14/02/11

Is there any horse in A clockwork orange?

The answer is yes. Here it is:

A clockwork orange by S. Kubrick (1971)
can you see it down there, under the tree? I don't think so. (The "Durango 95" is in fact a Probe 16.)
Alex's "pee" is Philip Stone, who'll be Mr. Grady in The Shining


Here's the soundtrack of 2001: a space odissey


"Before filming the scene where he had to carry Patrick Magee's wheelchair up the stairs, professional bodybuilder David Prowse went up to Stanley Kubrick and asked if he could make sure that (due to the difficulty of the task) he got the scene in as few takes as possible, saying, "You're not exactly known as 'one-take-Kubrick', are you?" The rest of the crew was horrified at such a famous director being talked to like this, but Kubrick just laughed and promised to do his best. The scene was filmed in only three takes, an incredibly small amount for a perfectionist like Kubrick. Even so, Prowse was near exhaustion after the repeated takes of him carrying Frank and his wheelchair down the stairs." (IMDB)



Mr. David Prowse (right) nowadays is way more famous for a role in which he's totally unrecognizable:


Finally yes, Alex's family name "DeLarge" (from his nickname "The large") was made up while filming, hence on the newspapers we still find an Alexander Burgess (just like his daddy):



The soundtrack of this movie is amazing, and it was the last work by Mr. Walter Carlos as such; there's a Wendy Carlos in Kubrick's The Shining soundtrack, his/her new identity since 1972.
Two of the records I've listened to more than 1 million times; one from Walter, the other from Wendy.

I've read the Burgess' novel when I was like 15, and it was great because of the "nadsat" language, that in the original version is mostly Russian ("golova" is gulliver, the head, korosho becomes "horrorshow", and so on) and "school [Brits] boy speak"; in the Italian translation I can't even remember how they made it, anyway it was terrific, and I was kind of disappointed to find that most of the god-knows-how translated "English nadsat" speaking of the book had been re-translated with a different (perhaps, closer to the original) "Italian nadsat"... And that Alex's Voice Over, that was my favorite yet "humble narrator" in bookland, had a very small part in movieland. This is a rare, peculiar case in the history of cinema: where the power of images can't compete with that of words ...that aren't there. Of course, you'll have to show a "gulliver" in the movie, yet that will be a bloody head, while in the book it will always be a "gulliver", and THAT word only -by Alex, and his humble reader- will be THAT thing. 
My final judgement is: horrorshow.
I'd like to see A clockwork orange with a 16-year-old Alex, anyway.

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