Stanley Kubrick's Anthony Burgess adaptation — withdrawn from British distribution by Kubrick himself in 1973 and not re-released in Britain until after his death in 1999.
Alex DeLarge is a Britain-of-the-near-future teenager who leads a small gang of 'droogs' through a series of increasingly-severe violent assaults across London's industrial-suburban environment. The early-film violence (assaults on tramps, gang fights with rival droogs, a home-invasion sexual assault, a separate home-invasion that becomes manslaughter) establishes the working ultraviolence register the film operates within.
Alex is eventually betrayed by his droogs and captured by the police. He is sentenced to fourteen years in prison; after two years he volunteers for the experimental Ludovico-technique behavioural-conditioning programme that promises early release in exchange for cumulative behavioural restructuring. The Ludovico process conditions Alex against violent and sexual response by associating violent and sexual imagery with severe physical illness.
The film's second half engages Alex's post-Ludovico life. His original family rejects him; his former droogs (now policemen) physically assault him; his former victims encounter him and attempt vengeance. He eventually attempts suicide; the suicide attempt becomes politically inconvenient for the government that had administered the Ludovico programme. The film's final sequence — Alex's reconditioning being reversed and his fantasies of violent and sexual response being restored — is one of the most-discussed closing sequences in modern American cinema.
Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange is one of the most-significant English-language novels of its decade. The novel's specific dystopian-near-future framework, the invented Nadsat language (Russian-derived English slang the novel's narrator uses), and the broader free-will-versus-behavioural-conditioning philosophical material substantially shaped subsequent twentieth-century literary fiction.
Kubrick's adaptation engages the novel with substantial fidelity but makes one structural change: the British and American editions of Burgess's novel differed in their handling of the final chapter (the British edition included a redemptive epilogue suggesting Alex's eventual maturation away from violence; the American edition omitted the chapter). Kubrick's adaptation follows the American edition; the redemptive epilogue is absent. The structural choice substantially shapes the film's broader thematic register and has been debated extensively across subsequent decades.
A Clockwork Orange's specific visual character is one of the most-distinctive in Kubrick's filmography. The film's production design — the milk-bar, the Korova bar's mannequin furniture, the home-invasion sequences' specific furniture and clothing choices — establishes a near-future-dystopian visual register that subsequent science-fiction-influenced cinema has substantially extended. The cumulative visual material has, across the subsequent five decades, become one of the most-frequently-referenced visual templates in modern cinema.
The film's specific use of classical music — particularly Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which becomes Alex's specific aesthetic-and-violence-association material across the broader narrative — is one of the most-distinctive music-integration approaches in modern cinema. The cumulative classical-music-and-violence association has, across the subsequent five decades, substantially shaped how classical music operates in subsequent commercial cinema (the use of classical music for ironic violence-association has become a standard cinema convention).
Stanley Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from British distribution in 1973 following reports of copycat violence associated with the film's release. The withdrawal was permanent across Kubrick's remaining life; the film was not re-released in Britain until 2000, the year after Kubrick's death. The withdrawal was Kubrick's personal decision rather than a regulatory requirement; the British film-censorship framework had not formally banned the film, and the broader international distribution was not affected.
The withdrawal substantially shaped the broader British cultural reception of the film across the subsequent quarter-century. The film's continued absence from British distribution produced substantial cultural anticipation; the eventual 2000 re-release was substantially anticipated. The structural lesson is, in some sense, the specific authority that major directors can exercise over their own work when their working contracts include sufficient distribution control. Few other directors of Kubrick's generation exercised similar withdrawal authority across their broader filmographies.