Word: clockworks
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...there is one thing conservatives and liberals should, in their respective prejudices against sex and violence, be able to agree on curbing, it is sexual violence. This includes not only rape as in Frenzy and A Clockwork Orange, but sado-masochism in all its ugly forms. Any work of art, or scene within one, which depicts violence as stimulating, or sex as in its essence violent and exploitive, should be suppressed. If the many reviews and plot descriptions I have read are accurate, The Last Tango in Paris fits this latter category in its entirety. Its systematic degradation...
...time for conservatives to admit that when it comes to the explicit depiction of violence, liberals have a point. As Sam Peckinpah's films have shown, it is today possible for the first time to make artistic violence look real--and exciting. As Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange has shown, violence can also be made to look beautiful--and attractive. Films like these, precisely because they have artistic merit, raise disturbing new questions about the tolerance of society for such things, assuming as seems likely that they represent a major trend...
...directors draw off the pornographers' best stuff and put it to respectable uses. I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969) seems to have started the current phase of candor. It was followed by progressively bolder films, from Midnight Cowboy (1969), with its homosexual as well as heterosexual couplings, to A Clockwork Orange (1971), with its rapes and sex à trois. Going beyond all of these, Tango proclaims the liberation of serious films from restraints on sex as unequivocally as the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde proclaimed liberation from restraints on violence...
...starts at the movies. The furor over violence in movies reached its crescendo with A Clockwork Orange, but it started with Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, and no discussion of cinematic fascism is complete without Straw Dogs. At the beginning of the year came the realization, by Pauline Kael and others, that the movies had begun to pipe fascism into the mind of Joe Moviegoer. That the primitive, unquestionably macho preachings of Peckinpah and Kubrick, as well as the less subtle portrayal of Dirty Harry Kellerman by Don Siegel, depicted a cultural regression...
Adding to the confusion is the recent discovery of evidence suggesting that Valpreda and his friends may be innocent. Last August district attorneys who were investigating other terrorist acts charged two neo-Fascists with the Milan bombing. A consignment of 50 clockwork timers, exactly like those used in the bombings, was traced to one of the suspects, a bookseller from Padua named Franco Freda. Furthermore, the briefcases in which the bombs were hidden were all purchased in a Padua store only a block from Freda's bookshop. Worst of all, it now appears that high-ranking police officials tried...