A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick's brilliant nightmare of a film takes the heavy realities of the 'do-your-thing' and 'law-and-order' syndromes, runs them through a cinematic centrifuge, and spews forth the commingled comic horrors of a regulated society. Uncomfortably proximate, disturbingly plausible and obliquely resolved, the film employs outrageous vulgarity, stark brutality and some sophisticated comedy to make an opaque argument for the preservation of respect for man's free will - even to do wrong.

In his fourth film in a decade, and the ninth in 19 years, Kubrick certainly is back from outer space. More than that, he has penetrated the relatively high level of multi-national madness found in "Doctor Strangelove" and landed right in the urban jungle. His screenplay, based on the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel, postulates a society composed of amoral young hedonists, an older generation in retreat behind locked doors, and a political-police government no longer accountable to anyone or to any principles except expediency and tenure.(Source: Variety, 1971)

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