it was even illegal to show clockwork in academic institutions or film clubs - this was no half-hearted ban at all. funnily enough it was the more effective than a bbfc ban!
also i have a interviews given by SK on clockwork post1971 and also a letter he wrote to the editor of the NY times regarding the film... will scan through them shortly and post any relevant information,
Some relevant articles dealing with the controversy (including the two you mention, lazybones):
The Clockwork Orange Controversy by Christian Bugge
"
Psychedelic Fascism" / The Hechinger Debacle (includes Kubrick's letter to the NYT).
Anthony Burgess on A Clockwork Orange, excerts from his autobiography.
On Kubrick's
Ban of ACO in the United Kingdom
Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, An interview with Michel Ciment
And finally, an excerpt from
UK Clock ticks again for Kubrick's Orange by James Howard, who summarises all the main contradictions:
By the end of 1973, though, A Clockwork Orange had disappeared from screens in Britain - unavailable for screening even by as eminent a body as the National Film Theatre who mounted a Kubrick retrospective in 1979 (although, it was claimed, it could be hired for screening in 'hospitals, prisons and borstals' !). A cinema manager in London's Kings Cross was later fined £ 1,000 by the Federation Against Copyright Theft for showing the film without the owner's permission, all of which added to the myth - which, typically with Kubrick, became 'fact' - that the movie had been either a) banned by the authorities, or b) withdrawn 'on the express orders of Stanley Kubrick', who then employed a team of 'spies' to ensure that the film remained unseen.
The truth is both less interesting and more disturbing: A Clockwork Orange - granted an 'X' certificate and passed uncut by the British Board of Film Censors - has never been 'banned' in Britain, other than by a handful of enlightened local authorities, led by the good folk of Accrington Borough Council. True enough, Kubrick was deeply disturbed by press reports claiming to link the film to acts of street violence but, as his brother-in-law Jan Harlan told me, this had more to do with the absurdity of the claims being made. 'It was very upsetting to him,' he says today. 'Stanley was a very sensitive person, and he would call me early in the morning and say 'look at this article, they must be out of their minds' He was deeply upset by all of this bad press he got in the UK almost all of his life - even after his death.'
Harlan - Executive Producer on all of Kubrick's remaining pictures after A Clockwork Orange - recalls how 'Stanley got such a hammering, and was accused of contributing to the falling apart of society in the broadest sense, and of course he personally was very hurt by this, because really the film should have an opposite effect. It's a deeply democratic film, and of course it is only a film. I dare say that most of those who criticised him hadn't even seen the film anyway.' Kubrick's widow Christiane told Sight and Sound magazine a few months after his death in 1999 that the director had been baffled by press reaction both to this film and, increasingly, to himself. 'It's only in England that there's this envious, strange joy in knocking him off his pedestal,' she said, adding 'even if he himself never climbed onto one. Because A Clockwork Orange played with the background of England, they blamed every crime in history on Stanley's film. That only happened here, nowhere else.'
Potentially more serious than the press reports, however, were the letters which began to reach Kubrick who, Harlan says, 'was singled out by various groups as a villain, and received personal threats.' Warners Advertising Executive Julian Senior worked closely with the director on the film and agrees that Kubrick was coming under increasing pressure from a number of directions. 'Nowadays they are called stalkers,' he says, 'but we started having guards in a mobile van on the driveway, and Hertfordshire police said some of the letters were becoming a little bizarre.' The joint decision was taken by studio and director that the film would no longer be available in the UK although, as Harlan makes clear, 'strictly, in legal terms, Stanley had no rights, but they agreed to do this, at great expense to themselves. It was much more than a matter of contracts, he and they had an excellent relationship, and Warner Brothers simply complied with his request.'
In the absence of any public response from Kubrick to the escalating press hysteria, Anthony Burgess had taken it upon himself to defend the movie as early as August 1973, just as Warners were about to take it out of circulation. Calling it 'a remarkable work, probably already a classic,' the writer said that he was 'increasingly exasperated by the assumption that it was my duty to defend the film against its attackers.. It is surely the duty of the maker of the film to speak out for his own work.'
Unaware of the true situation, as most people were, Joan Bakewell later (1988) wrote in the Sunday Times 'What are we to make of a film, passed by the censor, but taken out of circulation by its own maker ? The idea of a genius trying to recapture the work he has unleashed upon the world is one that might take Kubrick's own fancy.. yet once it is released, a film of the force of A Clockwork Orange does, for good or ill, enter the public imagination.' So the legend grew, with sporadic calls for the movie to be shown in cinemas again while Kubrick, as ever, remained silent.
