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The getting of wisdom, "a proper human being" made, not born. Industrial Britain, pace Flaherty, Imperial Coffee. "Between the making and the drinking," the salesman (Malcolm McDowell) propelled by ambition and stamina and Blake's sincerity. From stag parties with the elite to torture at a military base, a terrain scorched one moment and idyllic the next. "Try not to die like a dog." The Madonna in the isolated chapel, Dr. Moreau at the experimental clinic, the breezy groupie (Helen Mirren) who turns out to be the daughter of the copper tycoon (Ralph Richardson). Alan Price keeps a choric commentary: "Everyone is going through changes, no one knows what's going on / And everybody changes places, but the world still carries on." A thorough skewer of British institutions, top to bottom and all the way around, nothing less for Lindsay Anderson's abounding picaresque opus. Totems and avatars, blackout edits across a sprawling canvas. The capitalistic mandarin whose time is worth "500 pounds per minute" allows fifteen seconds of silence for the professor who just jumped out of his window, Richardson was first seen as a gnomic lodger offering a gold-thread suit. (The oneiric multiple casting also finds Rachel Roberts as horny supervisor and regal hostess and suicidal hausfrau, and Arthur Lowe as factory boss and crooked mayor and African despot.) Anderson's heterogeneity of style is swiftly announced, a shaft at Viva Zapata! and a gloss on Sympathy for the Devil before the protagonist is introduced, quite the grab bag. "Technology is the survival kit of the human race," proclaims the mad scientist, echoed later by London graffiti ("Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals"). Honey for genocide, slap of illumination, a journey that starts in silence and ends in music. The close study on A Clockwork Orange is lavishly repaid in Barry Lyndon. Cinematography by Miroslav Ondricek. With Graham Crowder, Mona Washbourne, Dandy Nichols, Peter Jeffrey, Philip Stone, Mary MacLeod, Wallas Eaton, Bill Owen, Warren Clarke, Michael Medwin, Christine Noonan, Vivian Pickles, Anthony Nicholls, Brian Glover, and Jeremy Bulloch.
--- Fernando F. Croce |