A Clockwork Orange
STANLEY KUBRICK WAS never one to go easy on his actors. But few had it so hard as Malcolm Mcdowell in A Clockwork Orange. He received a real on-stage beating, suffering a blood clot under one rib; he had his head dunked in filthy water for a terrifyingly long time; and, most notoriously, underwent ocular torture for the film’s harrowing aversion therapy scene. At one point during the shoot, Mcdowell recalled, a crewmember leaned over to him and said, “Hey Malcs, I think he’s trying to kill you.” It wasn’t, as far as the then 28-year-old actor could tell, meant as a joke.
To be fair to Kubrick, filming the pivotal ‘Ludovico Technique’ sequence, in which unrepentant delinquent Alex Delarge is tethered to a chair and forced to watch atrocities while under the influence of nausea-inducing drugs, was hardly life-threatening. However, it could conceivably have left his lead actor blind.
Before filming, the director showed Mcdowell pictures of eye-operation patients wearing lid-locks and asked if he’d be willing to give it a go. “Hell, no!” was Mcdowell’s reasonable response. But Kubrick reassured him he’d be in good, medicalprofessional hands, and sure enough, “a very nice doctor” from Moorfields Eye Hospital was there, appearing in the scene, to apply the lid-locks to Mcdowell’s anaesthetised glazzies and drop artificial tears into them to prevent them from drying out. But, as the actor found out, “You’re supposed to be lying flat on your back with these things, not watching movies!” He was strapped upright, in a straitjacket, to a chair in a Brunel University screening room, his eyes directed upwards and darting about. Before long, an eyeball met metal and he received a scratch on one of his corneas.
Recently, Mcdowell claimed that the lid-locks “kept sliding off my eyelids”. But associate producer Bernard Williams recalled Mcdowell freaking out and knocking one of the clips himself as he writhed and strained against his bonds: “Malcolm couldn’t take it any longer. He just panicked.” Either way, once the anaesthetic wore off the scratch proved so painful, Mcdowell says, “I had to have a shot of morphine.”
Though the horrorshow wasn’t over. In order to achieve a close-up of Alex’s bloodshot, wrenched-wide eyeball, he had to go through it all again at the very end of the shoot. “You can see I’ve aged, because I know what’s coming,” says Mcdowell, who was naturally reluctant to revisit the scene. “Eventually I had to say I was gonna do it, because what am I gonna do, say no?” Yet he recognises the suffering was well worth it. “I knew the film was going to be extraordinary in many ways,” he told The Guardian last year. Though controversial on release, A Clockwork Orange survives as a searing, disturbing study of crime, punishment and free will — as well as a work of pop art. One which could not be more perfectly represented than by the image of Mcdowell, eyes wide, screaming at a cinema screen.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD