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Álex in Valladolid, the unusual premiere of 'A Clockwork Orange' in Francoist Spain

2022-03-05T03:50:54.527Z


Stanley Kubrick's cult film was screened at Seminci despite the director's reluctance. A TCM documentary available on that channel and HBO Max details that adventure


In 1944, during a blackout in London in the midst of World War II, four deserting American soldiers broke into the home of Llewela Jones, a pregnant woman who lived alone in London because her husband was working as a British civil servant in Malaysia.

She was beaten and raped by all four before she disappeared;

the woman lost the baby.

This husband, Anthony Burgess, found himself on the way back with a Dantesque scenario and decided to cure his horror by writing a play about senseless ultraviolence.

Years before, he had heard an expression in an English

pub

that he loved (“

as queer as a clockwork orange

”) which translates to “as weird as a clockwork orange.”

"This title would be ideal for a story about the application of Pavlonian or mechanical principles to an organism that, like a fruit, has color and sweetness," he said.

A later version not far fetched recalls that "orang" is "person" in the Malay language, and perhaps the intention of Burgess, who lived in Malaysia for years, was also to play with

The Mechanical Man

, someone programmed as Alex (Alex by Alexander the Great, he is even called Alexander the Great at some point in the book) the protagonist of

A Clockwork Orange

, Burgess's most famous novel.

The surname DeLarge was added in the film in reference to the King of Macedonia.

That the author did not tell the whole truth about the inspiration of the title would not be a surprise.

In the biography that Andrew Bisbell wrote about him, he insists on his power of storytelling no matter what the circumstances.

In 1959 he claimed to have a brain tumor and, in order to leave his wife money for when he died, he wrote five books in three years.

His biographer says that it was a publicity stunt;

Burgess died in 1993. Stories like that caused Bisbell to warn about the possible falsity of the rape of Llewela Jones, whose story would have been invented in this way by Burgess to sign a good publishing contract.

As Andrés Petrucelli points out in

TN magazine

, Burgess spoke of the traumatic event as the cause of not being able to have children, but there is private correspondence in which he is excited about having them.

Who is he lying to?

A clockwork orange

was a scandalous phenomenon that Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation made it grow exponentially.

The film was banned in many countries and withdrawn by Kubrick himself from the UK until his death in 1999 due to death threats against the director and his family.

It premiered in 1971. It was banned in Spain.

All of Spain?

No!

In 1975 a conservative Spanish city managed to premiere it... with the permission of the dictatorship and in spite of Stanley Kubrick.

Queues at the box office of the Pucelano Carrión cinema in April 1975 to see 'A Clockwork Orange'. Archive of the Seminci

Valladolid screened

A Clockwork Orange

for the first time at its Seminci .

The story of how and why is revealed in a TCM documentary,

The Forbidden Orange

, directed by Pedro García Bermúdez and which was premiered, naturally, at Seminci in October 2021. Available on that channel dedicated to classic cinema and now released by HBO Max, is narrated by Malcolm McDowell, the actor who gives life to the iconic Alex DeLarge in the film (“I know that in my obituaries they will only talk about the damn

Clockwork Orange

", said).

“It arrived preceded by an aroma of scandal: it was said that it was immoral, corrupt, stark, promoted violence….” Vicente Molina Foix recalls on the tape at the same time that the full-page headlines in the English press are passed: “A new depraved world”, “A dangerous mystery of human behavior”.

Valladolid, says Fernando Herrero, director of the Seminci between 1978 and 1983, was a city in which the rural owners ruled and, adds Dolores Ortega, a spectator of that festival, of marked social differences: "The neighborhoods were in dire conditions, and very few bourgeois families lived in the center, a bunch of people”.

"A city in which the bourgeoisie has many links with the rural world," says the writer Gustavo Martín Garzo, "and was rather conservative and very attached to Catholicism."

A clockwork orange

, after four years of global scandal since its premiere.

There were two ways in Spain to see banned films: clandestine sessions or traveling abroad.

That is why Molina Foix says one of the most beautiful phrases in the documentary: “For me, Paris, more than the Eiffel Tower or the Champs-Elysées, was the discovery of cinemas.

Of the films by Buñuel and other directors who had not come to Spain”.

This is how things were when Warner Bros contacted Carmelo Romero, director of Seminci in 1975, to tell him that they were interested in screening

A Clockwork Orange

and that they had the approval of the Directorate General for Cinema.

In February of that year, the BOE had announced that the censorship control system was being suspended.

The premiere of Kubrick's film was, in the words of Martín Garzo, a way for the regime to show that they could make risky bets, an opening propaganda maneuver.

But it wasn't the first time.

In Seminci itself, Jesus Christ Superstar

had been screened the previous year, with a huge uproar at the doors

.

"It was authorized on a Friday by a Council of Ministers chaired by Franco so that it could be held on Sunday," recalls Romero.

propaganda maneuver

Neither the labor strikes, nor the political agitation that took place in the streets a few months after Franco's death, nor the regime's censorship were going to prevent

A Clockwork Orange

from premiering at Seminci.

The delicate rope broke on the most unexpected side a week before the festival started.

Stanley Kubrick did not want Valladolid to be the setting for the Spanish premiere of

A Clockwork Orange

.

“Don't bother me!” exclaims Romero.

The reason?

Jesús Ojeda, a member of the festival's management, believes that Kubrick was frightened by the name that Seminci had been forced to use since its founding by the dictatorship: International Week of Religious Cinema and Human Values.

Another idea is that he had received the information that the festival's projection machines did not guarantee him the best debut of the work.

"He was an obsessive perfectionist," says Romero.

Molina Foix, who translated

The Shining

and worked for weeks with Kubrick, got an interview with the genius.

"Can you tell me what his favorite movies are?"

"The good ones".

Malcom McDowell, in a still from 'A Clockwork Orange'.

The Seminci convinced Kubrick, through the intermediary of Warner, to screen the film exclusively at the University of Valladolid.

It was not like that: it was also screened in two cinemas in the city so that more people could see it.

Tiró, the director Carmelo Romero, of Spanish picaresque: "It is true that I told him that it would only be screened at the University, but it was not a hoax: the audience that packed the other screenings was exclusively university students."

“The instructions that I received when I read the script were that I had to play an immoral, rapist and murderer.

And he had to get the public to go for Alex.

Not his support, not necessarily, but his fascination, that they were hooked,” says McDowell.

In an interview published in 1972, Kubrick expressed what he meant by the film: “It speaks of attempts to limit man's choice between good and evil (…) Politically, the government uses the violence of the worst members of society for their own purposes: the alliance with the druggists who have become policemen and of course with Álex.

We must see the last scene in its satirical context.

“I was cured, all right!”

(“He really was healed”)

resembles Dr. Strangelove's cry:

"Mein Führer, I walk"

And the image of Alex as the spoon-fed child of this totally corrupt and totalitarian society offers the comic in the foreground and an excellent symbol.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-03-05

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