A Clockwork Orange

We have to remember that Stanley Kubrick himself withdrew A Clockwork Orange from distribution in 1974 and thus the controversy surrounding the film has nothing to do with official censorship. The issues it raised about the treatment of young criminals and the exploitation of law and order by government and the tabloid press remain relevant. But the movie is quaintly dated in its fashions (looking forward from 1971 to the mid-Seventies) and unduly stylised or (some might say) wildly over-acted.

Unlike Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, it doesn't transcend Swinging London, the last, bitter phase of which it reflected. Some of it is painfully crude in the manner of a Carry On comedy (the nurse and doctor, for instance, having sex behind a screen in Alex's hospital ward) and seeing A Clockwork Orange on the big screen for the first time in 20 years, I thought it looked like a Donald McGill cartoon much magnified but without the finesse of a Roy Lichtenstein. It may well be that the film appears better on video.