A Clockwork Orange

Director: Stanley Kubrick

1971 / 136min / 35mm

Wendy Carlos’s score of switched-on Moog synthesizer classical, Kubrick’s punchy framings, and Malcolm McDowell’s cruelly charismatic, Nadsat slang-spouting performance as teen reprobate Alex combine to make for cracking cinema, and a hallucinatory imagination of a future broken Britain. Based on the stinging satire by Anthony Burgess, a work by turns exhilarating and nauseating, the film of A Clockwork Orange would be withdrawn from British cinemas at Kubrick’s behest, citing concern over reports that it had inspired copycat crimes in the UK. The Scala screened it anyways, a decision that was perhaps its finest hour and also its death blow: losing a court case connected to the illegal screening in 1993, the cinema promptly went into receivership.

Introduction from SCALA!!! co-director Ali Catterall on Monday, July 22nd

Part of Long Live Scala Cinema!