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Post by dem on Aug 16, 2009 22:29:28 GMT
From Vault Mk I, posted by Franklin Marsh, Oct 10th, 2005. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (Penguin, 1962-present)  David PelhamBlurb Fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends start an evening's mayhem by hitting an old man, tearing up his books and stripping him of money and clothes.
Or rather Alex and his three droogs tolchock an old veck, razrez his books, pull off his outer platties and take a malenky bit of cutter.
For Alex's confessions are written in 'nadsat' – the teenage argot of a not-too-distant future.
Because of his delinquent excesses, Alex is jailed and made subject to 'Ludovico's Technique', a chilling experiment in Reclamation Treatment ...
Horror farce? Social prophecy? Penetrating study of human choice between good and evil? A Clockwork Orange is all three, dazzling proof of Anthony Burgess's vast talents.Been meaning to throw this one in for a while. Outside the rough timescale and by a 'proper' author, this books influence cannot be denied. (The film's a bit of a rascal too). If I've got my facts right, (and please kick me if I'm wrong), Anthony Burgess' first wife was assualted by three AWOL US soldiers at the end of the Second World War. She died later from pneumonia but it was thought this incident may have contributed to her death. Burgess paid a visit to the Soviet Union shortly before he wrote the book and was surprised to find that they had a juvenile deliquency problem. He was also (incorrectly) diagnosed as having a terminal illness and decided to churn out as many books as he could at the time to provide his family with some kind of legacy. A Clockwork Orange was one of these. Published around 1962 it was post-Ted, pre-Mod but IMHO brilliantly captures those teenage years when it's you against the world. The novel was written in Nadsat - a teenage slang created by Burgess - which led to praise from critics but (I assume) public indifference. Pan published a paperback edition and the book gracefully retreated to the sidelines. Burgess understood that any slang used by youngsters is very quickly dated (Rip mentiioned the film of The Wild One elsewhere - there's a hilarious example in there of two young bikers talking 'rebop' to confuse their elders - and the film was based on an article detailing the Hollister raid - allegedly an important part of the genesis of Hells Angels) so if he made one up it would remain timeless. He used Russian as the root of many of the words. What if British youth after WWII had turned to the other superpower instaed of America? Many praise these words as onomatapoeic (have I got that right?) ie tolchock sounds like you're hitting someone. They also have a satirical function. Horrorshow seems to mean good - a splendid example of youth using words such as bad or wicked to mean they approve. It was derived from the Russian 'Horosh' meaning good. Golova (head) became gulliver - a nod to Swift. There were rumours that Andrew Loog Oldham wanted the Stones to appear in a film version (and allegedly wrote sleevenotes for one of their albums in Nadsat).  Over to America - where publishers decided to remove the last chapter (where a burnt-out Alex starts to find the endless crime and violence too much and starts thinking of marriage and children) and an American prof provided a handy glossary of Nadsat words (which apparently didn't go down too well with Mr Burgess). The Andy Warhol factory made a film called Vinyl which was a rough and ready and none too accurate adaptation. Satirist Terry Southern had been called in by Stanley Kubrick to assist him and Peter George in transforming George's straight-faced nuclear nightmare into the comedy that became Dr Strangelove. Southern liked A Clockwork Orange and attempted a screenplay himself with no success. While visiting Kubrick on the set of 2001 he brought the novel to Stanley's attention. After five years of working on the sci-fi epic and film industry cutbacks sabotaging his immense and costly Napoleon biopic Kubrick thought A Clockwork Orange funny and interesting. He'd always collaborated on screenplays for previous films. Here was a chance to do it himself and make a quick low budget feature. The relaxing of film censorship meant they could go further. Unfortunately a backlash against the excesses of cinematic sex 'n' violence was brewing. The releases of Soldier Blue, The Devils and especially Straw Dogs at around the same time, with Last Tango in Paris and The Exorcist on the horizon saw a tabloid frenzy and innumerable discussions on the presentation of violence and its effects. Kubrick had made a brave but risky decision to show the violence from Alex's point of view - hyper-kinetic, enjoyable and the highlight of his life. Burgess' Nadsat distanced the reader from this. The book is far worse than the film. Alex is fifteen and takes part in much more robbery, vandalism, rape and muggings than in the film. The 'cat lady' is an elderly woman and he also commits murder whilst in jail. Another use for Nadsat was to prevent anyone picking up the book and getting a quick cheap thrill from Alex's appalling adventures. Ironically, due to Kubrick's reluctance to appear on television or be interviewed it was down to Anthony Burgess and Malcolm McDowell to defend the film. After being on release for approximately a year Kubrick withdrew the film from exhibition in Britain for his own reasons. Rumours of copycat attacks and threats to his family abounded, but the moralists couldn't blame him anymore. Apart from tantalising glimpses of MAD magazines A Crockwork Lemon and The Goodies' rabbit flavoured A Transistorised Carrot it was books about Kubrick, dodgy pirate videos and Burgess' novel that remained my only access to this film until Kubrick's death. It's still the best book about teenage wild ones. And it's not exploitative and seeks to go below the surface thuggery. Franklin Marsh |
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Post by fullbreakfast on Aug 20, 2009 23:11:17 GMT
Over to America - where publishers decided to remove the last chapter (where a burnt-out Alex starts to find the endless crime and violence too much and starts thinking of marriage and children) and an American prof provided a handy glossary of Nadsat words (which apparently didn't go down too well with Mr Burgess). Oh for f***s sake! Twenty years after I read the bloody thing it turns out it wasn't even the proper version! Mind you, this last chapter sounds a bit crap to me. I think the ending of the truncated version (just at the point where Alex gets his mojo back after a really good blast of Mahler, or was it Beethoven?) worked just fine. After being on release for approximately a year Kubrick withdrew the film from exhibition in Britain for his own reasons. Rumours of copycat attacks and threats to his family abounded, but the moralists couldn't blame him anymore. Apart from tantalising glimpses of MAD magazines A Crockwork Lemon and The Goodies' rabbit flavoured A Transistorised Carrot it was books about Kubrick, dodgy pirate videos and Burgess' novel that remained my only access to this film until Kubrick's death. It's still the best book about teenage wild ones. And it's not exploitative and seeks to go below the surface thuggery. Back in the early nineties some clips from the movie were shown as part of a Channel 4 documentary - the first time any part of it had been aired in the UK since it was withdrawn. When Kubrick found out C4 were planning to do this he insisted that Warner Brothers apply for an injunction to try to prevent the clips from being broadcast. At the time I worked in a junior capacity for the law firm representing Warners, and I was actually on a couple of conference calls with Kubrick and various studio execs. He came across as being one of the most miserable, whingeing, self-centred gits imaginable. We didn't get the injunction, anyway. Hadn't got a case really. |
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 21, 2009 13:23:58 GMT
Classic tale, legendary film. It was available on the continent for years but I read somewhere that Burgess had been given death threats and was reluctant for the film to be shown in the UK.
My life was not particularly sheltered and in my teen years there was a lot of fighting and running away (me mostly running) On two or three occasions I have been really scared, but to give an idea of how legendary and awful this film was I will relate the scariest incident of my life. It was quite simple:
I'm on a long road in Edinburgh in the afternoon. About a mile away two young fellows are walking down the street As the street was very long, you could see the ordinary folks, in sheep-like lines, dashing to get to the other side.
As soon as it became clear to me that these young fellows were dressed like Droogs, full outfit, complete with swordsticks it was also clear why people were fleeing. I can only equate it to the feeling deer have about lions.
It was understood by the simplest, rustic fool that anyone who dressed like that was a single step away from insanity. It was an absolute invitation to one and all that these two maniacs would, and were going to, happily kill people.
I got near enough to see they had one fake eyelash each before running.
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Post by dem on Aug 21, 2009 14:54:48 GMT
Back in the early nineties some clips from the movie were shown as part of a Channel 4 documentary - the first time any part of it had been aired in the UK since it was withdrawn. When Kubrick found out C4 were planning to do this he insisted that Warner Brothers apply for an injunction to try to prevent the clips from being broadcast. At the time I worked in a junior capacity for the law firm representing Warners, and I was actually on a couple of conference calls with Kubrick and various studio execs. He came across as being one of the most miserable, whingeing, self-centred gits imaginable. We didn't get the injunction, anyway. Hadn't got a case really. I seem to remember that Kubrick prosecuted the Scala in Kings Cross for screening the film. They were fined a relatively small sum, but their court costs were so high it eventually forced them out of business and London lost a treasure of an independent Cinema. I've very fond memories of that place.They seemed to have a big Birthday Party fetish - to the point of holding a Nick Cave day - which was enough to keep me going back (that and the fact there was no drink restriction. You could turn up in mobile off-licence mode and nobody cared). A truly magical venue, how bitterly ironic that it was effectively killed by a film-maker they feted! Classic tale, legendary film. It was available on the continent for years but I read somewhere that Burgess had been given death threats and was reluctant for the film to be shown in the UK. Alexander Walker mentions the death threats as the likely cause for Kubrick's act of self-censorship in Stephen Dalton's excellent article, Symphony For The Devil, ( Uncut #35, April 2000), published to coincide with the re-issue of the film following Kubrick's death. Dalton takes us through the film's troubled history (both in the US and Britain) and features contributions from Malcolm McDowell ("Everyone went on about the violence. I thought we'd made a comedy."), Miriam Karlin ("I get killed with a three foot phallus. If you've got to go, girl, what a way to go!"), Malcolm McClaren ("I did ask Stanley Kubrick to make a movie about the Sex Pistols, but he told me that he had already made that movie and it was called A Clockwork Orange."), Julien Temple, Phil Daniels, Andrew Loog Oldham, Wim Wenders, The Edge, Brett Anderson, Alex James, Gary Bushell, Tony Parsons, Martin Ware, etc. |
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Post by Steve on Aug 21, 2009 19:30:40 GMT
Classic tale, legendary film. It was available on the continent for years but I read somewhere that Burgess had been given death threats and was reluctant for the film to be shown in the UK. I first saw A Clockwork Orange in the cinema in Italy in the mid-90s. The place I was living in, while classed as a city, was really just a quiet little town. Street crime was virtually non-existent and the only murder anyone could remember had been a crime of passion some years previously. The place was a maze of narrow, dimly-lit alleyways, a would-be mugger's paradise, and yet anybody could wander around at any time of the day or night and the most frightening thing that might have happened would've been bumping into me staggering home from a bar. In that sort of context, the film really could be seen as a rather high-spirited romp. People I spoke to who'd been to see the film, one of them a youngish lad who'd taken his girlfriend along as if it was some kind of 'date movie', all seemed to view it as just a bit of harmless fun. As a bit of a footnote: the first time I came back to Britain after that, I'd got off the ferry in Dover and had about an hour to kill before catching my train. Obviously I headed straight for a pub opposite the railway station and, on pushing open the doors, was immediately greeted by the sound of raised voices and shattering glass. Welcome home, son, and might I interest you in a swift kick in the yarbles? |
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Post by franklinmarsh on Aug 22, 2009 8:58:55 GMT
Thanks for retrieving this one, Dem. Halcyon days! Seeing my Casino Royale gallery was greeted with such enthusiasm, here's a Clocky O one - Pan Paperback 1st Edition 1964. US Edition - Norton 1963 - missing the last chapter - Stanley Edgar Hyman's afterword gives us the much maligned (by Burgess) glossary. Heinemann 1972 Hardback Reprint. Stan The Man's 1972 script illustrated by pictures from the fillum published by Lorrimer. (Remember those Richard J Anobile horror books - Psycho and Frankenstein? It's a miniature version of them.) Quite rare and expensive until Stanley died and it was reprinted. If the book was written in Nadsat, how would it translate? Here's L'Orange Mechanique - Robert Laffont 1972, translated by Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier. "- Bon, alors ca sera quoi, hein? Il y avait moi, autrement dit Alex, et mes trois drougs, autrement dit Pierrot, Jo et Momo, vraiment momo le Momo, et on etait assis au Korova Milkbar..." (purchased in Paris!) A couple of Penguins, 1996 and 2000 (both with an Introduction by Blake Morrison) More (ptui!) hardbacks - No 1 in a series of 25 'banned books' given away with The Indescribablyboring, Intro by John Walsh. And cheap and cheerful Compact books '94 Penguin paperback overkill! Stanley dies, so we finally get the film tie-in edition we always wanted (2000) and the less-than-inspiring (can't see a date) And finally... The programme from the Royal Shakespeare Company's circa 1990 stage production featuring Phil Daniels as Alex. (which dramatised the last chapter) With music from Bono and The Edge (some of which appeared on U2's The Fly single.) |
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 22, 2009 13:19:39 GMT
brilliant
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 23, 2009 11:54:17 GMT
I've never read the book, but I have to say that I found the film (like much of Kubrick's work) to be incredibly pretentious and dull. I suppose the ban didn't help - I saw it when it was released on video about 10 years ago, and it seemed to me to be very badly dated. Maybe if I had "grown up with it" and seen it over a number of viewings (as I have with Lindsay Anderson's "If", for example) then I maybe would have been more forgiving - but seeing it for the first time in my 30s, it just seemed like a muddled mess of pointless nonsense and, even worse, the supposedly "shocking" violence turned out to be pretty tame by comparison with a lot of stuff I had seen by then.
And Craig... I can only assume that Edinburgh story was set somewhere like Morningside or Marchmont on a Sunday afternoon. I would have liked to see how far "two young fellows" dressed as droogs would have got around one of the housing estates in Muirhouse or Craigmillar, or down the Leith docks - sword sticks or not.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 23, 2009 16:57:10 GMT
I can only assume that Edinburgh story was set somewhere like Morningside or Marchmont on a Sunday afternoon. I would have liked to see how far "two young fellows" dressed as droogs would have got around one of the housing estates in Muirhouse or Craigmillar, or down the Leith docks - sword sticks or not.
Dr Strange
I was about 18 and my brother hung out with Jungle, the evil dead of HMFC, and carried a switch blade, so I had a goodish grasp on thoroughly mental youth. But they were youths so you are right that an older hardman from one of several Edinburgh areas would have laughed at them.
However, they were near the top of Easter road walking towards Portobello which was highly suggestive that they were Leathites or returning to Piershil where only a madman would dress like that unless he was prepared to back it up. That was the fear I tried to convey - they were looking for it.
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 24, 2009 8:42:40 GMT
Are you sure they weren't art college students staggering home from a party the previous night? I just can't see that look appealing to the neds...
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 24, 2009 9:17:31 GMT
Now you have me thinking.
But I got a reasonably close look at them and they just looked evil. Could have been by association I suppose though. It was over 30 years ago but I remember it fairly clearly.
Walking past them wouldn't be a chance I'd like to have taken at 17/18 years old. It was bad enough just meeting strange bozos in town without seeing them dressed as droogs.
There was that phase down Leith of dressing as an idiot - as in geeky, school wimp look - in the hope that people would pick on you. Some of the thugs were pretty devious in the 70's.
One great example was after a Hearts V Dundee match the supporters' bus was attacked by two stone throwing Dundee fans. The bus stopped. All the hard men leapt out and gave chase.
Unfortunately, it was an ambush...
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 24, 2009 10:02:52 GMT
Don't get me started on the deviousness of the Dundonian ned... I lived in Dundee for about 10 years (actually, some of the happiest years of my life).
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 24, 2009 18:21:13 GMT
My brother worked in the Library in Dundee but my only decent memories were going to Tannadice and Den's Park I remember a Dundee Ned was walking through the whole of the Hearts supporters asking people individually if they wanted to fight behind the shed. Needless to say the most drunk of us spotted the flaws in the arrangement...
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Post by marillionboy on Jan 17, 2011 14:45:18 GMT
Over to America - where publishers decided to remove the last chapter (where a burnt-out Alex starts to find the endless crime and violence too much and starts thinking of marriage and children) and an American prof provided a handy glossary of Nadsat words (which apparently didn't go down too well with Mr Burgess). Oh for f***s sake! Twenty years after I read the bloody thing it turns out it wasn't even the proper version! Mind you, this last chapter sounds a bit crap to me. I think the ending of the truncated version (just at the point where Alex gets his mojo back after a really good blast of Mahler, or was it Beethoven?) worked just fine. After being on release for approximately a year Kubrick withdrew the film from exhibition in Britain for his own reasons. Rumours of copycat attacks and threats to his family abounded, but the moralists couldn't blame him anymore. Apart from tantalising glimpses of MAD magazines A Crockwork Lemon and The Goodies' rabbit flavoured A Transistorised Carrot it was books about Kubrick, dodgy pirate videos and Burgess' novel that remained my only access to this film until Kubrick's death. It's still the best book about teenage wild ones. And it's not exploitative and seeks to go below the surface thuggery. Back in the early nineties some clips from the movie were shown as part of a Channel 4 documentary - the first time any part of it had been aired in the UK since it was withdrawn. When Kubrick found out C4 were planning to do this he insisted that Warner Brothers apply for an injunction to try to prevent the clips from being broadcast. At the time I worked in a junior capacity for the law firm representing Warners, and I was actually on a couple of conference calls with Kubrick and various studio execs. He came across as being one of the most miserable, whingeing, self-centred gits imaginable. We didn't get the injunction, anyway. Hadn't got a case really. Honestly, you have to read the last chapter. The book becomes absolutely pointless without it. The American first pressing omitted it due to an error and was not intentional. Clockwork Orange is the best book I've ever read but I thought the film was a disaster. It completely misses the point and has nothing whatsoever to say of its own. It was meant to be set in a future that Burgess said had probably already past by 1971, but the film distances itself by setting itself in an unrecognisable future lendscape which actually dates it more than if it had been set in the present day. Also the violence is far too choreographed. Violence is clumsy and ugly and messy. And while McDowell is brilliant in it, he is a man of 28 playing a 14 year old which just sint convicing. A rape scene is turned into an orgy... its hard to know what to praise about it. I just hate it. I think the praise heaped on it is simply for the brilliance of the book which the film cant help but inherit a little of. Rant over! |
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 17, 2011 15:46:53 GMT
I have to agree with you on this. The book is brilliant, and very easy to read despite the bizarre futuristic slang. But the film is a mess. So much so I haven't even bothered to get a DVD of it.
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