Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Today I choose to knock another classic, or should I say cult classic, off my list of shame. A Clockwork Orange was a book I had to read in school, but to be honest I never really liked it. Unless I'm remembering it wrong, I've been told by friends that the movie is much better and quite good. It's really only been my feelings towards the book that kept me from seeing the movie, but I figured I'd just get it out of the way today. On this very blog I've watched two other films by Kubrick, those being 2001 A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove. I had mixed reactions to both, hit the jump to see what I thought of this one.


I'm sure a lot of you know the premise behind A Clockwork Orange, but just in case I'll run through the basics. Alex is a criminally inclined teen in a dystopian future. He goes out with his droogs (friends) and generally gets into trouble. Or as he likes to called it, a little of the ol' ultra violence. He's eventually caught in a house invasion gone wrong and ends up in prison. He volunteers for an experimental procedure which is essentially brainwashing against all violence and acts of sex, and is then released back into the public life.

Alex in his iconic outfit and fake eyelashes

There are a couple things that stood out to me right away. The first is the horrible slang language they use. I've read the book, so I had a pretty good idea what they were saying by remembering the scenes, but it was often really hard just to even make out what they were saying since now it's not just words on a page, and now it's combined with an accent. In the book at least you could take a moment and read over what you just read a few times so that you could get the meaning, but you don't have any such luxury with a film. Well, it's at least not as easy as flipping your eyes up one line. You just sorta have to go with it and hope you can keep up.

The next thing was the fashion and the design of this futuristic world. It's hideous! I know this movie was made in 1971, and they had some crazy ideas of what the future would look like back then. There are plenty of sci-fi movies from that era to prove that. But this has to be one of the ugliest versions I've ever seen. The sets, the costumes, the interiors and the exteriors were all just awful in my opinion.

If this is the future, count me out

I was really surprised at the amount of nudity and scenes of sexual abuse too. If it's not a straight up topless, or even fully nude girl, then there's paintings of nude women or graffiti of dicks on posters. There's even a large piece of "artwork" of a phallus which is seen and used to a terrible end in one scene. To be honest, it suits the tone of the movie, and the world I recall from the book, but it was still surprising to see this amount of breasts and this not be a porno.

One of the few positives of the film is the performance by Malcom McDowell as Alex. It took me forever before I even recognized him because he's so damn young. He's really quite good at the role, it's unfortunate though, that I hated the character. The slang is partly to do with it, but he's really just not a likable character, and in the back half of the film when they try to make him out to be the victim, I just didn't buy it or care for him at all. On the downside, the acting all around him seemed really poor. Alex's mother in particular is awful. His friends aren't much better.

Time to beat up a homeless man for fun. Good times.

There's so much I could still go on about, but I feel like I'm doing just that already. I'm just going on and on about this movie. It has a very artistic feel to it, and it clearly has tons of messages about government and crime and youth and all that good stuff jammed into it. The book was like that too after all. So I guess I could say it's a good adaptation of the novel, but the fact that so much of it is narrated with paragraphs from the book, and that it look so dated now, I just really didn't like it at all. I really don't want to watch this ever again, but it could very well be that you might like it. If you do like this movie, all the more power to you, it's always better to be able to enjoy something than not, but I just didn't enjoy it, just like the book.