"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) used to be my absolute, all-time favorite movie. I loved handsome, witty Alex, I loved the soundtrack, and I loved the Art Deco! I rushed out and bought the book after I saw it (it took me two tries to read it thanks to the Nadsat).

A few years ago I rewatched it and wasn't as enamored with it as I had been. I noticed that Kubrick purposely made Alex the most appealing character in the film. You can almost overlook that he's a rapist/thief/murderer because all his victims are nasty and pathetic.

F. Alexander? Snobbish, out-of-touch, and completely batty. PR Deltoid a borderline pedophile. Cool and hip Alex has a midday (consensual) orgy with two girls (who are the same age as him). In the book Your Humble Narrator is sympathetic to some degree, but his nastiness is never glossed over and the other characters are more down-to-earth. The two girls in the book were about 10 years old, and he drugged and raped them. The woman he killed in the book was old and fragile.

And about F. Alexander (who's name, come to think of it, is never mentioned in the movie - a pity, on a number of levels) - in the book he's an author and when Alex and his droogs attacked, he’d been writing a book entitled “A Clockwork Orange.” Alex even reads an excerpt:

"The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen."

The whole point of the movie/book in a nutshell, stated by the main character's namesake. That couldn't have made it in?

Also what's with the all white costumes? The eyelashes and bowler hats were cool, but the outfits they wore in the book were much cooler: "The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we caled it, fitting on the crotch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider. Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown's litso (face that is). Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. Then we wore waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders ( 'pletchoes' we called them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real shoulders like that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking."

Burgess was inspired by the stilyagi ( “style hunters” ), the counterculture of 1950s Russia. They were interested in trendy foreign clothing and Western music. Kubrick, on the other hand, got his crappy white costume idea from Malcolm McDowell’s cricket gear. He had him put his jockstrap on over his pants. How edgy.

The middle of the movie drags terribly. We have this whole, pointless, unfunny scene with the prison guard strip-searching him. Lots of goose-stepping. A few guys winking and making kissy-faces at him. Funny how Kubrick's golden boy can't be seen being attacked by overly-amorous cellmates, but he's fine showing clothes being pulled off of women and furniture shaped like nude women. It makes more sense that Alex is chosen for the experiment because he killed a cellmate, rather than because he just spoke up during roll-call. Things pick up during the Ludovico Technique - now I'll admit that was well-done, but watching a film of Nazi soldiers marching doesn't make much of an impact. The films he watched in the book were a little too graphic to make it to the screen though.

Also, Kubrick ordered all the unused footage to be destroyed because he's an asshole. He had to cut out a lot of cool stuff because the film turned out to be four hours long. That would have made a cool extra on a DVD.

I think Roger Ebert's review said it best: "Alex and his society are smart-nose pop-art abstractions. Kubrick hasn't created a future world in his imagination -- he's created a trendy decor."

Anthony Burgess wrote a screenplay for the film that Kubrick naturally passed over because his egotistical self figured he could write a better one. According to Dr Andrew Biswell, the author’s biographer and the director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Burgess’ screenplay is "very different from the novel… It’s actually quite a bit more violent than the novel. There’s a scene early on where Alex opens his bedroom cupboard and it’s full of drugs, hypodermic needles and a child’s skull." I normally hate remakes, but if someone wants to remake the movie with Burgess' script I'd go see it.

Just for the hell of it, a poll: