A Clockwork Orange

A film set in a near-future Britain. Alex is fifteen and commits violence at night with three friends. Beatings, robbery, breaking into houses, and he narrates it as entertainment. Alex is the narrator. He speaks in a slang they invented and addresses the audience directly. One night the job goes wrong. His friends leave him and he is arrested. In prison he hears about a new programme. The state has developed a treatment that claims to cure the criminal. From there the film is an experiment. Alex's eyes are held open, he is shown violent footage for days, and his body develops a physical reaction to violence. The treatment works, but what it produces is not goodness but helplessness. Alex can no longer defend himself either. From there the film sends him back past everyone he met, and each of them settles the account. What the narrative is interested in is not violence but choice: the argument in the film is whether a person forced into goodness is good at all, and a chaplain states it outright. The music is an instrument of the narrative. Alex listens to classical music, and during the treatment the music is poisoned too. The source is Anthony Burgess's novel. The American edition omitted the final chapter and the film used that edition; the author criticised the difference for years. The film was withdrawn in Britain. The decision was the director's rather than the studio's; after threats to his family and claims that the film was being imitated, the prints were pulled, and it was not shown in the country until after his death. Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates and Warren Clarke are in the cast. Stanley Kubrick directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see one of the most argued-over productions in the history of cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take scenes of sexual violence; the film shows them in a deliberately entertaining tone and that choice is meant to be disturbing.