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HBO Max marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick classic A Clockwork Orange with A Forbidden Orange, a documentary account of the firebrand film’s first public screening in Spain in 1975. Director Pedro González Bermúdez rounds up a bunch of people involved in getting the film past Francisco Franco’s censorship-heavy regime so it could screen at the Valladolid International Film Festival, and even gets Orange’s Alex DeLarge himself, Malcolm McDowell, to narrate. Wild, how a single screening of one movie warrants a 77-minute documentary – or does it? Let’s find out.
A FORBIDDEN ORANGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We’ve all seen A Clockwork Orange, right? If not, then we at least know of it, its controversial content and imagery, the discomfort it inspires. McDowell talks about how he spent a grueling, but rewarding six months working on the film with Kubrick, a notorious perfectionist; he goes so far as to say the movie shaped his life. We can see that, and if we’ve seen it, as in the movie, we understand that. The movie is f—ed up. It’s unforgettable. It’s visually stunning. It’s full of brutal violence and features deeply disturbing rape scenes. It has mountains to say about the media, violence, the human psyche. Nobody “likes” it. If it’s your “favorite” movie, then you’re almost certainly lying. It’s unpleasant and discomforting and provocative and challenging, and it’s a work of art.
Anyway, the documentary. Some context: A Clockwork Orange was banned from some countries upon its 1971 release. Its critics called it “morally corrupt” and “a cursed film.” It was pulled from some theaters amidst the backlash. No surprise there, and less so that it didn’t see a single screen in Spain until 1975. The country was under Franco’s fascist rule, and his censors worked hard to stifle the country’s cultural vitality. But by the early ’70s, his grip began to loosen, and democratic activists started pushing back, staging protests and inspiring workers’ strikes.
One of the protest hubs was Villadolid, a medium-sized college town in the country’s northwest region with a compelling dynamic: It reflected the conservative values of the surrounding rural communities, but of its then-population of 200,000, 30,000 of them were progressive students. Many of the locals loved the escapism afforded them by the cinema, so they soon organized an international film festival, which began as a collection of religious films to please Franco’s Catholicism-based dictatorship. But when the nationalist’s censors relaxed, the event soon progressed to include Truffaut, Bergman, Bunuel and the like. And the one film they really, really wanted to program? You guessed it – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. No! It was A Clockwork Orange. But it wouldn’t come easy. And it roused such a froth of anticipation, could it ever meet expectations?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: You’ll be thankful this isn’t a too-goofy deep dive into Kubrickdom like Room 237 is.
Performance Worth Watching: Journalist Maria Aurora Viloria, when she admits she loved Orange, and “found it really funny.”
Memorable Dialogue: Viloria: “The city was divided: those who were excited, and those who sat at the front saying the rosary.”
Sex and Skin: A couple of unsettling clips from A Clockwork Orange.
Our Take: I’ve seen A Clockwork Orange many times. It’s a masterpiece that stands on its own and speaks for itself. And from that perspective, A Forbidden Orange is a bit disappointing, a straightforward talking-heads documentary with a if-only-you’d-been-there tone that meanders into dull minutiae about printing tickets and moviegoers lining up outside the movie theater overnight to buy them. Bermúdez turns up some amusing trivia, e.g., a tidbit about how Spaniards so badly wanted to see Kubrick’s film, Spanish filmmakers produced A Drop of Blood to Die Loving, which was such a ripoff, it was nicknamed A Clockwork Tangerine. The director’s best idea comes at the end, when he interviews a handful of 20-ish filmgoers before and after seeing the film for the first time, which helps contextualize it here in 2021.
The doc is less interesting than the conversations it inspires, but at least it inspires them. It seems crazy – especially in the streaming age – that so many people would go to such extreme lengths to show a screening or two of one single movie, some of those lengths enforced by Kubrick himself, who wanted exhibitions of his films to be just so. Was he a dictator? Maybe. But his punishing pursuit of his art is something to be admired, insists one documentary interviewee. (Shelley Duvall might feel otherwise.)
But putting up with his demands was worth it: The theater was packed. Anti-riot cops showed up (they weren’t needed, fortunately). The organizers shrugged off a bomb threat that was called in halfway through the screening. The film HAD to be screened, because it became a political protest, a crack in the levee of fascist control. Bermúdez gets his subjects to say a lot about the politics of then and now, but it feels repetitive and shallow. He briefly touches on modern political correctness; breezes by a comparison of the overt censorship of the 20th century and the more subtle censorship of the 21st; barely takes advantage of an opportunity to ponder whether a movie like A Clockwork Orange would even be made today. Compelling stuff, sure, but A Forbidden Orange ultimately would be better as a longer, more detailed doc about the film’s still-rippling cultural reverberations – or a shorter, more focused one, about that one screening, so crucial for Spaniards thirsty for freedom.
Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s far from perfect, but A Forbidden Orange should stir interest in Kubrick wackos (guilty!) and those with a more-than-passing interest in A Clockwork Orange.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
