Word: clockworked
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With three heavy money-rakers under his belt, he has boldly re-emerged into media athletics--to the extent that a Warner Brothers exec has resigned due to Kubrick's authoritarian control of his latest picture's release. Unfortunately, A Clockwork Orange makes the director's now-famous integrity seem like that of the repentant Chasids, who chased back to God by bricking themselves into a 4x5 hovel with nothing but a palette, a Bible, and the sky above them. Bigger-hearted men carve out their own living communities and bring back McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or, better still...
Almost every frame in A Clockwork Orange is dead, pre-planned to the last actor's detail, and predictably sensationalist. Kubrick's gelled his fluids in a concept-ridden icebox: his effects misfire because they are backed neither by rigorously developed intellectual argument nor compassion. From the moment that the orange and blue credit backgrounds start to work on us, followed by that long dolly which grows from Malcolm McDowell's leer to encompass the entire terribly-clever Korova Milk bar set, we are begged to participate in a mere thrill show. A proud Kubrick tells his interviewers how people...
...Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's vision of future shock, Cinema 57, 200 Stuart St., Boston...
...CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the Stanley Kubrick film of the Anthony Burgess novel, tries to force its audience to accept some outrageously artificial terms. I don't think you should accept them: they are those of its lead character, without any distancing to guard you from his impulses. Even with those granted, the film won't give satisfaction. Kubrick's work is not immoral, but it is awfully silly. And 2001 fans will go home crying--this one features crude theatrical effects and baldly repetitious camera movements...
Burgess satirized philosophic issues through the individuals who embodied them. Kubrick has overplayed the satire, which wasn't that subtle to begin with. The novel is one of the first '60's apocalypses to take apart the weeping-heart liberal: Alex stomps the author of an essay called "A Clockwork Orange," which protests the state's "attempt to impose...laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation"; in addition, he brutally rapes the writer's wife. Later, Alex is sent to prison on a murder charge and undergoes the Ludovico Treatment--which conditions him against violent, sexual or (ironically) musical...