Author: Dignan
Published: Sep 28th, 2009
Category: Movie Posters
Comments: None

Clockwork Orange Posters

Narrated by Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), the film opens on Alex and his droogs, Pete (Michael Tarn), Georgie (James Marcus) and Dim (Warren Clarke), partaking of mescaline-spiked milk at the Korova Milk Bar prior to an evening of “the old ultra-violence”. They proceed to beat up an elderly vagrant under a motorway and interrupt an attempted gang rape of a woman by a rival gang led by Billyboy[2] (Richard Connaught). They subsequently get in a brawl with their rivals. Upon hearing the sounds of police sirens, the gang flees, stealing a car and driving into the countryside on the wrong side of the road. They then gain entry to the home of Mr. Alexander, a writer, under false pretenses and assault him while violently raping his wife (Adrienne Corri), all while Alex sings “Singing’ in the Rain.” When they return to the milk bar, Alex chides Dim when he interrupts a female patron while she sings a selection of Beethoven, a composer Alex admires.
The next day, after skipping school, picking up and having sex with two girls from a record shop, and ignoring the concerns of Mr. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris) (a social worker who may have sexual feelings for him and touches him inappropriately) Alex regroups with his droogs who challenge his authority: with Georgie insisting the gang be run in a “new way” that entails less power for Alex and more ambitious crimes. As they walk along a canal, Alex attacks his droogs in order to re-establish his leadership.
That night, the gang attempts to invade the home of a woman (Miriam Karlin) who lives alone with her cats and runs a health farm. In the process, she gets into a fight with Alex, and Alex mortally bludgeons her with a phallus-shaped statue. As they flee the scene, Dim smashes a milk bottle across Alex’s face, blinding him and leaving him to be arrested by the police. During his interrogation, Alex is told by Mr. Deltoid that he is now a murderer as the woman died from her injuries. To add insult to injury, Deltoid simply spits on Alex in sheer disgust.
In prison, Alex becomes friends with the chaplain and takes a keen interest in the Bible, but primarily in the more violent characters. When the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp) arrives at the prison looking for volunteers for the Ludovico technique, an experimental aversion therapy for rehabilitating criminals, Alex eagerly steps forward, much to the disgust of Chief Officer Barnes (Michael Bates). At the Ludovico facility, Alex is placed in a straitjacket and forced to watch films containing scenes of extreme violence while being given drugs to induce reactions of revulsion. The films include one of real scenes in Nazi Germany, which includes a soundtrack of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Alex realises this will likely condition him against Beethoven’s music and makes an agonised though unsuccessful attempt to have the treatment end prematurely before the conditioning sets in. After the treatment is finished, Alex’s reformed behaviour is demonstrated for the audience. He is unable to respond back to an actor (John Clive) shouting insults and picking a fight with him, and a feeling of sickness attacks him when he is presented with a young naked woman who sexually arouses him. The Minister declares Alex to be cured, but the chaplain asserts that Alex no longer has any free will.
Alex is let free from prison two years after his sentencing. He finds his parents have rented out his room to a lodger named Joe (Clive Francis), leaving him on his own. Alex comes across the vagrant he had assaulted before the treatment, who calls in his friends and they attack Alex. Two policemen arrive to break up the fight, but Alex discovers the policemen to be his former droogs, Dim and Georgie. They drag Alex out to the countryside, where they brutally assault and half-drown him.
Battered and bruised, Alex wanders to the home of Mr. Alexander, who does not recognize him from two years prior, due to Alex’ wearing a mask at the time. He takes Alex in, aware that he had undergone the Ludovico treatment. Mr. Alexander tends to Alex’s wounds, but the memories of his assault return when Alex sings “Singin’ in the Rain” while taking a bath. Mr. Alexander drugs Alex, locks him in the upper floor of his home and plays Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at full volume through a powerful stereo on the floor below, knowing that the Ludovico treatment will cause immense pain to Alex. In order to escape the torture, Alex becomes suicidal and throws himself out of the room’s window.
Alex recovers consciousness to find himself in traction, with dreams about doctors messing around inside his head. Through a series of psychological tests, Alex finds that he no longer has a revulsion to violence. The Minister of the Interior comes to Alex and apologises for subjecting him to the treatment, and informs him that Mr. Alexander has been “put away.” The Minister then offers Alex an important government job and, as a show of goodwill, has a stereo wheeled to his bedside playing Beethoven’s Ninth. Alex then realises that instead of an adverse reaction to the music, he sees images of sexual pleasure. He then states ( in a sarcastic and menacing voice-over) “I was cured all right!”

? Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge
? Warren Clarke as Dim
? James Marcus as Georgie
? Patrick Magee as Frank Alexander
? Michael Tarn as Pete
? Adrienne Corri as Mrs. Alexander
? Carl Duering as Dr. Brodsky
? Madge Ryan as Dr. Branom
? Godfrey Quigley as Prison Chaplain
? Anthony Sharp as Minister (of Interior)
? Sheila Raynor as Mum
? Philip Stone as Dad
? David Prowse as Julian
? Michael Bates as Chief Guard
? Aubrey Morris as Mr. P. R. Deltoid
? Steven Berkoff as Tom
? Tony Hargreaves as Prison Guard
? Richard Connaught as Billy Boy
? Matthew Ash as Uncredited Droogie
? Miriam Karlin as Cat Lady
? John Clive as Stage Actor
? Virginia Wetherell as Nude stage actress

Themes
Morality
The film’s central moral question (as in many of Burgess’ books), is the definition of “Goodness”. After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, but not by choice. His goodness is involuntary; he has become the titular clockwork orange — organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside. In the prison, after witnessing the Technique in action in Alex, the chaplain criticises it as false, arguing that true goodness must come from within. This leads to the theme of abusing liberties — personal, governmental, civil — by Alex, the Government, and the Dissidents manipulating him for their political ends. Concording with Kantian ethics, this critically portrays the “conservative” and “liberal” parties as equal, for using Alex as a means to their ends: the writer Frank Alexander — a victim of Alex and gang — wants revenge against Alex and sees him as a means of definitively turning the populace against the incumbent government and its new régime. Mr Alexander fears the new government; in telephonic conversation, he says:
. . . recruiting brutal young roughs into the police; proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we’ve seen it all before in other countries; the thin end of the wedge! Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism.
On the other side, the Minister of the Interior (the Government), jails Mr Alexander (the Dissident Intellectual) on excuse of his endangering Alex (the People), rather than the government’s totalitarian régime (described by Mr Alexander). It is unclear whether or not he has been harmed, however, the Minister tells Alex that the writer has been denied the ability to write and produce “subversive” material that is critical of the incumbent government and meant to provoke political unrest.
Psychology
Another critical target is behavioural psychology (popular ca. 1940–60s), as propounded by the psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Novelist Burgess disapproved of behaviourism, calling Skinner’s most popular book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), “one of the most dangerous books ever written”.[3] Although Watson conceded behaviourism’s limitations, Skinner argued that behaviour modification (systematic reward-and-punishment learned behaviour techniques, which differs from Watsonian conditioning) is the key to an ideal society (see the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two). Dr. Ludovico’s behaviourist technique of conditioning Alex to associate violence with severe physical sickness, to curb his violent nature is akin to the CIA’s Project MKULTRA of the 1950s. Dr. Ludovico’s behaviourist technique is based on classical conditioning, and should not be confused with B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.
In showing the “rehabilitated” Alex repelled by both sex and violence, the film implicitly compares the Ludivico technique to castration, and suggests that, in depriving him of his ability to fend for himself, Alex’s moral conditioning via the Ludivico technique dehumanises him, just as Alex’s acts of violence in the first part of the film dehumanise his victims.
Belgian cinema writer Anthony Bochon notes the criminological question underlying the Ludovico Technique, describing the quality of the cinematic description of the treatment as “a problem of integrating the bad, the criminal, who is rejecting human dignity, into Humanity itself. Kubrick didn’t make an apology of some fascist practices, but simply brought his vision of the future of our society, and how violence is fed by our society”.