Going from Willy Wonka to Dirty Harry practically gave me the bends.
But Clint Eastwood’s signature performance was next up in the Warner Brothers 50 Film Collection. Like Bullitt, this is a movie about police officers in San Francisco. Unlike Bullitt, this is a much more in-your-face, blood-and-guts cop flick, complete with wildly unrealistic criminal and procedural scenarios.
If you’re looking for nuance, this isn’t the movie for you.
The movie pits Eastwood’s gruff, rogue Callahan up against Andy Robinson’s “Scorpio,” a wild-haired, wilder-eyed cartoon character of a serial killer.
This is one of those examples of a movie that works better if you turn your brain off. Well, maybe not off, but at least down.
The film, and Eastwood’s character, serves as a counter-counter-culture piece, at a time (and in a place) in which things seemed to be swinging too far in one direction for much of the country’s tastes. Debauchery, criminality, and a justice system that seemed to be realigning to help criminals combine to form the backdrop of Harry Callahan’s San Francisco, much darker and more dangerous even than Bullitt‘s San Francisco of just three years prior.
As I said, the plot doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. The biggest issue is the notion that Scorpio would somehow get off scot free because Callahan beats a confession out of him while frantically searching for a girl who’s been buried alive. The DA and an appellate judge(!) both conclude that Scorpio has to be set free, even though the girl has been found dead, with the DA admonishing Callahan and saying that he couldn’t even get a conviction “for spitting on the sidewalk” in light of the illegal search and interrogation.
I was eager to dive into the next film in the 
Bullitt, the next film in the 
For about 25 minutes, there’s not a single line of dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
With my renewed, pandemic-commitment to reviewing the 
I thought there could be no better time to resume my on-again, off-again relationship with the 
About six minutes in, Paul, the primary player on this particular episode, stumbles across what appears to be a large present, complete with ribbon and bow. As a giant, Mode-7-ified question mark displays on screen, Paul, Nick, and Josh shriek in anticipation . . . before Plok suddenly reappears in a hunter’s outfit, carrying a large gun.
Untimely Movie Review: A Clockwork Orange
Cool Hand Luke is, on one level, a backward-looking but contemporary analysis of the nature of prisons and rehabilitation—posing the question of whether penal institutions do more harm than good from the perspective of that rehabilitation.
Likewise, A Clockwork Orange is, among other things, a commentary on rehabilitation, and whether a cure can be worse than the “disease” of inherent sociopathy. In particular, it ponders whether aversion therapy of the kind depicted in the film (even when—no, especially when—effective) is moral. The story mulls this question both in terms of a denial of free will (the prison clergyman makes this part abundantly clear), but also from the perspective of whether the government can be trusted to wield this power in the first place.
We get hints of this idea throughout, with throwaway lines about political prisoners and so forth serving to underscore that the dystopian nature of A Clockwork Orange’s setting extends beyond violence and chaos and into the well-worn ground of soul-crushing totalitarianism.
In the midst of that, there’s Malcolm McDowell’s Alex, a charismatic sociopath who slips easily from setting to setting, behaving in whatever manner has the greatest chance of producing the outcome that will service his depravity. He maneuvers through a society steeped in hedonism and violent crime carried out by gangs of youth speaking in a bizarre type of future slang anchored in pigeon-Russian and Cockney rhymes, and McDowell plays him with transcendent precision every step of the way.
In Kubrick’s uniquely skilled hands, the movie becomes a visual and auditory masterpiece, akin to, but very different from, 2001. His deft use of a classical score, paired with futuristic Moog synth music, is brilliant. Also memorable is the use of slow-motion and fast-motion, the artistic value of which in Clockwork Orange is apparent even to a layman like myself.
Like many of the other films in this collection, Clockwork Orange is also based on a book. One thing I loved about this movie, though, is that it avoids the pitfall into which so many other novel-to-film translations stumble: it feels neither rushed nor as if it’s “missing” critical elements. Kubrick is able to manage the pace and density of the story perfectly.
The irony is that Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay, based his script on the American edition of the Anthony Burgess book. That meant that version Kubrick read omitted the final, redemptive chapter (and we don’t see it reflected onscreen).
Yet, that doesn’t seem to matter. The strange, acrobatically stylized violence of the world Kubrick creates is perfectly illustrated, and Alex’s resilient and ultimately victorious trajectory soars and dips before the viewer’s eyes in a way that is as satisfying as it is, at times, disturbing.
Share this: