Word: kubrick
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...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...
...KUBRICK, however, removes the ambivalence of the Burgess viewpoint, and weights all material on Alex's side. The people whom the gang beat up are ugly or ridiculous--they spout cant about the lack of law and order or assume mere postures of fear. Alex still gets to screw two teen-age girls, but here he doesn't first get them drunk or shoot them up with horse. Kubrick makes his representatives of the state not only bland, but sexually randy. Most important for audience emotion-letting: out of all the victims seen, only Alex suffers. Kubrick has, in general...
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...
...Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick's vision of future shock, Cinema 57, 200 Stuart St., Boston...
...Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's vision of future shock, Cinema 57,200 Stuart St., Boston...