Everything’s going to the droogs. The nationwide release of “A Clockwork Orange” was 44 years ago — on Feb. 2, 1972 — but today its star, Malcolm McDowell, says the movie was more prescient than it seemed at the time.
Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, the Stanley Kubrick film shows “a world in which all older people stayed indoors with their televisions on,” McDowell told the News. “And that’s basically what happened.
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“It’s just the young people out there doing drugs — and he foretold all this before the drug explosion.”
The film, like the book, depicts a dystopian future filled with “ultra-violence,” gangs of “droogs” and depravity at every turn. The four main characters — including McDowell’s lead character Alex — spend their free time in a bar where they drink drug-laced milk in preparation for an evening filled with violence, mayhem and even rape.
The book was released in 1962 and shooting for the film began in 1969, “so this is really before huge gang violence and drugs happened,” McDowell said.
With some of the most iconic scenes set behind bars, the prison system looms large in the world of “A Clockwork Orange” — much like in modern America.
“I don’t see any aversion therapy thank god, but it’s amazing how there’s so many people incarcerated in America,” McDowell said. “We are so backward in our thinking, we are so medieval.”
Though “A Clockwork Orange” imagined an entire future world, the inspiration for it was based on a chance encounter at a Moscow coffee shop — which Burgess later recounted for McDowell.
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“He told me it came to him while he was in Moscow on an exchange visit. He was sitting in a coffee bar on a warm night.” He was sitting near the window with a group of Russian friends when a menacing group of “Muscovite thugs” creepily pressed their faces against the window. That triggered the idea for the book, as well as for the creation of Nadsat, the strange English/Russian/Yiddish slang language used by the youth of “A Clockwork Orange”..........
(Yeah..... but like all "mainstream" culture the movie and now the star have left ONE little thing out of the picture -- one BIG little thing -- the MAIN thing in life then as now: RACE. Other British stars are decrying the blacken of Britain -- will Mal finally get it once another 45 years have passed, hmm?? NN)
NN Sequitur
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