A Clockwork Orange

This is a truly challenging film that routinely glorifies violence - especially towards women, and offers us a terrifying appraisal of the effects of unfettered government and science working in cahoots with each other. Fifty years on from it's groundbreaking release, it's great to watch this on a big screen again - and though the imagery is much less potent that it was in 1971, the performance from Malcolm McDowell is scarily compelling. The plot centres around him and his three sadistic cohorts who live a disparate life terrorising wherever they roam until finally they go a little too far and he is apprehended. A fourteen year sentence is handed down but after two of them, he seeks enrolment in a controversial, experimental, aversion therapy scheme the results of which don't quite deliver as expected. The film presents us with some some pretty gruesome worst-case scenarios to start with, those serve to exaggerate the threat to normal livelihoods and thus lend credibility to the even more daunting prospect of the clinical conditioning of people. In this case, it is specifically the conditioning of one violent individual, but it's very easy to extend the principle to those with whom the government, or state, might disagree - and Kubrick lays that threat bare for all to see and evaluate. I struggled a bit with the nonsense language at times, it seemed puerile and prone to ridicule, certainly to detract from, the more thought-provoking elements of the plot. Perhaps it is there to serve as steam-valve for the intensity of the subject matter, but I am not convinced it is effective or necessary. The book allows us scope to use our own imagination as to the terror this whole concept could invoke, but as film adaptations go, this one offers us a great and innovative template for any interpretation, and coupled with the powerful use of a classical music score - including Ludwig Van, of course, and a solid supporting cast contributing well, this is a truly momentous piece of cinema.