o lucky orange!

foreign lobby card set for A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Malcolm McDowell turns 77 today. A few films from a slightly unnerving career:

 Mick Travis in “If….” D: Lindsay Anderson (1968).  The horrors of an English boys boarding school. The first Cannes Palme d’Or winner to be rated X for nudity, upperclassmen violence, and because McDowell’s rebel hero ends the movie by shooting up the school on Founders Day. A star is born.

Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange. D: Stanley Kubrick (1971). A futuristic thug after several sprees of “the old ultraviolence” (brutal beatings, rape, murder) is given a behavioral conditioning treatment that makes him incapable of antisocial behavior – and Beethoven. Which leads to the question, which is worse, instinctive brutality or social negation of free will? McDowell was charismatic enough to make the loaded question harder than you’d think and his narration (in Nadsat, a slang invented by author Anthony Burgess) is one of the best voiceovers in film history.