Clockwork Orange, A (Blu-ray) (1971)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Audio Commentary Featurette-Still Tickin': The Return Of Clockwork Orange Featurette-Great Bolshy Yarblockos!: Making A Clockwork Orange Featurette-O Lucky Malcolm! Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1971
Running Time	136:36
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Stanley Kubrick
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Malcolm McDowell Patrick Magee Adrienne Corri Miriam Karlin
Case	?
RPI	?	Music	Wendy Carlos

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 English Linear PCM 48/16 5.1 French Dolby Digital 5.1 German Dolby Digital 5.1 Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.66:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	1080p
Original Aspect Ratio	Varies	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired French German German for the Hearing Impaired Italian Italian for the Hearing Impaired Spanish Dutch Japanese Chinese Korean Spanish Portuguese Danish Finnish Norwegian Portuguese Swedish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Burgess' novel was written after an assault upon his wife by (as the IMDB trivia entry has it) four American GIs, and is considered by many a highbrow literary type to be the ultimate statement of where our justice system goes wrong, in that it is concerned more with revenge than actual justice. For reasons that are probably still best known to them, the American publishers omitted the final chapter of Burgess' novel, and thus Stanley Kubrick made an adaptation where the central character is simply left to go rape and pillage as at the start of the story. The final chapter of the novel as Burgess wrote it features the character meeting with one of his former friends, who now has a job and family, before deciding of his own accord to become a law-abiding common citizen. The result of this glaring omission is somewhat like a Batman in which Bruce's parents have merely died of old age, or an X-Men where the Mutants are simply a collective of militants with dark skin. Put very baldly, Kubrick's film misses the entire point. That, combined with his notorious tendency to shoot take after take until the actors are merely reciting their lines in order to get through the ordeal, results in an adaptation where only Malcolm McDowell's powerhouse performance as the central character justifies the lavish praise it has been in receipt of since.

    Alex (McDowell) is a fairly typical and yet atypical teenager in a non-specific future where order has given way to chaos. In this future that was conceived when novels were still written using typewriters, the recreational activity of choice among youths is to get hopped up on drug-laced milk and go beat up anyone who looks weak enough to not fight off four teens, or each other. Alex and his gang are in something of a power dispute, which comes to a head as they knock him cold and leave him outside of the house of a woman he got carried away with and murdered. As Alex struggles in the midst of an overcrowded prison system, he learns of an experimental "technique" that supposedly corrects the behaviour of the violent and anti-social. Volunteering in the hopes of getting out of prison a little faster, Alex is subjected to such an extreme form of aversion therapy that one is certain it violates at least one Human rights clause. As the press parades the "reformed" Alex around to assure the public of this therapy's success, we learn it has one not-so-useful side effect in that it leaves Alex more or less completely unable to defend himself when people decide they wish to assault him.

    Truth be told, the story's relevance has diminished somewhat since it was first printed. In the intervening forty-plus years, some major revelations concerning the nature of what certain people call aberrant or anti-social behaviour have come to the fore. The same kinds of people who would have invented Ludovico's technique have become embroiled in a new civil rights struggle, and on the very wrong side at that. Ironically, these people on the wrong side are being bashed over the head constantly with the central point of Burgess' novel. You know, the one that Kubrick's film completely misses: that it is better to be evil by choice than be obedient because all other choices have effectively been removed.

    That all said, A Clockwork Orange is a film that will mean many different things to many different people. Although there are plenty of films now with more violence or more disturbing content, the controversy and general regard in which it is held makes it a very interesting watch from a technical and historical curiosity point of view. Whatever your reasons for watching, you will not easily forget A Clockwork Orange once you have seen it.

Video

    A Clockwork Orange is presented in the aspect ratio of 1.66:1 within a 1920 by 1080 progressive window. For those who have not seen this arrangement before, it means the unused portions of the frame that one normally sees at the top and bottom of 2.35:1 transfers are to the left and right of the active picture. This is not a mistake, but rather the optimal way to present 1.66:1 films. The transfer remains in this aspect ratio throughout the running time, rather than changing occasionally as was apparently intended by the director.

    The sharpness, it must be said, is somewhat variable, but tending towards the soft. Making matters worse is that different areas of the frame display wildly different levels of detail. A good example of this would be Alex's friendly chat with Mr. Deltoid, where the middle of the frame seems dramatically sharper than the edges in one shot, or vice versa in another shot. Serious problems also arise whenever the subject is distant from the camera. Close-ups are quite detailed and sharp, but any shot with more than two actors in it has issues.

    The shadow detail is rather limited, with a dramatic fall-off between brighter and darker parts of the picture in scenes with substantial amounts of dark. However, such scenes are few and far between, so this is not much of an issue. Low-level noise is not present in the transfer.

    The colours of the transfer are generally a bit muted and lifeless. Again, this is more an issue with the source material and how it was shot than a problem with the transfer. Flesh tones are quite accurate and well-delineated.

    Compression artefacts were occasionally noted, usually in the form of minor posterisation of background colours. Film grain is a minor problem, but well within acceptable limits given the age of the film. No film-to-video artefacts were noted. Film artefacts in the form of black and white specks on the picture were occasionally noted, especially during the credits. One wild variation in the brightness level occurred for a couple of seconds at 43:37.

    Subtitles are offered in English and English for the Hearing Impaired. The latter are quite accurate to the spoken dialogue.

    So is this disc worth the cost of upgrading? That depends on where you are coming from. If you own the 16:9 Enhanced DVD that was released at the same time as this BD, then the video will not offer much bang for your buck. If you only own one of the 4:3 DVDs that were released a few years back now, then this transfer offers a substantial but not dramatic improvement. If you do not own this film at all on home video and you have a 1080P television, then this disc offers the best presently-available introduction, shy of going to a cinema like the one in Pitt Street, Sydney, and viddying it there.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Okay, so a (disappointing) 1080P video transfer is not enough reason to upgrade your old 4:3 DVD? How about the Ludwig van in uncompressed (very frontal) 5.1-channel?

    The first, and default, soundtrack on this disc is the original English dialogue in Dolby Digital 5.1, and I am sure anyone who has read a few of my reviews will know what is coming next. I immediately passed over this default soundtrack in favour of the second choice, the original English dialogue in 5.1 channels of glorious uncompressed Linear PCM. Rounding out the available options are Dolby Digital 5.1 dubs in French, German, Italian, Castilian Spanish, and Spanish. The eighth and final option on this disc is an audio commentary in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo.

    The dialogue is generally clear and easy to understand, within certain limits. The slang used throughout the film by its lead character and narrator takes a bit of adjusting to, and it makes one grateful that this was used a lot less in the film than is the case in the novel. Audio sync was not a problem.

    The music in the film consists of a score by Wendy Carlos. Also featured are a collection of preexisting classical numbers. The most well-known of these is obviously the Ninth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven's Ninth is a fairly militaristic-sounding piece, a fact clearly not lost on Kubrick as it is heard accompanying some of the footage of marching Nazis that Alex is forced to watch as part of his "therapy". Interestingly, the music that Mr. Alexander uses to try and impel Alex to commit suicide during the final act of the film is from a different part of the Ninth Symphony than the one we hear whilst Alex is in the Ludovico clinic. Whether this is a continuity error or the director trusts the audience to understand that it is likely that the sadists who run the place would have used more than one piece of music is up to the interpretation of the viewer.

    The surround channels are (barely) used to echo the music. When the music is in full swing, you might hear the occasional twang of strings from the rear speakers, but not much else. There is also little separation between the front channels. This is fundamentally a mono soundtrack, but the increased bitrate allows the elements to defy this channel congestion. For all the limitations imposed by the age of the film, the encoding on this disc does much to preserve the space between dialogue, what few sound effects there are, and the near-omnipresent music.

    The subwoofer kicks in to support the lower frequencies of the music. It calls attention to itself because of the episodic nature and pattern of its use, but in a good way.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    A small number of extras are present. Their quality is inverse to their number, happily.

Menu

Audio Commentary - Malcolm McDowell (Actor), Nick Redman (Film Historian)

    By a long road the most interesting extra on the disc. This Dolby Digital 2.0 audio commentary is basically all McDowell, with prods and additions from Redman. McDowell talks almost constantly, having no end of information to share. This commentary really is worth a few stars on its own.

Featurette - Still Tickin': The Return Of Clockwork Orange

Featurette - Great Bolshy Yarblockos!: Making A Clockwork Orange

    Presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio within a 4:3 frame, in standard definition with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio. Twenty-eight minutes and seventeen seconds.

Featurette - O Lucky Malcolm!

    Presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, in high definition with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio. This eighty-six minute and ten second featurette is, as the title suggests, a look at the storied career of Malcolm McDowell.

Theatrical Trailer

    A single minute of disjointed frames from the film, mixed with words seemingly chosen at random, that may induce seizures. 1.78:1, in high definition, with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio.

    Allow me to echo a sentiment expressed on High-Def Digest: if this is the best that A Clockwork Orange's video can look in 1080P, then allow me to shed a tear.

    The audio transfer is much better than the video transfer, but still shows the film's age.

    The extras, though few in number, reflect some thought being put toward quality.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall