Trying to recall my feelings about a film I first saw some 48 years ago is a little tricky. I was 26 at the time and around six years into what would develop into a lifelong passion for serious cinema. Anyway, last Wednesday, all those years later, I went to see the very film I had watched back then: A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Like so many devotees of cinema, I am a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, and at the moment in London, there’s a major BFI retrospective, along with an exhibition at the London Design Museum. Meanwhile, back in the cinema, sitting among a surprisingly sparse audience for the screening, the lights faded and the opening titles started. Two things immediately struck me. The aspect ratio was 1.66:1. My memory had tricked me into remembering a much wider format. It wasn’t.
The second thing was the opening title design. Large, bold, clunky, oddly spaced, slightly out of register, white, sans serif type pinging out of primary solid-coloured backgrounds. After this initial shock, I became hyper-aware of everything wrong with the film, including very patchy cinematography – started by Geoffrey Unsworth and midway handed over to his old assistant John Alcott, and even Kubrick shot a number of handheld sequences on his trusty Arriflex 35 (below). This may explain the erratic overall quality.
The Allen Jones table sculpture (1969) was a major inspiration for the furniture in the Droogs milk bar (below).
But Kubrick's copies are rather crude.
The ragged edges on the fibreglass pods.
A very unconvincing colour of claret.
The heat of the studio lights have bubbled up the silver wallpaper squares.
There were many badly made props, especially the phoney Allen Jones-style provocative tables, ragged-edged fibreglass pods, clumsy set dressing, widely varied performances, stock music running far too noisily over so much of the dialogue and some very naff graphics and type, badly imitating what was going on in the real design world at the time.
Bookcover Designed by Johnathan Miller 1966
Above type designed by Charles Front for the Beatles Rubber Soul album from 1965.
If you like, this was just the packaging of the film. But the content is shamefully and grotesquely misogynistic, so much so that I found it difficult to watch in parts.
That coupled with the violence made for an unsettling experience. It links with another film released the same year: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs’– also a pretty horrid and misogynistic exploration into sexual violence. Clockwork Orange also has a lot in common and is much closer in tone to Lindsay Anderson’s If (1969).
At the time of its release, A Clockwork Orange was criticised over the influence it may have had in a manslaughter case where a 14-year-old had been accused and the prosecution argued that the film A Clockwork Orange had relevance to the case. It was also linked with further cases, with ‘copycat’ crimes reported. Kubrick’s family home was raided by protesters. After its initial run in UK cinemas, it was pulled at the request of Kubrick himself. In true style, Kubrick never publicly explained why. But having watched the film again last night, I have a sneaking suspicion that it had nothing to do with concern about the gratuitous sex and violence but more to do with the production values, especially in comparison to his obsessively driven production design on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Ridley Scott's famous Hovis commercial (1973) was helping to change the look of film.
Also, this was a time when British advertising was beginning to shine and young commercials directors were investing a lot of innovation and higher creative standards in production design, in particular cinematography. The London advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP) had amassed a stable of highly creative talent who were upping the ante, and the 60-second commercials emanating from the Young Turks at the time were outstripping the over-lit, predictable production of mainstream cinema. I think this must have had an effect on Kubrick because his next film after A Clockwork Orange was Barry Lyndon (1975), shot by John Alcott, and was a major shift in the ‘look’ of his films. And the look of feature films was being heavily influenced by British commercials at the time, with directors like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson.
Kubrick’s meticulous attention to detail and overall production quality of 2001: A Space Odyssey made the look of A Clockwork Orange more akin to the polystyrene and Bacofoil-wrapped constructed sets of the early ‘Dr Who’ TV series. I’m only too aware that there are many Kubrick devotees who feel that A Clockwork Orange is his masterpiece. Well, I beg to differ. I put it with Eyes Wide Shut as his most disappointing films. The others are all genius.
If you are a lover of the furniture you spot in films, pop over to Paula Benson’s wonderful Film and Furniture website, where you will find a wealth of fantastically well-researched stuff and where to purchase.