Word: alcotts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Clockwork Orange. John Alcott's colors are impressive, but Stanley Kubrick's film of the Anthony Burgess novel has the tone of a shrill scold, and is a visual and dramatic cheat. Malcolm McDowell as the lead thug has been praised for his performance, but can't help being more interesting than his supporting cartoon figures. No great achievement for director or actor...
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT was the first of these childhood heroines. I always associated her with her autobiographical creation. Jo March, eldest of the Little Women, and the two fused as a symbol of dashing individuality and creativity within the loving constraints of the family. When I was eight, I thought nothing could be more glorious than the way Louisa Mary-Jo hid herself in a garret, recording the tearful story of her family's adventures, and then secretly sold the novel to make money to give to her family. In retrospect, I realize that this picture was as deceptively rosy...
...Nubian, you be a sheep chained to death's tow rope," begins one of her poems-and she plans to write a screenplay. She even talks about writing a novel, which if it follows her own life would read like a collaboration between Louisa May Alcott and Harold Robbins...
What Kubrick has made from Burgess's fantasy is a plush animated cartoon, with extraordinary color consistency (credit John Alcott's lights), one acceptable action setpiece (a gang battle, not the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence), and a cast of characters in no way as interesting and varied as that of Fritz the Cat. The Ludovico Treatment, not as indispensable to the book's development as Burgess's language and characters, not only dominates the film's outlook, but the way in which it works...
...trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott, "he had best stop writing for them." Such scoldings came despite Mark Twain's prepublication agreement to eliminate references to blasphemy, bad odors, dead cats, and to change the phrase "in a sweat" to "worrying...