McDowell, Harlan remember "A Clockwork Orange" on its 40th Anniversary (& a synopsis of the bastardization of the X rating by the porn industry)
A friend of mine recently posted a link to this great video from The Guardian with Malcolm McDowell,Jan Harlan and Christiane Kubrick discussing Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange. It's a great discussion on the film's impact on the U.K, how they didn't see it as a "black comedy" because of the violence, what Anthony Burgess was writing about in the story, etc., etc.....
I guess since I saw ACO in 1980, and was very familiar with Kubrick's other black comedy, "Dr. Strangelove," and perhaps because I was a callow young punk rocker, I saw it as black comedy. ACO adhere's to certain conventions of black comedy: it takes place in a familiar yet surreal world, the characters are over-the-top, situations trying to make distinct points about current society, and scenes that make one laugh even while wincing at the violence, cruelty or ignorance of the characters.
oh, and Malcolm McDowell was kinda cute....
But ACO left a big impression on me long before !980. It was seeing this poster in a drive-in snack bar when I was about 10....
.....that image haunted me for years. Geeze, I even remember the aqua and chrome decor of the Rt. 18 Drive-In Theater's snack bar, the smell of hot dogs and popcorn, the red and white stripes of the popcorn machine.....
The other thing about this poster--and about the movie--is the X rating. Back In The Day (I'm talking late 60's and early 70's), an X rating wasn't necessarily the kiss of death. "Midnight Cowboy" was another mainstream film that was X rated when first released. The lettered rating system was fairly new, and X was serious business. It meant that, if you weren't an adult, you would not be admitted. And movie theaters had no problem enforcing that rule.
The X rating was respected at this time because there were still a number of films that hit the market that didn't have official ratings. Low-budget exploitation pics made the rounds of both indoor and outdoor movie theaters, and they didn't always have official ratings. One of those movies (I just can't call them films) that I remember because of the size of the ads in the newspaper was "My Baby is Black" (don't ask--just watch the trailer. you'll be horrified, but not for the same reasons some audiences Back Then were horrified)
For some reason, I can't seem to embed the video here--how annoying! But there's no rating to this bizaare exploitation flick. At the end of the trailer it simply says "For ADULTS ONLY." None of the stuff we're used to today with the ratings system...and a film like this, without a rating, would never make it to a local movie theater. Those whacky days are gone...
Not to mention that within a year of ACO's release, porn would hit the big screen big time with "Deep Throat." Pretty soon the porn industry would co-opt the X rating and create the XXX rating. This was ot a real official motion picture board rating, but just a cheezy symbol that in its own weird way helped differentiate porn from mainstream Hollywood productions.
Be that as it may, ACO was eventually downgraded from X to R--yet this may have had as much to do with changing mores than with the bastardization of the X rating. By 1980 there were other films that were considered far more violent and titilating, including "Chinatown," "Rollerbal," and "Mad Max."
None of those could be mistaken for black comedy (or porn, for that matter.)
It's certainly quite fascinating to think about how much has changed since "A Clockwork Orange" premiered, and, from an American perspective, interesting to hear what the impact of the film was on British audiences. Apparently, it was quite incendiary. The reaction here, as I recall, wasn't quite the same. Then again, it did get the X rating....
Many thanks to CineMasterpieces for the image--and you can buy the poster from them too!
