A no-frills filmmaker adapting a controversial book without lessening the impact of the source material was always going to be a lightning rod for controversy, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange more than lived up to its billing as an incendiary classic in the making.
The dystopian nightmare proved to be a sizeable success after landing five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, while a box office haul of almost $115 million on a shoestring budget of just $1.3 million ensured that the profit margins were through the roof, which made the widespread backlash a moot point in hindsight.
A small few of the headlines seized by A Clockwork Orange include being slapped with a dread X-rating, the film spending 12 years on the banned list of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, the production being named in a manslaughter case that saw it pulled from theaters, and a general ban in countless other nations around the world.
At the end of the day, though, Kubrick delivered another stone-cold classic that’s as unsettling and uncomfortable to watch as it is easy to lose yourself in the technical mastery of it all. Long deemed as a landmark moment for the relaxations in how the industry depicted onscreen violence, A Clockwork Orange stirred up a discussion and debate so wide-ranging it ultimately ended up changing cinema forever.
As a result, it endures forevermore as one of the all-time greats, with new and old viewers alike either revisiting or experiencing the haunting social parable for the first time, after FlixPatrol outed it as one of the most-watched movies on the iTunes global rankings over the weekend.