One remarkable thing about this movie is that when it was released It received an X rating. I’m not sure what it’s rated now. The movie rating system we use now was new in the early 70’s. The nudity and sexual violence in the movie I don’t think is even approached in current movies.
I must confess that I saw the film when it first came out. In fact, I saw it at the Fargo, which was a different type of theater then. Everything was different then, and I think those under the age of 25 or so won’t understand much of what the movie is about.
The movie, when first released, I thought at the time was about fear: fear of the future, fear of society, fear of ourselves. The Viet Nam war was at it’s height, the civil rights movement was just getting started, the Miranda ruling was recent and still under much debate. Police brutality was still pretty much the law of the land. In the midst of all this change, there was the usual far right element opposing all of it. Not to say that the liberals, whatever they are, weren’t extreme too.
On the one side we had J Edgar Hoover saying the Miranda decision left him powerless to prosecute criminals. As an aside, the Miranda decision gave no one any more rights than they already had, it just required that upon arrest, they be advised of them. Law enforcement was able to obtain many convictions due to most people’s ignorance of these rights, while organized crime, which Hoover insisted didn’t exist, knew these rights cold and were therefore hard to convict.
On the other hand the “liberals” were in favor of rehabilitation through counseling, psycho therapy and the like.
When “A Clockwork Orange” was first released, it was billed as taking place in London sometime in the future, when Law and Order had broken down. I saw the movie, and didn’t believe it. I’ll return to that point later.
The main character in the movie is an adolescent named Alex, played magnificently by Malcom McDowell, who is basically a young hoodlum with a small hoodlum following. They like to steal things, beat people up, fight with other youth gangs, etc. Nothing new here. This has been going on as long as I can remember. In fact, one of his gang’s first victims in the movie, a helpless old wino the beat up with their walking sticks, complains first that there is no law and order anymore. They also commit two violent crimes by breaking and entering houses of people who won’t open the door for strangers, even for someone apparently mortally wounded. If you’ve ever lived in New York or Chicago, for example, nothing new there either. During the second of these, the victim dies accidentally during a sexual assault. She has, however, called 911 previously, and Alex gets arrested and sentenced to 14 years in Dartmoor. So Law and Order hasn’t broken down completely.
While in Dartmoor, Alex is a model prisoner, and is selected for an experimental program run by the British Home Office which uses some psychological methods to change the personalities of dangerous criminals. Without going into detail, its instills in the would be criminal a reaction to violence similar to what the drug antibuse does in an alcoholic’s reaction to alcohol. As one would expect, one issue is that the Home Office has used its power to change a human’s personality without really changing anything else. Removed his freedom of choice, as it were. Antabuse does the same thing, and I’m against that, too.
So, what we have here is a first rate film with excellent acting and a poignant but often humorous script that really is about several issues which at the time were as important as say multi-billion dollar rescue packages are today. The issues raised in the movie have mostly been resolve, or at least, rendered irrelevent.
Lots of violence, foul language, and it is interesting to see how we compare to where the movie thought society was headed. It is not a romantic comedy, but I think anyone who seriously wants to think about how we got where we are should see this movie.
Script: B+
Acting: A-
Relevance: B+
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