I really hope this gets remade and it is a certain topic that I believe must be introduced to today's public today. A lot of the important parts from the novel were left out of the film and the choice of colors/costumes were not what I expected.
shareI'd prefer it not be remade because I consider the original film to be perfect, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone eventually takes a crack at it.
What I'm curious about, though, is I wonder if the rights to the novel reverted to Burgess' estate, or who exactly owns them now?
Hey look--I won an award for just showing up! Yay!!!
The only thing missing from the movie thats in the novel that I'd consider interesting is seeing Alex after everything happened and how he does eventually mature. I actually wouldn't have minded seeing Kubrick attack that particular part of the story.
However, I do believe that Kubrick made a pretty good incarnation of the story.
"I have always valued my lifelessness."
I read the book 10 years before getting to see the movie ( it was very difficult to see this film in rhe Uk during the lengthy ban) and for me the novel is very different and more detailed than the movie which is a sketch in comparison.
For me at least a true to the letter version of the novel would be a very different take to the 1971 film version.
The reason why Alex gets the Ludovico treatment in the book was left entirely out of the movie. I was expecting a prison fight scene and I thought that played a big role in the novel
shareAlex also murders another inmate in jail and gets beaten up regularly by the prison guards, none of which feature in the film......just two of hundreds of details not present in the book to movie translation.
shareSo you think Peter Jackson should do the remake and turn it into a trilogy?
shareA Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Oranger.
A Clockwork Orangest.
Hey look--I won an award for just showing up! Yay!!!
The movie we have is already quite long at 137 minutes so perhaps we do have a problem with making an even longer version with all the details omitted from the original novel.
Other interesting points missing in the movie are detailed descriptions of the spiked moloko drug effects and the very different dress code the droogs wear in the novel.
Don't forget about the early scene during the gang's initial rampage when they encounter an Academic, Bookwormish man who's carrying a manuscript entitled "A Clockwork Orange" that Alex mocks and scatters to the wind before they attack and beat him.
Later, during his post-conditioning when being presented to the government bigwigs, Alex remembers this occurrence and blurts out loud, "And what about me? Am I just to be 'A Clockwork Orange?'"
Hey look--I won an award for just showing up! Yay!!!
Deleted.
See next entry
Yes those two items would have worked great in the movie......the term: 'a clockwork orange' is sadly never heard in the film.
The scene with the bookish old guy near the start of the novel was partly filmed but the elderly actor died before retakes were captured and sadly scrapped as a result.
I read the book in 1971 before the film came out, and clearly remember that A Clockwork Orange was the title of the book that Mr. ALexander was writing at the time of the home invasion.
shareYou're right, it's at the Home invasion that Alex sees the title, not the first street attack...I remembered the books from the earlier assault and thought that was one of them.
Hey look--I won an award for just showing up! Yay!!!
I think the first guy the droogs attack in the book was a schoolteacher (or he had the looks of one), and he had 3 books that looked like school textbooks - their names were 'Elementary Crystallography', 'The Rhombohedral System' and 'The Miracle of the Snowflake'.
"How could a man love anything except a blonde?"
-Captain Phoebus, 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'
Just saw this. PJ doing a remake...what a train wreck THAT would be. It would probably take 3 hours before Alex shows up at all. All their crimes would be multiplied by 100 (victims, acts, etc). There would be about 50 flashbacks/fantasies, only 2 of which would help the plot. Anyone want to add anything?
shareI don't know why Jackson would make it a trilogy, when he could easily turn it into a seven-part series... :)
share...And he'd figure out some way to get dinosaurs into it...
shareHaha :-) And have an extended scene with showing just their legs, with horrible CGI :)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC86J9yN_UD-TEPCCcOWRR1Q/videos - my Youtube movie reviews.
after seeing this post i will pray every night for the next 2 weeks that this amazing movie never, ever, EVER gets remade
shareI think some people don't understand why a movie gets made.
Yeah, so big deal, some little detail was left out but Kubrick was more concerned about the moral of the story which is,
Quoted from Anthony Burgess,
"What I was trying to say was that it is better to be bad of one’s own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing."
Why just remake it with every single detail in the novel.
But to take it a bit further. Why is it better to be bad of one's own free will?
To be honest, the message of the book is somewhat superficial and naive.
Neither Burgess nor Kubrik offer the "why is it better?" solution. They just sort of put this one thought out there without any perspective on the larger picture.
Sort of a unintelligent teenager thinking, "yeah, i should just do what i want!". Probably why this movie sparked a bunch of copycat crimes across England.
Completely overrated (and irresponsible) theme and movie in my opinion.
"What I was trying to say was that it is better to be bad of one's on free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing."
I wonder if Burgess really believed this or was just trying to use this idea to write an interesting novel. To take this idea to its next step would be to say that it's better to die naturally from a disease than use chemicals to try and cure yourself. Or it's better to have a natural occurring mental disease than to try to use procedures to cure it.
KingJoffrey: contrary to your contention above, the movie is actually all about "the larger picture." The reason why Burgess and the movie are saying that it is better to be bad of one's own free will than to be good through brainwashing has nothing to do with a desire to "just do what I want."
The theme about free will versus brainwashing is really about what makes us human and how we can lose that through careless engineering of people for a superficial fix on crime. Burgess was saying we shouldn't be naive about eliminating free will - because if we eliminate the ability of people to choose whether to be good or evil, we are losing what makes us human. In fact, we are losing morality as a whole - which can lead to the very evils we claim to be countering with our alteration of the nature of people.
When we use a "treatment" of the kind used on Alex, we turn a human being into "a clockwork orange," or something organic on the outside with mechanical parts on the inside - not a natural thing at all. That's what Burgess and Kubrick were getting at - not a hedonistic message that it's better to have everyone do as they wish.
My real name is Jeff
I agree. I don't care for this movie at all, and older family members tell me that the book is much better.
I particularly hate the imagery and artistic direction of this film. I remember the rapper Eminem being on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine, I believe, around 10-12 years ago, and he was made up as the main character from this movie. I actually thought that the costume was beneath him.
People are totally enthralled with the legend of Stanley Kubrick, but not everything he did was good. He was primarily a 1960s director and actually made very few decent films afterwords. In the 1980s and 1990s he made only two (The Shining was made in the 1970s and released in 1980. It is very much a 1970s film). The 1970s was somewhat of a downward trajectory for him.
That is one of the stupidest comments i have read here.
shareNo remake has ever improved on the original, except for Huston's The Maltese Falcon which, as Leslie Halliwell once wrote, "shows the difference between excellence and brilliance." I am told that the second version of The Thing is better, but I have never seen either.
I once saw a stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (I still have the ticket stub, and it was on the 13th. March 1990) in which Phil Daniels played Alex. I cannot say that it was an improvement on the film, except that it did at least explain what the title meant, and included the "proper" ending. In one respect, however, it was better. In the script, the four droogs were supposed to be disguised during the "surprise visit" as Disraeli, Shelley, King Henry VIII and Elvis. However, on stage, they wore masks of the four Marx Brothers. This was quite astonishingly macabre, and I'd love to have a D.V.D. of this.
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge
Cry, God for Harry, England, and St. George!
I doubt very much someone especially these years could make a movie that would be near to A Clockwork Orange in quality, not to mention improving the novel's movie representation.
This movie, including The Lord of the Rings, are maybe the best examples on how to make a movie based on a book.
I will never understand why people feel the need for movies to be made exactly like the book. I love both book and movie equally even though they vary. Kubrick's interpretation of Burgess' book is magnificent and McDowell is iconic as Alex DeLarge. This is one of the greatest films ever made.
You ain't got a license to kill bookies and today I ain't sellin any. So take your flunky and dangle
I will never understand why people feel the need for movies to be made exactly like the book.
if you had a chance to remake a clockwork orange, who would you cast? I would like to see Wolf Eyes do the soundtrack. Maybe Gaspar Noé to direct it. what do think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZVdR19E5mU
Well, I feel like we should look at the book and the movie as two separate entities. Film directors don't necessarily make film adaptations of movies to give fans of the book a movie version of it that follows the plot perfectly. A film director might read a book, like the plot and want to use it for his movie. With that, the director might choose to do things differently from the book, and in most cases the director has to because it's two different forms of media that attract different audiences. Of course one thing that was different was the exclusion of the material from the last chapter. But the last chapter wasn't in the American edition of the book until 1986. Another thing I noticed was different was the officers. Instead of Billyboy being one of the officers, it's Georgie (who died in the book) and Dim. But this change makes sense because Georgie didn't die (Which makes sense because he was less important in the film so his death wouldn't have been that significant of an event) and Billyboy wasn't all that important in the movie (nor was he really all that important in the book.) It just makes sense for the officers to be Dim and Georgie. Sometimes following the events of the book just to follow the events of the book is unnecessary and takes away from the film. But for the most part, I feel like Stanley Kubrick did the book justice.
shareI think the point of making Billyboy one of the officers is that everyone victimized by Alex in the beginning gets their retribution.
share