Day 86: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Movie #54 – A Clockwork Orange (1971) - 136 min, cert 18.

Set in a bleak future where lawless gangs of young men roam the streets indulging their every violent fantasy. Alex DeLarge is the leader of one such gang who get high on milk laced with drugs, then go out and commit various atrocities, including one particularly violent assault on an author and his wife. She is brutally raped, while he is beaten so badly that he is left paralysed from the waist down. Not long after this, Alex’s gang turn on him, leaving him behind after a crime for the police to capture. He volunteers for a new reconditioning program which involves forcing him to watch a series of horrific images, leaving him unable to perform any anti-social acts. Upon his release he is found by all the people he wronged before and they exact their revenge on him, while he is unable to do anything in response.

This is the third Kubrick film in the last six, and the fourth overall, making him only the second director so far, after Hitchcock, to get four films in the list. In fact, casting an eye down the rest of the list as it stands at the moment, that’s a pattern that continues throughout the list. Hitchcock has the most entries with 9, then Kubrick is next with 8, then a slight gap to Wilder, Miyazaki & Tarantino with 6 each.

So far his films haven’t hit with me. I thought Dr Strangelove was OK, didn’t like his adaptation of The Shining, and just didn’t get Paths of Glory at all. This one falls into the OK camp as well. It clearly sets out to shock at every opportunity with its graphic violence and full-frontal nudity. It plays like soft-core porn in several places, so it’s easy to see why it has spent so much of the last forty years banned in so many countries. Is it art? Is it making some sort of bold statement about the culture of today? I don’t claim to know about such things. All I know is that it was quite bizarre, and not always in a good way.

Score – 6/10. It’s an experience, but not really a film that you can sit down and enjoy.

Next up is City Lights, a silent Charlie Chaplin movie. I’ve never seen a Chaplin movie all the way through, but I haven’t been impressed by the clips that I’ve seen.