialogue in the rehearsals, which
would then be incorporated into the script.
Peter sellers as a wild card
While Kubrick is sometimes described as a “cold” filmmaker, such
a description is belied by his intensely moving and lyrically visual adaptation of Thackeray’s 1844 novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon.
To evoke Hogarth’s oil paintings, Kubrick decided to film interiors
for Barry Lyndon in natural light, using only candles. To fully capture facial details in the flickering gloom, Kubrick tracked down one of
ten camera lenses designed by NASA to film the dark side of the
moon, as well as using so many candles that the crew reported
they were sometimes deprived of oxygen.
Going To the moon and back
Margaret Adams, Kubrick’s secretary, was tasked with typing up all
the hundreds of “All work and no play” pages that exemplify Jack Nicholson’s growing madness in The Shining – a film that in 2004 mathematicians at King’s College London calculated was “the perfect scary movie”. It apparently took Adams several months to complete. Kubrick made sure to record the audio of the words being typed out, and it’s said that he repeated that process for different translations
of the phrase in the foreign-language versions of the film.
All work and no play takes months
is available to own now on 4K Ultra HD and Digital.
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daly routine