Classic Movie 24: Clockwork Orange (1971)

'Real horror show, like'

	The slick, cocky, vicious and manipulating DeLarge is given the reprieve his taste in music deserves when he is selected to be the next inmate guinea pig for the Ludovico Technique

The plot
Stanley Kubrick's most controversial artistic legacy, A Clockwork Orange follows the life of the brilliantly salacious Alex DeLarge and his bloodthirsty gang of socially deviant Droogs. They spend their nights dressed somewhere between Chris Eubank and the Skeksis in the warped, neo-classical environs of the Korova milk bar, exchanging words in their own dialect (Nadsat) and sharpening their senses in readiness for a bit of the old ultra-violence and the old in-out in-out.
Alex reserves special favour for the "surprise visit" and likes to top a night of raping and rollicking with a bit of the old Luwig van [Beethoven]. Unfortunately for "little Alex", after one evening's fun stoving a flat-chested old spinster's head in with a giant china cock, his backward Droogie chums turn against him and he ends up sentenced for murder and condemned to a life inside the state-controlled prison system.

So what happens?
The slick, cocky, vicious and manipulating DeLarge is given the reprieve his taste in music deserves when he is selected to be the next inmate guinea pig for the Ludovico Technique – a government experiment designed to eradicate violent crime. DeLarge is heavily doped and exposed to images more disturbing than Judy Finnegan doing step aerobics. The treatment renders him helpless to violence, the "unrestrained Joy of Battle" giving way to pathetic bouts of sickness and nausea. The "reformed" DeLarge is then set free, and hurriedly upon by all those whose lives he gleefully fucked over in the past.

Why's it a classic?
Watching this for the first time is like doing a bungee jump over a car crash with your eyelids taped to your forehead – provocative, intoxicating and excruciating in equal measure. Or as Alex might say: "Real horror show, like."
It's a scabrous satire about human deviance, brutality and social conditioning that's even more relevant today than it was during Kubrick's lifetime. Pushed to savage lengths by his director, Malcolm McDowell is uncompromising as Alex, single-handedly proving that it's as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
An incredible cinematic experience.

The Infamous Break-In Scene (Adult scene):

The Ludovico Technique: