Go Back   Sports Car Forum - MotorWorld.net > Television and Movies > Favourite TV Shows and Movies

Favourite TV Shows and Movies This is the place to discuss you favourite TV Shows and Movies



Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 04-21-2006, 08:50 AM   #1
a007apl
Regular User
 
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Brasília-DF Brazil
Posts: 15,357
Default A Clockwork Orange

Classic Movie ever 8)
____________


____________

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is producer-director-screenwriter Stanley Kubrick's randomly ultra-violent, over-indulgent, graphically-stylized film of the near future. It was a terrifying, gaudy film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' 1962 satiric, futuristic novel of the same name. This was Kubrick's ninth feature film, appearing between 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Barry Lyndon (1975).

The luridly-colorful set designs by John Barry, costume design by Milena Canonero, the synthesized electronic score by Wendy Carlos [sometimes credited as Walter Carlos - her birth name until undergoing a sex-change operation in 1972 to became Wendy], the colorful and innovative cinematography by John Alcott, and the hybrid, jargonistic, pun-filled language of Burgess' novel (called Nadsat - an onomatopoetic, expressive combination of English, Russian, and slang), produce a striking, unforgettable film. Some words are decipherable in their contextual use, or as anglicized, portmanteau, rhymed, or clever transformations or amputations of words. Originally, the rock group The Rolling Stones were considered for the main cast roles of Alex and his droogs, until Kubrick joined the production.

The controversial film's title and other names in the film have meaning. The title alludes to:

a clockwork (mechanical, artificial, robotic) human being (orange - similar to orang-utan, a hairy ape-like creature), and
the Cockney phrase from East London, "as queer as a clockwork orange" - indicating something bizarre internally, but appearing natural, human, and normal on the surface
The film's poster and tagline advertised its themes of violence in a police state, teen delinquency, technological control, and dehumanization:

Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.

Originally rated X, A Clockwork Orange was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Screenplay, but was defeated in each category by William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971). It was one of only two movies rated X on its original release (the other was Midnight Cowboy (1969)) that was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award.


To underline the assaultive nature of the film's content, much of its camera work is deliberately in-out, with few pans or much lateral/horizontal movement. Because of the copy-cat violence that the film was blamed for, Kubrick withdrew it from circulation in Britain about a year after its release. [Shortly after the ban was instituted, a 17-year old Dutch girl was raped in 1973 in Lancashire, at the hands of men singing Singing in the Rain. And a 16-year-old boy had beaten a younger child while wearing Alex's uniform of white overalls, black bowler hat and combat boots. Both were considered 'proof', after the fact, that the film had an influential effect on violence in society.] In preparation for a new 1972 release for US audiences, Kubrick replaced about 30 seconds of footage to get an R-rating, as opposed to the X-rating that the MPAA initially assigned to it. (The replacement footage was for two scenes: the high-speed orgy scene in Alex's bedroom, and the rape scene projected at the Ludovico Medical Center.) In the spring of 2000, an uncut version of the film was re-released to British screens.

The frightening, chilling and tantalizing film (a morality play) raises many thematic questions and presents a thought-provoking parable: How can evil be eradicated in modern society? If the state can deprive an individual of his free will, making him 'a clockwork orange,' what does this say about the nightmarish, behavioral modification technologies of punishment and crime? Do we lose our humanity if we are deprived of the free-will choice between good and evil?



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The title of the film plays upon an orange-shaded background. The setting of the film is England in the near future [later in the film, the police wear an emblem of Elizabeth II on their lapels]. In the background, gothic-sounding organ plays Purcell's 'Elegy on the Death of Queen Mary' - a funereal dirge. [The music was played on an electronic organ by pioneering synthesist Wendy (or Walter) Carlos.]

The opening memorable image is an intimate closeup of the blue staring eyes and smirking face of ebullient young punker Alex de Large (Malcolm McDowell), wearing a bowler hat and with one false eyelash (upper and lower) adorning his right eye. His cufflinks and suspenders are ornamentally decorated with a bloody, ripped-out eyeball.

[This menacing closeup is known as the 'Kubrick' stare, with the head tilted down and slightly to the side, with penetrating eyes staring forward from behind the eyebrow line. The same stare was also prominently found in Kubrick's works: Dr. Strangelove, Or: (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).]

As the camera zoom pulls back, the anti-hero character with the malevolent, cold stare is shown sitting amidst his kingly court of teenaged gang of "droogs" - Georgie (James Marcus), Dim (Warren Clarke), and Pete (Michael Tarn). The young hoodlums wear oversized, protective cod-pieces to flaunt their sexuality, over their all-white combat suits. [Their names are symbolic: Alex represents the heroic and majestic leader Alexander the Great, but in this case "A-lex" - a man without law or 'a law unto himself.' A-lex literally means 'without law.' The droogs have Russian names, e.g., Dim is probably a shortened version of Dimitri.]

In front of them and also forming a corridor on either side of the camera are grotesque forms of art work in a mood of futuristic nihilism - sculpted, sleek, hygienic white-fiber glass nude furniture and statues of submissive women either kneeling or in a back-bending position on all fours as tables. Colors are absent except for the artificial orlon wigs and pubic hair.

The visually-brilliant film is narrated by Alex, the film's main hero/protagonist:


Alex (voice-over): There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.
In the Korova Milkbar, spiked, hallucinogenic drink concoctions (called "milk-plus") served from the nippled breasts of the coin-operated mannequins are automatically laced with drugs to alter their minds and get them ready for entertainment - a bit of "the old ultra-violence." They are looking forward to a night of sado-sexual escapades (beatings, pillaging, mayhem, break-ins and rape). The teen-aged boys, wearing zoned-out, pathological expressions on their faces and assuming arrogant poses, are preparing to go on a rampage led by Alex.

Visually, they are harshly backlit and project elongated shadows ahead of them as they walk through the darkened streets with billyclubs, wearing white trousers and white suspenders to match, black combat boots and derbies. Every night, they commit stylized but meaningless acts of terrorism including rape ("the old in-out, in-out"), robbery, and mugging.

The youth gang beat up a drunken bum (Paul Farrell) who has sought refuge in a gutter under a pedestrian underpass, while singing "Molly Malone." The "filthy, dirty old drunkie" taunts them and is severely beaten after masochistically bemoaning the state of affairs in the present society - "a stinking world" where the young show no respect for the elderly:


Alex (voice-over): One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy, dirty old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp, blerp in between, as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was. (The boys stop and applaud the Tramp's singing)
Tramp: Can you spare some cutter, me brothers? (Alex rams his club into the tramp's stomach) Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards. I don't want to live anyway...not in a stinking world like this.
Alex: Oh...and what's so stinking about it?
Tramp: It's a stinking world because there's no law and order any more. It's a stinking world because it lets the young get onto the old, like you done. Oh...it's no world for an old man any longer. What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon, and men spinning around the earth, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.
On the soundtrack, a balletic overture of violins and woodwinds plays, as the camera pans down from a gilded prosceneum above the stage of a derelict, abandoned opera house/casino, a symbol of collapsed civilization. Operatic screams and waltztime music are heard as a young woman struggles during an acrobatically-delivered molestation. On stage, the rape victim has her clothes torn off by five other mad-faced delinquents from a rival gang. The leader, Billyboy (Richard Connaught) and his gang of droogs wear remnants of old Nazi uniforms:


Alex (in voice-over): It was around by the derelict casino that we came across Billyboy and his four droogs. They were getting ready to perform a little of the old in-out, in-out on a weepy young devotchka they had there.
From the shadows, Alex and his gang observe the preparation for the rape, and then - preferring violence to sex, challenge them to a fight on the rubbish-strewn floor with a youthful, sexual insult: "How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunich jelly thou." The old-fashioned, stylized rumble, a quick-edited succession of violent images performed as a balletic dance, is dazzling - synchronized with the building music from Rossini's The Thieving Magpie (La Gazza Ladra). In slap-stick style, the adolescent gangs flash switchblades, hurl each other through furniture and plate glass windows, and use judo to smash each other about. Bodies fly through the air, leap and somersault; chairs smash heads.

When a police siren alerts them to the arrival of police, Alex and his gang escape - crammed into a stolen sports car - a Durango-95. [The car's model, aka Probe 16, was a concept car produced in the year 1970. Is this an anachronism or not? Does it imply that the film's setting was approximately the same as the time of the film's release? Note: the 95 in the car's title refers to the car's model number - it doesn't refer to the year 1995.] The vehicle is a low-slung, fast, phallic-shaped car headed into the black night of the countryside. Driving at reckless speed in a rush toward the camera (with the sides of the road receding behind them), they play "chicken" with other vehicles, exhilarated by the panic and excitement of forcing other cars and drivers off the road:


Alex (voice-over): The Durango-95 purred away real horrorshow - a nice, warm, vibraty feeling all through your guttiwuts. Soon, it was trees and dark, my brothers, with real country dark. We fillied around for a while with other travellers of the night, playing hogs of the road. Then we headed west, what we were after now was the old surprise visit. That was a real kick and good for laughs and lashings of the old ultra-violence.
At an opulent residence welcomingly marked with a lit "HOME" panel sign, the four sneak up toward the door of the ultra-modern home, a monstrosity of futuristic architectural design. The home is the residence of the Alexanders. The elderly husband Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), a left-leaning writer, taps away at his IBM typewriter in a book-shelved section of the home. His wife Mrs. Alexander (Adrienne Corri), wearing a red pajama suit, reads in a white plastic chair. When the doorbell rings (to the chimed tune of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony!) and she answers, Alex pleads and claims that there has been "a terrible accident" and he must use their phone to call an ambulance: "It's a matter of life and death." She hesitates to let him in, suspicious of night callers. But Mr. Alexander acquiesces to the passionate request and permits entry.

When she unlatches the door, the gang bursts in to bring a nightmarish form of entertainment - they are wearing bizarre comical masks. Alex has a grotesque, phallic-nosed face mask. Dim slings Mrs. Alexander over his shoulder and fondles her. Mr. Alexander is assaulted and kicked on the floor by Alex who ironically punctuates his rhythmic, soft-shoe kick-dance with the lyrics of "Singin' in the Rain." The scene is one of the most disturbing scenes in the film, with its juxtaposition of the familiar lyrics of playful music from a classic film with slapstick comedy, brutality and horrible ultra-violence:


I'm singin' in the rain, Just singin' in the rain...
What a glorious feeling, I'm happy again..
I'm laughing at clouds, so dark up above..
The sun's in my heart, and I'm ready for love.
Let the stormy clouds chase, Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain, I've a smile on my face.
I'll walk down the lane, With a happy refrain
And I'm singin', just singin' in the rain.
The appearance of mirrors in the hallway implies that the rape is metaphorically executed over and over again, and also reflects the mental/psychological state of the victim. Both victims and bound and gagged, with a rubber ball painfully inserted into their mouths and wrapped with long strips of Scotch tape around their heads. Alex overturns the writer's desk, typewriter, and bookshelves. Mr. Alexander is forced to helplessly watch the ugly disrobing and choreographed rape of his own wife. A grown-up 'child,' Alex begins by first attacking her breasts - he first snips off two circles of jumpsuit cloth around them to expose them. In the mode of 'Jack the Ripper', he then slits her entire suit off from her pant leg upward. After unzipping and pulling his own pants down prior to her rape, he mocks the husband: "Viddy well, little brother. Viddy well."

After a long night of "energy expenditure," the group returns to the Korova Milkbar where they are seen sprawling against its black walls:


Alex (voice-over): We were all feeling a bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure, O my brothers. So we got rid of the auto and stopped off at the Korova for a nightcap.
At a nearby table where "some sophistos from the TV studios" are "laughing and govoreeting," the woman in the group suddenly has a "burst of singing" with a short section of Schiller's Ode to Joy chorale movement from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. For Alex, it is a moment of pure ecstasy:


Alex (voice-over): And it was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milkbar and I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards and then down again. Because I knew what she sang. It was a bit from the glorious Ninth, by Ludwig van.
After Dim blows a raspberry at the singer, Alex smashes him across the legs with his cane for lack of respect ("for being a bastard with no manners") for his favorite, beloved composer. The oafish Dim whines and whimpers and shows dissatisfaction and discontent with Alex's leadership: "I don't like you should do what you done. And I'm not your brother no more and wouldn't want to be...Yarbles, great bolshy yarblockos to you. I'll meet you with chain or nozh or britva any time. Not having you aiming tolchocks at me reasonless. It stands to reason, I won't have it." But Dim backs down and declines to fight and Alex lets the challenge go, for the moment.

He returns home to Municipal Flatblock 18a Linear North, where he lives with his "dadda and mum." In the ground-floor, trashed lobby of the depressing, unkempt building, a huge mural depicting the dignity of labor and noble citizens is defaced with obscene sexual graffiti. The elevator door is broken and Alex must take the stairs. The wall inside his room is decorated with an erotic, spread-eagled female image on one side, and a poster of Beethoven on the other. He puts his loot from the evening into a drawer already filled with stolen watches and wallets. In a second drawer, he checks his pet python. As "the perfect ending" to the "wonderful evening," Alex switches on a cassette tape of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. While musically appreciating his favorite composer and classical piece, he lies back on his bed. His pet python phallically explores the exposed crotch area of the female figure on the wall.

During the drugged reverie of listening to Beethoven in his combination-locked bedroom, Alex moans orgiastically: "Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied I knew such lovely pictures." Spaced-out pictures from Alex's hallucinogenic, sado-masochistic dreams are flashed in images on-screen [as Alex allegedly masturbates - just out of the viewable frame]:


Quick-cuts of four plastic, tap-dancing bleeding, crucifix Jesuses

A white-dressed woman dropping through the trap-door floor as she is hung by the neck and viewed by leering men from above

A close-up of Alex's face as he laughs maniacally and bares bloody fangs

Exploding rocks or a volcanic eruption

A fiery explosion

A rockslide avalanche crushing primitive Neanderthal men
The next morning, his financially hard-pressed, working-class parents Pee (Philip Stone) and Em (Sheila Raynor) are confused, apologetic, and apparently frightened by their son's devious behavior. Costumed in garish, mod outfits and drinking their morning coffee, they speak about him in the kitchenette of their ugly, knick-nack filled flat:


Pee (father): I wonder, where exactly is it he goes to work of evenings?
Em (mother): Well, like he says, it's mostly odd things he does, helping like, here and there as it might be.
After finally getting up, but feeling "a pain in the gulliver" and missing school, Alex plods around in his underwear and is surprised to discover his middle-aged, pudgy, social worker/probation officer ("Post Corrective Adviser") Mr. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris) in the apartment (he was given the key by Alex's mother on the way to work). A sexually-deviant adult, Deltoid is happy to have found the young boy before he has had a chance to get dressed. After having Alex sit on the bed next to him, he affectionately puts his arm around Alex's bare shoulders and speaks to him in the Nadsat lingo of youth:


...you watch out, little Alex, because next time it's not going to be the Corrective School anymore. Next time, it's going to be the barry place and all my work ruined. If you've no respect for your horrible self, you at least might have some for me who's sweated over you. A big black mark, I tell you, for every one we don't reclaim. A confession of failure for every one of you who ends up in the stripy hole.
As the rapacious and monstrous Deltoid shamelessly paws at Alex, and even makes a forceful grab at Alex's crotch, he informs Alex that he suspects the boy's involvement in the "nastiness" of the previous evening and demands reform:


Deltoid: There was a bit of a nastiness last night, yes. Some very extreme nastiness, yes. A few of a certain Billyboy's friends were ambulanced off late, yes? Your name was mentioned, the word has got thru to me by the usual channels. Certain friends of yours were named also. Oh, nobody can prove anything about anybody as usual, but I'm warning you, little Alex, being a good friend to you as always, the one man in this sore and sick community who wants to save you from yourself. (He forcefully grabs at Alex's crotch. Alex doubles over in pain, squirms away and rises. He drinks from a bedside glass of water, not noticing the pair of false-teeth floating within.) What gets into you all? We study the problem. We've been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You've got a good home here, good loving parents, you've got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside of you?
Alex: Nobody's got anything on me, brother, sir. I've been out of the rookers of the millicents for a long time now.
Deltoid: That's just what worries me. A bit too long to be safe. You're about due now by my reckoning. That's why I'm warning you, little Alex, to keep your handsome young proboscis out of the dirt. Do I make myself clear?
Alex: As an unmuddied lake, sir. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, sir.
In a flashy, mirrored, musical boutique, two teeny-boppers lick phallic-shaped (but droopy) icy lollipops. To the synthesized sounds of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the stylishly-dressed Alex is filmed in an elaborate, 360 degree tracking shot as he struts through the record store [the soundtrack of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is on display at one of the counters] and scrutinizes young females. After hunting around and inquiring about an order, he asks the pop-sucking little sisters: "A bit cold and pointless, isn't it, my lovely?" and then invites the two young boppers back to his room to listen to music on his elaborate hi-fi system:


What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful portable picnic players. Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited.
After getting them back to his room, a creatively-filmed high-speed, slapstick orgy scene occurs. The frenetically-paced orgy is staged to the tempo of the "William Tell Overture." Before sexual hijinks, he sprays underarm deodorant at them, and then they frolic in group sex upon his bed. Both teen nymphets undress, dress and undress again. [The scene was shot at twelve times normal film speed (at 2 frames per second). It took an actual 28 minutes to film, but lasts only 40 seconds on screen.]

Alex's mutinous droog gang are waiting for him in the squalid lobby of the apartment building when he comes downstairs. After grumbling about his "giving orders and discipline" and confronting him with his dictatorial treatment, they demand a "mansize crast" to go after the "big, big money":


Alex: Let's get things nice and sparkling clear. This sarcasm, if I may call it such, does not become you, O my little brothers. As I am your droog and leader, I am entitled to know what goes on, eh? Now then, Dim, what does that great big horsy gape of a grin portend?
Georgie: All right, no more picking on Dim, brother. That's part of the new way.
Alex: New way? What's this about a new way? There's been some very large talk behind my sleeping back, and no error.
Georgie: Well, if you must have it, have it then. We go around, shop crasting and the like, coming out with a pitiful rookerful of money each.
Dim: Pitiful rookerful.
Georgie: And there's Will the English, in the Muscleman coffee mesto, saying he can fence anything that any malchick tries to crast. The shiny stuff, the ice, the big, big, big money is available, is what Will the English says.
Dim: Big, big money.
Alex: And what will you do with the big, big, big money? Have you not everything you need? Have you not everything you need? If you need a motor car, you pluck it from the trees. If you need pretty polly, you take it.
Georgie: Brother, you think and talk sometimes like a little child.
To appease the dissidents' bitter disaffection, Alex offers to reconcile with them and suggests first buying them a round of drinks ("moloko-plus") at the Korova milkbar. They walk along the flatblock marina to the bar, in graceful slow-motion (in striking contrast to the high-speed orgy scene previously):


Alex (voice-over): As we walked along the flatblock marina, I was calm on the outside but thinking all the time. So now it was to be Georgie the General, saying what we should do, and what not to do, and Dim as his mindless, grinning bulldog. But, suddenly, I viddied that thinking was for the gloopy ones, and that the oomny ones used like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. There was a window open, with a stereo on, and I viddied right at once what to do.


Hearing Rossini's The Thieving Magpie drifting in from an open window, Alex "viddies" what to do - he turns on his pals. First, he spins and strikes Georgie in the crotch with his cane and then thrusts both Georgie and Dim into the water. [The image of Alex leaping with his cane and ape-ing at the camera resembles the man-ape in the opening sequence of Kubrick's own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).] To impose his will over his followers and subjugate them into submission, he draws his knife from the end of his cane and slices Dim with it across the back of his hand. Later, in the Duke of New York pub, Alex resumes power over them and is acknowledged as their "Master and Leader:"

Alex (voice-over): I had not cut into any of Dim's main cables and so, with the help of a clean tashtook, the red, red krovvy soon stopped, and it did not take long to quieten the two wounded soldiers, down in the snug of the Duke of New York. Now they knew who was Master and Leader. Sheep, thought I, but a real leader knows always when like to give and show generous to his unders.
Alex accepts Georgie's scheme to visit and rob ("it's full up with like gold and silver, and like jewels") an almost-deserted, isolated health farm outside of town "owned by this like very rich ptitsa who lives there with her cats." [Their plan is part of a plot to betray Alex so that he will be caught after the crime.] Before a description of the Woodmere Health Farm is completed, they are knocking on the door of the carpeted facility, wall-papered with gigantic, modern pornographic art (lewd scenes of sexual intensity and bondage), and decorated with garish, decadent art objects. [One of the paintings resembles Mrs. Alexander with her breasts exposed.] The exercise facility is run by a wiry, introverted Englishwoman named Miss Weathers, known as the 'Catlady' (Miriam Karlin) - wearing an emerald-colored leotard, she is exercising on the floor surrounded by dozens of cats when she hears knocking. Cursing, she goes to the door, but rejects Alex's familiar accident/emergency ploy.

Instead of letting him in to call the police, she uses the phone to notify the authorities at the Radlett Police Station, while the droogs put on their masks and sneak around to the rear of the house. Alex enters through an open window on the second floor. When she hangs up the phone, she turns and suddenly sees Alex, who grins: "Hi-hi-hi-hi there!" and calls her giant phallus artifact: "Naughty, naughty, naughty. You filthy old soomka." When Alex sets to rocking her giant, obscene phallus sculpture on its testicles, she screams: "Leave that alone! Don't touch it! It's a very important work of art." Her demands that Alex get out fail, so she picks up a bust of his beloved Beethoven and rushes at him, They duel each other with antagonistic weapons - he holds her off with the oversized phallus, and she thrusts the small bust of Beethoven at him.

The scene, another balletic dance, is filmed with a hand-held camera to emphasize its urgency. When she goes down on the floor, Alex raises the Beethoven sculpture above her and plunges it down into her - filmed from a low angle. As she screams, a close-up of a mouth within another open mouth (from one of the pop paintings in the rooms) flashes on-screen with other dismembered body parts in an orgy of modern art. Alex leaves her senseless and beaten on the floor, mortally wounded by her own sculpture-turned-weapon, when he hears sounds of distant police sirens. As he races out the front door to join his henchmen, Dim - holding a milk bottle behind his back (a visual clue of the impending revolution) clobbers him across the face with the object. Alex is left screaming: "I'm blind, you bastards. I'm blind. I'm blind, you bastards. I can't see. O, you bastards! I'm blind!"

Alex is left to be arrested - and taken to the police station house where he is interrogated in a windowless room by bobbies in uniform - one is a young policeman named Tom (Steven Berkoff). Sporting a bloody-nose bandage, Alex refuses to speak without a lawyer: "I won't say a single solitary slovo unless I have my lawyer here. I know the law, you bastards." The Inspector (Lindsay Campbell) responds: "We'll have to show our little friend Alex here that we know the law too, but that knowing the law isn't everything." After Alex burps into one of the policeman's faces, the man brutally jams his thumb down on Alex's injured nose. Alex grabs the attacker's genitals. In retaliation, Alex is beaten and kicked - his wound is freshly opened and blood is splattered on the immaculate wall of the interrogation room.

Mr. Deltoid, Alex's social worker, appears after being summoned to participate in Alex's questioning in the interview room, but he announces gleefully that it is "the end of the line":


Deltoid: Dear, dear, this boy does look a mess, doesn't he? Just look at the state of him.
Policeman: Love's young nightmare, like.
Inspector: Violence makes violence. He resisted his lawful arrestors.
Deltoid: This is the end of the line for me.
Alex, "love's young nightmare," argues that he is innocent and "was led on by the treachery of others" - he was forced into murdering the Catlady by his "stinking traitorous droogs." In a subjective point-of-view shot, Deltoid bends down and stares into the camera, vindictively telling Alex:


You are now a murderer, little Alex. A murderer...I've just come from the hospital. Your victim has died...It will be your own torture. I hope to God it will torture you to madness.
The policeman rests his head on Deltoid's shoulder and invites him to "bash" Alex one final time: "If you'd care to give him a bash in the chops, sir, don't mind us. We'll hold him down. He must be a great disappointment to you, sir." Instead of taking up the policeman's offer, Deltoid opts instead to spit in Alex's face.

An aerial shot of the exterior of the government's prison compound, surrounded by green fields, appears. Following his arrest and conviction by the totalitarian government for first-degree murder, Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison, and he melodramatically narrates the next section of the film - "the real weepy and like tragic part":


Alex (voice-over): This is the real weepy and like tragic part of the story beginning. O my brothers and only friends. After a trial with judges and a jury, and some very hard words spoken against your friend and humble narrator, he was sentenced to fourteen years in Staja No. 84F, among smelly perverts and hardened prestoopnicks, the shock sending my dadda beating his bruised and krovvy rookers against unfair Bog in his Heaven, and my mum boohoohooing in her mother's grief, at her only child and son of her bosom like letting everybody down real horrowshow.
In an extended scene, Alex is systematically inducted into H. M. Prison Parkmoor. He is led in handcuffed to a bobby and presented to the Chief Guard (Michael Bates). As he must obey the directive to not cross the white line painted on the floor in front of him, he is given a new identity ("You are now 655321, and it is your duty to memorize that number"), stripped of his clothes (that are packed with mothballs to preserve them) and his personal effects - by confiscation:

one bunch of keys on a white metal ring
two plastic ball pens - one red, one black
one pocket comb - black plastic
one address book - imitation red leather
one ten penny piece
one white metal wristlet watch, "Timawrist", on a white metal expanding bracelet
one packet of cigarettes
one half-bar of chocolate
The Chief Guard examines Alex's rectal area for VD, crabs, and lice with a flashlight grasped between his teeth, before ordering the new inductee to the bath area.

During a typical service in the prison chapel, two years later, the inmates are threatened by the chaplain/priest (Godfrey Quigley) for their crimes. After the crucial question regarding free, moral choice: "What's it going to be then?", they are assured that they have a choice between Hell's damnation or Heaven's redemption:


What's it going to be then? Is it going to be in and out of institutions like this, though more in than out for most of you? Or are you going to attend to the Divine Word and realize the punishments that await unrepentant sinners in the next world as well as this? A lot of idiots you are, selling your birthright for a saucer of cold porridge, the thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy. Well, I ask you, what is it worth? (One of the homosexual sinners blows kisses at Alex) When we have undeniable proof, yes, incontrovertible evidence that Hell exists. I know, I know, my friends. I have been informed in visions that there is a place darker than any prison, hotter than any flame of human fire, where souls of unrepentant criminal sinners like yourselves. (A convict belches and everyone laughs) Don't you laugh, damn you, don't you laugh. I say like yourselves, scream in endless and unendurable agony. Their skin rotting and peeling, a fireball spinning in their screaming guts. I know, oh yes, I know ...(Someone farts and disrupts the service)
The prisoners are forced bring their discordant voices together and sing, "I Was a Wandering Sheep." Alex participates in the service by cranking the overhead projector for displaying the words of hymns:


I was a wandering sheep, I did not love the fold
I did not love my shepherd's voice. I would not be controlled.
I was a wayward child, I did not love my home.
I did not love my Father's voice, I loved afar to roam.

Alex (voice-over): It had not been edifying, indeed not, being in this hellhole and human zoo for two years now, being kicked and tolchocked by brutal warders, and meeting leering criminals and perverts, ready to dribble all over a luscious young malchick like your storyteller.
Left with only his vivid fantasy life, Alex studiously peruses and reads the Bible in the prison library, imagining the more lurid and violent parts of the Old and New Testaments. The chaplain, the moral voice of the film, misinterprets his sincerity and religiosity when befriending Alex:


Alex (voice-over): It was my rabbit to help the prison charlie (chaplain) with the Sunday service. He was a bolshy great burly bastard, but he was very fond of myself, me being very young, and also now very interested in the big book.
Alex brutally fantasizes about being a Roman guard at the Crucifixion, lashing out and shouting to Jesus in an American accent - like in a bad Hollywood movie: "Move on there!" All that Alex has left to feed his violent and sexual personality are his fantasies of being an Old Testament warrior in battle, and surrounded by half-naked, bare-breasted handmaidens (Jan Adair, Vivienne Chandler, Prudence Drage):


Alex (voice-over): I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and I could viddy myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in the height of Roman fashion. I didn't so much like the latter part of the book, which is more like all preachy talking than fighting and the old in-out. I liked the parts where these old yahoodies tolchock each other and then drink their Hebrew vino, and getting onto the bed with their wives' handmaidens. That kept me going.
Moments later, Alex tells the chaplain of his "genuine desire to reform," and the kindly chaplain is taken in by Alex's phony contrition. Patronizing the chaplain, he presses for information about a new, experimental, brain-washing reprogramming treatment called "aversion therapy," the Ludovico Treatment Technique. Alex wants to be civilized and "good" and believes that this new form of enforced therapy will work and be effective for him - "this new treatment that gets you out of prison in no time at all and makes sure you never get back in again...all I know (is) that it gets you out quickly." The chaplain of the prison doubts the expedient treatment methods of the State to cure anti-social behavior, considering them dangerous because they scientifically would deprive him of his humanity. He warns Alex against volunteering - it is a powerful theological statement of the importance of free will and moral choice:


Chaplain: The Governor has grave doubts about it and I have heard that there are very serious dangers involved.
Alex: I don't care about the dangers, Father. I just want to be good. I want for the rest of my life to be one act of goodness.
Chaplain: The question is whether or not this technique really makes a man good. Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Alex: I don't understand about the whys and wherefores, Father. I only know I want to be good.
Chaplain: Be patient, my son. Put your trust in the Lord.
During an exercise yard session, the inmates circle the yard. To the sounds of Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" March, the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp) visits the prison and glances into the interior of Alex's cell, picking up a bust of Beethoven and noting the sexy pin-ups on the wall. During the inspection, the 'law-and-order' Minister lectures the Prison Governor (Michael Gover) about overcrowded prisons. He advocates the imposition of the Ludovico Technique to clear the prison of mere "common criminals" so that there may be more room for "political offenders":


Minister: Cram criminals together and what do you get - concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
Governor: I agree, sir, what we need are larger prisons - more money.
Minister: Not a chance, my dear fellow. The Government can't be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories. Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political offenders. Common criminals like these are best dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that's all. Full implementation in a year's time. Punishment means nothing to them, you can see that. They enjoy their so-called punishment.
When Alex blurts out: "You're absolutely right, sir," he is asked about his specific crime: "The accidental killing of a person, sir." Because he is the perfect guinea-pig candidate ("he's enterprising, aggressive, outgoing, young, bold, vicious"), Alex is chosen for the controversial rehabilitation treatment which is designed to curb violence and sexual behavior and enable a prisoner to leave after only two weeks. But Alex doesn't realize the consequences of the government's desperate and brutal attempt to deal with its hoodlums with a harsh conditioning treatment: "This vicious young hoodlum will be transformed out of all recognition."

Alex is signed out of the prison and volunteers willingly, although the Prison Governor theorizes that new treatment methods are displacing the 'eye-for-an-eye, a tooth-for-a-tooth" retributive form of justice: "The new ridiculous ideas have come at last and orders are orders...The new view is that we turn the bad into good. All of which seems to me to be grossly unjust...You are to be reformed." Alex is transferred to the Ludovico Medical Center from Parkmoor the next morning, where the dark-dressed, 'by-the-book' prison guards are replaced with the white-coated medical staff at the Ludovico clinic. As they accept him, the prison guard prophetically warns them: "You'll have to watch this one. A right brutal bastard he has been and will be again, in spite of all his sucking up to the prison Chaplain, and reading the Bible."

The young subject is injected by a hypodermic needle filled with an experimental serum No. 114 (filmed in gigantic closeup) by female Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan). He is then strait-jacketed and transported to a screening room where he is tied down in a seat and made a captive audience. Alex is forced to watch films with his eyelids clamped open with pitiless clamps, while an assistant lubricates his bulging pupils at various intervals. His tortured face and head are wrapped in straps, and connected with electrodes and wires. The scenes of violence consciously follow the succession of crimes that Alex committed with his droogs: first, the bloody violence of a beating by a group of teenage thugs, and then a gang rape. In the rear of the theatre, the group of white-jacketed doctors with Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering) watch his reactions and record his behavior on scientific instruments.


Alex (voice-over): And viddy films, I would. Where I was taken to, brothers, was like no sinny I ever viddied before. I was bound up in a straitjacket and my gulliver was strapped to a headrest with like wires running away from it. Then they clamped like lidlocks on my eyes so that I could not shut them no matter how hard I tried. It seemed a bit crazy to me, but I let them get on with what they wanted to get on with. If I was to be a free young malchick again in a fortnight's time, I would put up with much in the meantime, O my brothers. So far, the first film was a very good, professional piece of sinny, like it was done in Hollywood. The sounds were real horrorshow. You could slooshy the screams and moans very realistic, and you could even get the heavy breathing and panting of the tolchocking malchicks at the same time. And then, what do you know, soon our dear old friend, the red, red vino on tap, the same in all places like it's put out by the same big firm, began to flow. It was beautiful. It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen. Now all the time I was watching this, I was beginning to get very aware of like not feeling all that well, and this I put down to all the rich food and vitamins, but I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which jumped right away on a young devotchka who was being given the old in-out, in-out first by one malchick, then another, then another...When it came to the sixth or seventh malchick, leering and smecking and then going into it, I began to feel really sick. But I could not shut my glazzies. And even if I tried to move my glazz-balls about, I still could not get out of the line of fire of this picture.
The images of violence in the films are environmentally paired to an induced, convulsive nausea caused by the injections, part of the behavioral theory of conditioned-reflex therapy. As he watches, a feeling of revulsion passes over him and slowly engulfs him, as predicted by Dr. Brodsky - "Very soon now, the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis, together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness. One of our early test subjects described it as being like death, a sense of stifling or drowning, and it is during this period we have found that the subject will make his most rewarding associations between his catastrophic experience-environment and the violence he sees":

Later, Dr. Branom assures Alex that he has "made a very positive response" to the conditioning, but there will now be two sessions per day instead of one. Alex is on his way toward a cure: "Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it...You felt ill this afternoon because you're getting better. You see, when we are healthy, we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all. By this time tomorrow, you'll be healthier still."

The next day, scenes of Nazi atrocities are screened in the film theatre. Newsreels of Hitler's sturmtroopers, seig-heiling, and the blitzkrieg with the background music the classical soundtrack of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony cause agonizing revulsion in Alex, and he screams to his doctors to stop:



Alex (voice-over): It was the next day, brothers, and I had truly done my best, morning and afternoon, to play it their way and sit, like a horrorshow co-operative malchick, in the chair of torture, while they flashed nasty bits of ultra-violence on the screen. Though not on the soundtrack, my brothers. The only sound being music. Then I noticed in all my pain and sickness what music it was that like cracked and boomed - it was Ludwig van - Ninth Symphony, fourth movement.
Alex pleads for them to stop playing his favorite piece of music - Beethoven ("It's a sin..using Ludwig van like that"), since Beethoven created only beautiful music: "He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music...." Dr. Brodsky responds to the accidental contact of the music with the treatment: "(To Dr. Branom) It can't be helped. Here's the punishment element perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased...I'm sorry, Alex, this is for your own good. You'll have to bear with us for a while." Dr. Brodsky wants the treatment to proceed and Alex must see it through to the end - as he ironically chose: "You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours."

At the breaking point, Alex admits and confesses that he is being cured of his anti-social tendencies:


You've proved to me that all this ultra-violence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned my lesson, sir. I see now what I've never seen before. I'm cured, praise God!...I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's like against society. It's wrong because everybody has the right to live and be happy without being tolchocked and knifed.
Made "a free man" and trained to become docile and harmless, Alex is destructively robbed of his individuality, personality and humanity by being transformed into a 'clockwork orange' - a compliant and mind-numbed citizen. He is brought - after two weeks - to an auditorium and subjected to an unusual graduation ceremony. With his arms crossed, the Minister of the Interior introduces a shy, smiling Alex to the packed lecture hall and announces his political motivations to achieve law and order, and how the treatment changed a "wretched hoodlum" into a well-behaved saint ("undrugged" and "unhypnotized"):


Tomorrow, we send him out with confidence into the world again, as decent a lad as you would meet on a May morning. What a change is here, ladies and gentlemen, from the wretched hoodlum the State committed to unprofitable punishment some two years ago. Unchanged after two years. Unchanged, do I say? - not quite. Prison taught him the false smile, the rubbed hand of hypocrisy, the fawning, greased obsequious leer. Other vices it taught him, as well as confirming in those he had long practiced before. Our party promised to restore law and order and to make the streets safe again for the ordinary peace-loving citizen. This pledge is now about to become a reality. Ladies and gentlemen, today is an historic moment. The problem of criminal violence is soon to be a thing of the past. But enough of words. Actions speak louder than. Action now. Observe all.



In a memorable, sado-masochistic sequence, there is a successful demonstration of Alex's learned lessons - of how his behavior has been reformed and conformed - "actions speak louder." In a two-part play, Alex is first insulted, humiliated and attacked by Lardface (John Clive) - an abusive, curly-haired, homosexual man who calls the passive Alex a smelly "heap of dirt." After slapping Alex across the face, stamping on his toes, twisting his nose, pulling his ears, and pushing him over, Alex is forced to lick his shoe in subservience. As an obedient zombie, he suffers tremendous sickness and revulsion against violence:


Alex (voice-over): And, O my brothers, would you believe your faithful friend and long suffering narrator pushed out his red yahzik a mile-and-a-half to lick the grahzny, vonny boots...The horrible killing sickness had whooshed up, and turned the like joy of battle into a feeling I was going to snuff it. (The audience applauds as the stage actor bows to them.)
In a second demonstration to the tune of "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary," he is tempted before a stage actress (Virginia Wetherell), a half-nude woman wearing only bikini panties. Eyes glazed and on his knees, Alex lustfully reaches out for her breasts (filmed both from a low angle and an overhead shot to emphasize their ripeness). As he cups his hands tantalizingly close to her pink-nippled, fleshy protuberances, his urge for sex instantly turns to an urge to vomit and he falls to the floor belching to his former passion:


Alex (voice-over): She came towards me with the light like it was the like light of heavenly grace, and the first thing that flashed into my gulliver was that I'd like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out, real savage. But as quick as a shot came the sickness, like a detective that had been watching around the corner and now followed to make his arrest. (She curtsies to audience applause before exiting from the demonstration.)
The Minister summarizes Alex's cure to the audience: "Our subject is impelled towards the good by paradoxically being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these, the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude. Any questions?"

Although pronounced cured, the prison chaplain objects that in actuality, Alex has been deprived of his free will with the shock therapy that has nauseated him. He is not a free man but "a clockwork orange" - a mechanically-responsive non-human:


Chaplain: Choice! The boy has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrong-doer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Minister: Padre, these are subtleties! We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime. And with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify. Sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly. Reclamation, joy before the angels of God. The point is that it works!
Alex (voice-over): And the very next day, your Friend and Humble Narrator was a free man.
To the jaunty song, "I Want to Marry A Lighthouse Keeper," Alex returns home. He finds his parents reading newspapers with headlines: "Cat-Woman Killer Alex Freed," "'Crime Cure' Will Strengthen Law and Order Policy," and "Murderer freed: 'Science has cure'." His parents are bewildered and surprised by his unexpected return. Alex proudly pronounces himself "cured": "They did a great job on me. I'm completely reformed." He discovers that he has been displaced from his own house - his parents have rented his room to the "strange fella sitting in the sofa munchy wunching lomticks of toast" - Joe (Clive Francis), the new teenaged lodger, who has quickly become like a son to them. Instead of being civil, Joe immediately criticizes Alex: "I've heard about you. I know what you've done. Breaking the hearts of your poor grieving parents. So you're back, eh? You're back to make life a misery for your lovely parents once more, is that it?"

When Alex cocks his arm back to punch Joe, it causes him to belch and retch violently, and he stumbles into a chair:


Pee: Are you all right, lad?
Em: Dad...it's the treatment.
Joe: Well, it's disgusting. I mean, it's enough to put you off your food.
Em: Oh leave him be, Joe, it's the treatment.
Frail and crushed by despotic training and brainwashing, Alex becomes a victim of violence himself, totally unprepared and helpless to cope with the real world when he is returned to society. Alex also learns that all of his personal things were taken away by the police due to "new regulations...about compensation for the victims." Basil his snake, has passed away, and Pee stammers that Joe cannot be asked to leave because he has already paid next month's rent. Truly suffering, Alex weeps after hearing Joe disdainfully chastise him and take his place:


You've been like a father and mother to me. Well, it wouldn't be fair now or right, I mean, for me to go off and leave you two to the tender mercies of this young monster, who's been like no real son at all. Look, he's weeping now. But that's all his craft and artfulness. Let him go and find a room somewhere else. Let him learn the errors of his way, and that a bad boy like he's been doesn't deserve such a good mum and dad as he's had...You've made others suffer. It's only right that you should suffer proper.
Unable to defend himself, Alex leaves the flat and announces he will make his own way in life:

Right, I'm leaving now. You won't ever viddy me no more. I'll make me own way. Thank you very much. Let it lie heavy on your consciences.
During the remainder of the film, Alex is helplessly assaulted or rejected by the other people from his past who had been his abused victims, but he cannot retaliate in each case. The revenge-seeking former victims include: the drunken old bum, former gang members, and widower of the rape victim - leftist writer Mr. Alexander.

Along the banks of the Thames, accompanied by a slow movement within the "William Tell Overture," Alex sadly walks and contemplates committing suicide in its waters. The Tramp which he assaulted with his droogs earlier in the film recognizes him, and drags him to a dark underpass where other toothless, stubbly-faced bums are encouraged to join in the bashing during the vengeful attack: "This is the poisonous young swine that near done me in. Him and his friends, they beat me and kicked me and punched me. Stop him, stop him. They laughed at my blood and my moans. This murderous young pig."


Alex (voice-over): Then there was like a sea of dirty smelly old men, trying to get at your Humble Narrator, with their feeble rookers and horny old claws. (Close-ups of rage-filled, grubby faces of the bums fill the screen) It was old age having a go at youth, and I daren't do a single, solitary thing, O my brothers, it being better to be hit at like that than want to sick and feel that horrible pain.
Two young policemen rescue Alex - they turn out to be Georgie and Dim, two of his former Droogs, who have since joined the increasingly-violent, fascist state to impose law and order. Alex is shocked when he recognizes them and Georgie explains that they are now on the side of the law:


Nothing up our sleeves. No magic, little Alex. A job for two who are now of job age.
Now belching and choking, Alex is roughly dragged to their patrol car and driven into the country. As he is led out of the vehicle with handcuffs, Alex feebly jokes:


The old days are dead and gone. For what I did in the past, I've been punished...I've been cured.
As they lead him down a forested, muddy lane, in a long tracking shot filmed with a hand-held camera from behind, accompanied by a Moog synthesizer playing "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary," Dim wants to make sure that he remains cured: "This is to make sure you stay cured." When they reach a water trough, Georgie viciously hits Alex in the stomach with his blackjack club, doubling him over. For retribution, Dim pushes him headfirst under the water and holds him there, while Georgie methodically beats him with his nightstick.

After the vicious beating, lightning strikes as Alex stumbles down a torrential rainy night road. Coincidentally, he comes upon a panel sign welcoming him: "HOME," in another scene filmed with a hand-held camera:


Alex (voice-over): Where was I to go, who had no home and no money? I cried for myself. Home, home, home. It was home I was wanting and it was Home I came to, brothers, not realizing in the state I was in, where I was and had been before.
In the Alexander home, the old widower is typing at his IBM typewriter, now impotent, crippled, and confined to a wheelchair. He has a newspaper lying on his desk with headlines: "SCIENTISTS HAVE CURE FOR CRIME." Alex is admitted to the Alexander home by a young, giant weightlifter/male manservant named Julian (David Prowse, the future Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy). The bloody-faced victim gasps at the door that he was beaten up. He isn't immediately recognized because of the disguise-mask he wore during his first visit to the home:


Alex (voice-over): And would you believe it. O my brothers and only friends there was your Faithful Narrator being held helpless, like a babe in arms, and suddenly realizing where he was and why 'Home' on the gate had looked so familiar. But I knew I was safe. I knew he would not remember me. For in those carefree days, I and my so-called droogs wore our maskies, which were like real horrorshow disguises.
For a shocking second, Alex thinks he has been recognized when the writer exclaims:


I know you! (Long pause) Isn't it your picture in the newspapers? Didn't I see you on the video this morning? Are you not the poor victim of this horrible new technique?
Wishing to capitalize on the horrible experiences of the treatment, Mr. Alexander excitedly welcomes Alex into his home as a victim of the police. Alex is offered a warm bath and as he soaks in the tub and hears water dripping in the echoing bathroom, he starts quietly and involuntarily humming "Singin' in the Rain." In the other room, Mr. Alexander crouches down and phones some of his Leftist associates, to explain how they can plot to use Alex as "the most potent weapon imaginable" to discredit the government's new approach to dealing with crime to "the people - the common people":


Recruiting brutal young roughs into the police, proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we've seen it all before in other countries. The thin end of the wedge. Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism. This young boy is a living witness to these diabolical proposals. The people - the common people - must know, must see. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. The tradition of liberty is all. The common people will let it go. Oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life - that is why they must be led, sir, driven, pushed!!
As Mr. Alexander becomes more aware of the echoing sounds of "Singin' in the Rain" emanating from the bathroom, he wheels his wheelchair over to the door - and then his twisted, distorted, apoplectic face, shot from below, expresses his horror. He knows that Alex was one of the hoodlums who earlier had invaded his house and left him a crippled widower.

Alex sits by himself in a dressing gown over a dinner of spaghetti and a bottle of wine. After the muscle-bound weightlifter carries Mr. Alexander into the room seated upon his wheelchair, Alex senses something fatefully foreboding will happen to him. Glasses of wine (drugged) are offered to him. Mr. Alexander's voice trembles, his eyes bulge and his body shakes, and he grits and bares his teeth - anticipating the retribution that Alex deserves. Unwisely, Alex asks about Mr. Alexander's wife - "a victim of the modern age":


Alex: Your wife, sir, is she away?
Mr. Alexander: NO, SHE'S DEAD!
Alex: I'm sorry to hear about that, sir.
Mr. Alexander: (intensely) She was very badly raped, you see. We were assaulted by a gang of vicious young hoodlums in this house, in this very room you are sitting in now. I was left a helpless cripple, but for her, the agony was too great. The doctors said it was pneumonia because it happened some months later during a flu epidemic. The doctors told me it was pneumonia but I knew what it was. A victim of the modern age - poor, poor girl. (He wheels his chair closer to Alex) And now, you, another victim of the modern age, but you can be helped.
[There is a curious homosexual subtext to this scene - Mr. Alexander appears to have forsaken a woman as a life companion, after the brutal rape of his wife - although she allegedly died of pneumonia!] Two of Mr. Alexander's fellow conspirators/associates who were phoned arrive - they are both interested in Alex's case: a fat, bald intellectual man named Dolin and a blonde female named Rubinstein. They have learned that Alex has been conditioned against music too: "...in addition to your being conditioned against acts of sex and violence, you've inadvertently been conditioned against music." The government's inhumane, inadequate technique to cure crime is causing Alex to have the same reaction to the playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as he has to sex and violence. Alex explains the sensation of hearing the Ninth: "I can't listen to the Ninth anymore at all. When I hear the Ninth, I get like this funny feeling and then, all I can think about is like trying to snuff it...death, I mean...I just want to die peacefully, like, with no pain." Suddenly a few moments later, the drug in the wine takes effect and Alex collapses face-first into his plate of spaghetti.

When Alex awakens, he finds himself belching and locked in a lavender wall-papered attic bedroom of Dolin's Country Manor, with the sound of Beethoven's Ninth pouring up from below:


Alex (voice-over): I woke up. The pain and sickness all over me like an animal. Then I realized what it was. The music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony.
Alex staggers around, crying out: "Turn it off!! Stop it!!" Downstairs, the conspirators fiendishly turns up the volume, with Mr. Alexander especially delighted with his revenge and torture. In despair, Alex suicidally throws himself out of the upstairs window. In a spectacular subjective shot, he plunges to the pavement below [the camera was literally thrown out of the window], but survives the fall:


Alex (voice-over): Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep for ever, and ever and ever. (After the suicidal jump, the screen turns black)
Taken to a hospital following the suicide attempt, in a long panning shot from right to left up his immobile, convalescing body, Alex wakes up in a hospital ward, both his legs in traction and his head wrapped in gauze and a cast. He has literally "fallen" from his mechanistic behaviorism to his old self:


Alex (voice-over): I jumped, O my brothers, and I fell hard, but I did not snuff it. If I had snuffed it, I would not be here to tell what I have told. I came back to life, after a long black, black gap of what might have been a million years.
Alex's moans are coupled in a duet with the moans of a night doctor and nurse making love from behind a screened-off bed. As they adjust their clothes, the nurse exclaims: "Oh, he's recovered consciousness, Doctor." A montage of newspaper headlines highlights the embarrassment of the government over its inhuman experiments that motivated Alex's attempted suicide. The Ludovico Technique calls "into question the whole policy of law and order which it had made a plank in its election programme." He has been turned over to the opponents of the government, who wish to reverse his conditioning, and hailed as a victim of inhuman criminal reform methods:


Government accused of
a007apl is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 09:11 AM   #2
bmwmpower
Regular User
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Slovakia
Posts: 1,782
Default

i heard about it , i like old movies but dont know if this is right for me,
bmwmpower is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 09:22 AM   #3
Everlasting
Regular User
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 421
Default

Originally Posted by bmwmpower
i heard about it , i like old movies but dont know if this is right for me,
right for u?! it's not like ur gonna sleep with it
it's just a movie, watch it, it's good.
Everlasting is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 09:39 AM   #4
taygunho
Regular User
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Posts: 948
Default

I watched it.Good movie but can't say my favourite one.
__________________
taygunho is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 10:15 AM   #5
No.1
Regular User
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Manchester, UK
Posts: 3,224
Default

a great movie (and a novel too).

Book is a little better than the film version though
__________________
No.1 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 10:24 AM   #6
sameerrao
Regular User
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: TX
Posts: 3,850
Default

I love this movie ... it is very poignant.

APL your post is almost as long as the movie
__________________

"Tazio Nuvolari - The greatest driver of the past, the present and the future" - Ferdinand Porsche
sameerrao is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 10:38 AM   #7
bmwmpower
Regular User
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Slovakia
Posts: 1,782
Default

Originally Posted by Everlasting
Originally Posted by bmwmpower
i heard about it , i like old movies but dont know if this is right for me,
right for u?! it's not like ur gonna sleep with it
it's just a movie, watch it, it's good.
he he , i downloaded Brasil, very good ratings and so on, and that movie is out of time, dont know why,but Terry Giliams movies re not right for me,
bmwmpower is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 10:50 AM   #8
a007apl
Regular User
 
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Brasília-DF Brazil
Posts: 15,357
Default

Originally Posted by sameerrao
I love this movie ... it is very poignant.

APL your post is almost as long as the movie
a007apl is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-21-2006, 11:44 PM   #9
r2r
Regular User
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Detroit
Posts: 1,562
Default

One of my friends has it, so I'll get around to watching it now.

Thanks for the recommendation a007apl!
r2r is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-24-2007, 05:35 AM   #10
Butch
Regular User
 
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: France
Posts: 21
Default

This was the first time I heard "singing in the rain".
Now when I hear it, I think of Malcolm Mc dowell before Gene kelly.

I've found some pics of the car there:

__________________
Butch is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-24-2007, 06:26 AM   #11
Stoopie
Regular User
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: United Provinces of the Kingdom of Great Netherlands
Posts: 2,119
Default

OMG did somebody just post a moviescript? j/k
Stoopie is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-24-2007, 05:39 PM   #12
r2r
Regular User
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Detroit
Posts: 1,562
Default

Watched it few weeks ago, was pretty weird.

Interesting story, but I wouldn't watch it again!
r2r is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-24-2007, 05:54 PM   #13
TopGearNL
Regular User
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: The 51st State
Posts: 10,181
Default

I love the car they use in it, one of the rare classics! :shock:
__________________
TopGearNL is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-27-2007, 07:13 PM   #14
stistyle
Regular User
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Posts: 55
Default

brilliant film
stistyle is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-27-2007, 07:38 PM   #15
666fast
Regular User
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Minnesota, United States
Posts: 3,120
Default

Originally Posted by dani_d_mas
Not really my "kind" of movie...

I haven't seen it yet, and I don't think I'll do it any time soon :bah:
Same here, I've seen bits and pieces of it and didn't think it was all hat great.

Funny story, in high school we had to write a movie review for english class. What this was supposed to teach us, I don't know. Anyway, there was a list of movies to choose from, on of which was Clockwork Orange. I wanted to do Casino, but it wasn't on the list, so I asked my teacher if I could. She said it was too violent to encourage a kid to watch.
__________________
666fast is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump