Kubrick is overrated.
I could answer, but I’m pretty sure you would find it underwhelming also. Just for context, can you name a film from the same period that really blew your mind?
His films are, for the most part, beautifully shot and very well composed. His talent with dialogue and human interaction is utter shit. 2001 worked so well because human interaction was supposed to have that sort of wooden quality. Clockwork Orange worked because of the extremes and weirdness it called for. Strangelove worked for the absurdity of it, and Sellers’ natural genius. But when he gets in to trying to portray real people in real life, like that last movie, he comes down somewhere between almost successful and horribly wanting.
I saw it in 1972, when I was a 22-year old counterculture leftwing revolutionary drug brother wannabe, and it did nothing for me.
It’s one of my favorite films, and I’ve seen it perhaps a dozen times or more.
Kubrick’s vision of a dystopian England is still unmatched. McDowell plays Alex perfectly - an intelligent, sociopathic criminal always looking for some new excitement.
Of course, the score is a marvel - especially the ground-breaking use of Carlos’s synthesized classical.
And, yes, there are some perfect boobies, too…
Knorf is right in his reply to this on all fronts. That post clanks.
I love the movie. Malcolm McDowell is so gleeful when he’s bad. I love the Beethoven, speedframe orgy - still makes me giggle.
Kubrick doesn’t do stuff halfway. Easy to see why he’s not to some folks’ taste. I feel that way about most Scorsese films - and certainly this new HBO series, Vinyl.
I never got the morality play part of it. Per Wiki (which says it better than I could have), the movie’s POV is “After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, but not by choice. His goodness is involuntary; he has become the titular clockwork orange — organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside. In the prison, after witnessing the Technique in action on Alex, the chaplain criticises it as false, arguing that true goodness must come from within”
To which I say: “Who gives a damn about whether Alex’s “goodness” is voluntary or not. He’s a dangerous, crazed/rabid animal and he’s been muzzled with the aversion therapy. I don’t care what’s in his soul–that’s between him and God. I care if he can cripple any more old men or rape women any more. And after the aversion therapy, he can’t. The therapy works.”
So…Clockwork Orange didn’t do much for me since I can’t get my head around the Chaplin’s (and the movie’s) viewpoint. There’s no complex moral issue here. Alex is a low-grade Joker from the Batman and he’s been stopped from hurting others. Problem solved. I think the movie would have been a lot more compelling if Alex wasn’t such a comic-book eeee-vil villian
That said, the music just rocks though, much of the acting was excellent and the visuals are compelling.
Hallucinogens.
Paths of Glory
Spartacus
Dr. Strangelove
2001*
A Clockwork Orange*
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
Full Metal Jacket*
*On on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.
With a resume like that, it would be pretty much impossible to overrate him.
Saw movie then read book in 1986 when I was 19. Didn’t get it, but knew there was something to get. I’ve seen the movie a few times since then and I always seem to get it a little more. As has been mentioned, the impact of the movie on its own merits is somewhat diluted given what alternatives exist today: There are more (although maybe not better–the test woman was epic, especially for 1970’s) boobies in Stripes, more horrifying violence in Blue Velvet, more dehumanizing dystopia in Brazil and Blade Runner, more mind-bending plot twist in Shutter Island, etc. Still, I’m not sure you can have all of it in one package to the same degree you get it in A Clockwork Orange.
When Orange came out, the world had had around 30 years to digest the implications of B F Skinner’s notion of operant conditioning. Most folks I think didn’t even know or care about that pop-sci mumbo-jumbo. Burgess came up with a pretty good reason to implement it (‘fixing’ Alex), and an even better reason to care about it (fixing Alex is a Band-Aid that leaves the larger problem of evaporating morality, trivialization of important stuff like high art, and disposability of alliances as convenience dictates, unchecked). I just think it’s a good bunch of ideas in a good story well-told and well-filmed.
So would just shooting him. Or locking him away in a dungeon and forgetting about him. Is taking away an essential part of Alex’s humanity, his ability to choose, a more moral option, a more civilized option, than those? The difference between you and the chaplain is that you see the Alex problem from a purely mechanistic point of view and consider his humanity forfeit because of his crimes. You come right out and say you don’t care about his soul. The chaplain *has *to care about Alex’s soul and the nature of good and evil.
Biffy & Fenris illustrate the main issue perfectly: Yep, the bad eggs can be rooted out and fixed. That’s a questionable solution because 1) it doesn’t heal the society that produced Alex, and 2) the same method can be used to reprogram political dissidents or 3) produce sociopathic or even unwilling assassins. Even removing the spiritual element, it’s a slippery practice and more likely to backfire from abuse/misuse eventually.
You must be thinking of A Brave New Orange or Orange and Essence.
And unless you think the novel was porn also, I can only imagine that you’ve never seen such a movie, even ones made at the time. The movie was more extreme in the violence than the sex.
The fact that it seems relatively mild now just shows how much we’ve become inured to ultra-ultra-ultra-violence in films today. Like a handgun being the Ultimate Weapon for the teen gangs in West Side Story.
Yes. 
Seriously though, he can make whatever damnfool choices he wants to for himself, but when he’s crippling, murdering and raping other people, he loses his choices and the right to make them.
Granted the chaplain does, and that’s a valid point, but the take-away I got from the movie was that that was the POV the movie was pushing is that what was done to Alex was wrong, and I strongly disagree with that
And the fact that it’s still provoking debate what…~45ish years later?..shows that it’s got something going for it.
!984?
But there is the social commentary that still resonates today. After his therapy, Alex runs in to two his equally evil and violent former droogs. THESE miscreants are now policemen. Not reformed, though. They just never got caught. Still evil violent thugs, but now with social acceptability. They can beat their former comrade with impunity.
Bear in mind that the chaplain is Burgess’s mouthpiece in the book. Burgess was a Catholic, and in *A Clockwork Orange *he examined the nature of good and evil from a Catholic perspective. The book isn’t about how to deal with crime. It addresses the old riddle of why God permits evil to exist. Why not just make us all nice, lobotomized Alexes to begin with? The answer is that without the choice to do evil, we can never be good. Without that choice, we are not fully human.
This is an important issue with the ending of the film, based on the American edition of the book which omits the significantly numbered Chapter 21. The truncated version is a more dramatic ending, but it’s not the story Burgess set out to tell. By finally choosing abandon his evil past, Alex can be redeemed, which he could not be when forced to be good by the Ludovico treatment.
Way I saw the movie was that it wasn’t “pushing” either position: it was raising it as a dilemma. Is use of this sort of technology (assuming it worked) a bad idea, or a good one?
Notably, both ‘political sides’ are represented as wanting in effect to use Alex to further their ends - both are depicted as equal.
You think the choice if available would be a good one, because Alex has forefitted his rights to moral choice anyway; others have a different opinion - that the ‘behavioral modification’ tech, if available, would inevitably lead to misuse; that it was only being used on an irredeemably bad person as a first step in the erosion of essential liberties.
The fact that it is debatable is exactly what makes the movie still relevant, decades later.