Clockwork Orange - Extra-textual information research

Clockwork Orange

Extra-textual information research

Reactions to A Clockwork Orange:

• Public

"Old people tremble to go out of doors and young girls are abused by bands of louts imitating your bizarre world." - Reverend John Lambert

"films like this tend to bring out the worst possible interests in people. It can only encourage people into violence." - Lord Soper, leader of the Methodist Church in Britain 

"The film seems to say that to take away a man's choice is not to redeem him but merely to restrain him. Otherwise we have a society of oranges, organic but working like clock-work. Such brainwashing organic and psychological, is a weapon, that to totalitarians in state, church or society might wish for an easier good even at the cost of individual rights and dignity. Redemption is a complicated thing and change must be motivated from within rather than imposed from without if moral values are to be upheld. But Kubrick is an artist rather than a moralist and he leaves it to us to figure what's wrong and why, what should be done and how it should be accomplished." - John E. Fitzgerald

• Government

"I believe that when A Clockwork Orange is released, it will lead to a clockwork cult which will magnify teenage violence." Maurice Edelman, Labour MP

• Critics

• Media

In the sea of moral panics around at that time, newspapers put it in the spotlight, blaming it for the increase in time since the films release.

Newspapers reported similar crimes, and directly related them to the film.

 "The first and most famous of these was the case involving a 16 year old boy called James Palmer who had beaten to death a tramp in Oxfordshire. As Edward Laxton reported in the Daily Mirror, in a convincing enough manner that the more reactionary reader might suspect that, A Clockwork Orange was terrible enough to influence even the most unassuming and hitherto quite innocent of young men, it was clear that the press were going to make the film even more controversial. "The terrifying violence of the film A Clockwork Orange fascinated a quiet boy from a Grammar School...And it turned him into a brutal murderer". Laxton continues, "The boy viciously battered to death a harmless old tramp as he acted out in real life a scene straight from the movie A Clockwork Orange" "

Source: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0012.html