Cinema Flashback – A Clockwork Orange, 1971

This could be test question to see what kind of moviegoer you are. Let’s say that you’re living in England between 1971 and 1973. You’ve heard rumors that Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange may be pulled from theaters – by the director himself – due to several violent crimes perpetrated by thugs claiming to have been inspired by the characters in the movie.

So naturally, you’d race out to see the movie in the theater before it was gone, right?

In fact, Kubrick’s reasoning behind withdrawing the film from theaters in the U.K. wouldn’t be known for years afterward. Reportedly, he and his family received death threats while Clockwork was in the theaters, and police authorities suggested that it might be better for all concerned if he withdrew the movie from exhibition. Because he enjoyed a rather unprecedentedly close relationship with Warner Bros., Kubrick made the request and the studio supported him; the studio even went so far as to successfully sue a popular London film club that screened the movie without permission in the early 1990s.

Copycat violence. Death threats issued to a famous and controversial director. A film that has been deemed too incendiary for the public to see.

And even though my mom would shake her head in sad resignation, I’ve just got to say DANG, but that sounds like a good time at the movies!

Cinema has a long history of creating antiheroes for whom we’re meant to feel sympathy, if not outright allegiance. It’s become a staple of the moviegoing experience that the villains and heroes are no longer portrayed in easy-to-digest white hat/black hat terms. The drama and conflict of modern movies is that sometimes we’re drawn toward evil; it provides a cathartic thrill that we are unable to allow ourselves in everyday life. Cinema allows us an easy out, a pressure-release valve of cruelty with which we can relieve such feelings without actually indulging them.

But many were not fans of Clockwork upon its release for these very reasons. Ebert hated the movie and Pauline Kael went so far as to refer to the director as a “pornographer” in her 1972 review printed in The New Yorker magazine:

I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it…At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools.

And of course history has shown her to be right. How else can we explain our gleeful willingness to soak up the savage brutality of Clockwork Alex’s cinematic progeny: Travis Bickle, Hannibal Lecter, Tyler Durden, Annie Wilkes and so many more? Why is it so stimulating, so seductive for us to steal forbidden glimpses into the worlds of Trainspotting, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas or even Sin City?

Clockwork became a decent-sized blockbuster, rating 10th among other titles of the 70s, not ironically sharing the charts with similarly dark narratives like The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now and Chinatown. Eventually, audiences in the U.K. would get their Clockwork back, but not for nearly 30 years after Kubrick had passed away. I think it’s also worth noting that Kubrick’s film output slowed down considerably after Clockwork; he made nearly 10 movies in the 20 years prior, and only four films in the 28 years afterward.

Do you think that having Clockwork nominated for four Oscars – and losing every single one of them to The French Connection – would really sting that much? Maybe not, but then you aren’t Kubrick and neither am I.

Neither is Tarantino, but that doesn’t stop this A Clockwork Orange/Reservoir Dogs mash-up from being a delightful little tidbit of fun:

(found via Brandish)

It’s your turn: what’s your Cinema Flashback? What’s the movie that you would travel back through time to see in its original environment, in a packed theater of that era?

Thanks for reading. Go see more movies in the theater!