RateItAll: The Opinion Network

So notorious that Bart Simpson spoofed it for a Halloween episode one time with a costume that was a blatant rip of Malcolm McDowell...

A classic, cold and brutal film, with an icy vision of a near future, and a cynical view of human society.

Not easy to watch, and quite chillingly brutal, which the periodic insertions of mercilessly cruel comedy enhance, rather than relieve.

McDowell, as poor little Alex, gives a performance for the ages, and Kubrick is near the peak of his directoral powers.

This is one film I absolutely cannot and will not watch.  Even Channel 4 were under dispute as to whether to broadcast it on a network channel and that caused controversy in itself.  Whenever I think of a controversial film "Clockwork Orange" is right up there.  Awful film.

Again, I have to agree with Oscar. Malcolm McDowell is superb in this movie, especially when you consider that he was far older at the time he starred in it than the 15-year old Alex character was in the novel. Also very good, in my opinion, is Warren Clarke, a British character actor, as "Dim", one of the Droogs. I first saw this movie at the age of 13, when my father took me to see it at the Rt. 3 Drive-In in Rutherford, NJ, where it was appearing on a double-bill with "Barbarella". I was probably way too young to see it (I don't think my father had any idea what it was about; I'm sure he wouldn't have taken me to see it if he had). When "Barbarella" came on, and Jane Fonda started removing her intergalactic attire while floating in a gravity-free environment, it proved too much for my Dad and he sped out of the drive-in (with me craning my neck around wildly in a last-ditch effort to miss nothing that was occurring on-screen). I guess potential nudity was far more reprehensible, in his mind, than "ultra-violence" (my Dad is a great guy, but a product of his generation in some respects). I saw the movie again nearly 20 years later and was shocked that it was even more brutal than I remembered, although its brutality is of a chilly, stylized sort. Kubrick was an extremely gifted film-maker, and nowhere is his genius more evident than in this film. Brutal, cold, and brilliant, it well deserves its reputation as a classic, and in common with most classics, its message is probably more applicable now than it was when the film was first released in 1971.

Yet another film on this list accused of glamorizing violence, and it must have been quite shocking in it's time with it's amoral gang so diffident about thuggery and so forth... I notice that the greatly underrated Malcolm McDowell is on this list twice, for this and "Caligula." I always enjoyed performances by him, and it's too bad that he never really quite caught on as a star with American audiences and has generally been just a character actor since the 70's. An excellent actor in stuff like this film, "If" and Polanski's "Macbeth," who has unfortunately fallen into the hell of appearing in Sci-Fi channel dreck and what not.

Very much still in our collective subconscious - like today's news, which probably justified its effect at the time.