A documentary reconstructs the bizarre premiere of the film at the Seminci in Valladolid in 1975, four years after it shook the world with its violence
There are a few movies that change the world and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is one of them. Anthony Burgess published the novel on which it is based in 1962 from a painful memory: the rape of his wife by four US Marines during a blackout in 1944, as a result of which she suffered a miscarriage. Alex, the protagonist of the book, possesses, according to the writer, the main human attributes: love of aggression, love of language and love of beauty. “But he is young and has not yet understood the true importance of freedom, which he enjoys so violently,” Burgess described. Alex and his ‘drugos’ (friends) were brought to life on screen thanks to Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker who had been given carte blanche by the extraordinary success of his previous film, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
A documentary produced by the TCM channel, which will be released on December 17 commemorating the film’s half century, reconstructs the eventful premiere of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in Spain in 1975, four years after it was seen in the rest of the world. Narrated by the film’s protagonist himself, Malcolm McDowell, ‘The Forbidden Orange’ shows how the author of ‘Espartaco’ defeated Franco’s censorship from an unexpected place: a deeply conservative provincial capital. The Seminci de Valladolid, a contest that had been born twenty years ago with religious contents as an extension of Holy Week, commemorates these days a projection that acquired a legendary character among the people of Valladolid and that forever marked the university students who stood in line throughout the night in front of the Carrión cinema supporting the charges of the police. “It was something that transcended the screen,” states the director of the documentary, Pedro González Bermúdez. “These people wanted to change things and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ influenced their lives forever.”
Not only the Franco regime had banned the hyperviolent moral fable set in the near future and starring an antihero who commits misdeeds with his friends before being ‘socialized’. Many countries gave it an X rating or outright vetoed its exhibition. Kubrick himself demanded that Warner withdraw the tape from British theaters after a series of juvenile crimes were associated with the film by the media and judges. The director received letters with death threats to his family and only after his death was the tape seen in the United Kingdom. «’A Clockwork Orange’ became anathema and suffered persecution. The film’s values were not being judged, but its supposed moral corruption, “says writer Vicente Molina Foix, who for twenty years translated Kubrick’s dialogues into Spanish and dealt with the director. “Kubrick did not want to feed something extra-cinematic and withdrew the film from circulation when it was talked about the most. It acquired the halo of a cursed film ».
Valladolid in 1975 was not only daily masses and walks through the Plaza Mayor. The 15,000 FASA-Renault workers were on strike and 30,000 politicized university students had managed to close the university for the first time since the Civil War. The Seminci was a window through which free cinema had slipped in that had not been seen anywhere else: Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Buñuel, Nouvelle Vague, cinematographies behind the Iron Curtain … In Spanish cinemas there was still no premiere ‘Senderos de gloria’, Kubrick’s anti-war epic, and his ‘Lolita’. The repercussion reached by ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was such that even Eloy de la Iglesia directed a kind of ‘copy’ in 1973,
‘A drop of blood to die loving’, with a script, among others, by José Luis Garci. Some renamed it ‘The Mechanical Mandarin’.
The spectators of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in Valladolid queued for a whole day.
So when Warner Bros called the then director of the Seminci Carmelo Romero to inform him that the General Directorate of Cinematography gave its approval for the premiere of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Valladolid experienced a revolution. Only a month before, a council of ministers chaired by Franco had authorized the exhibition of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. However, ten days before the festival, Stanley Kubrick disavowed the pass. Perhaps he thought that the Castilian city was not the right place for the premiere in Spain. Or that the projection machinery was not ideal, accustomed as he was to sending ‘spies’ to theaters to verify that the film reached the audience as he had conceived it. He could dismiss a room by the color of its walls. Warner Spain sent one of its executives, Ángel Corvi, to London to speak with the director in person. Romero wrote him a letter with a white lie, assuring him that the film was going to be screened at the university. Finally he accepted.
Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his droogs.
‘The forbidden orange’ collects the emotional testimonies of some of those university students, now venerable retirees, who felt they were entering modernity in that projection with camouflaged riot police in the stalls and a bomb warning that the director of the Seminci ignored. “The film spoke of a violence that we saw in the streets,” says one of them. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ would end up being the highest grossing film in 1975 behind ‘Jaws’ and was kept in theaters for a year without interruption. TCM’s documentary concludes with current kids reflecting on Kubrick’s tape after seeing it for the first time. Shocked by the violence, everyone concludes that something like this could not be filmed today.
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