Married with young kids and thoroughly Americanized, Malcolm McDowell has
finally kicked his droog habit. Back in the UK after a ten year absence, the
original Clockwork rebel unwinds at home. The problem with Malcolm is no one wants him to be Malcolm. They're simply
not interested. They look for the volatile, demonic Alex, or the glamorous,
insubordinate Mick Travis or the grimacing debauched Caligula. The problem with
Malcolm is that his cinematic creations breathed, wriggled and reproduced a
self- perpetuating legend with a life of its own. It's currently suspended
somewhere between the Millwall terraces and Dennis Nielsen's kitchen, never
mind the fact that at the age of 44 Malcolm is more at home in a comfortably
well-off domicile off Palace Gardens Terrace. In short they want him to be bad
and, in short, he's not. Malcolm McDowell wears a pea-green Guernsey jumper and
reads The Independent. So much for type-casting.
Malcolm McDowell is, of course, amazingly ugly, blessed with the ideal
physiognomy to play deviant sociopaths. He doesn't even object to the fact that
he's regularly asked to portray them. The malleable features are pressed
together as if made of a child's Plasticine, the nose looks as if it has been
planted there by a Heavy Metal comic artist in mischievous mood. The hair is
gray and the skin is sallow with a papery quality like an old lampshade. But it
is his eyes that have been most useful to him professionally; a startling
swimming pool blue, they are strange and difficult to read. There is a certain
toughness about him. It starts with his voice which is brittle, accent less and
occasionally pleased with itself, and extends to the things he admits. "I
like to ask why," he says, "I don't like to be told what to do without
a reason, you know what I'm saying?"
This applies particularly to directors and he has been known to walk away if
he considers a project ill-conceived or silly. "I don't row with them, but
there's no point in working with somebody you know is going to produce a piece
of shit. I don't need to go through that and I'd prefer not to do it."
The McDowell paradox appears when you see him in his sunny Notting Hill Gate
house stroking the head of his chirruping three-year-old son and hear him
enthuse about his Californian home in the Ojai Valley where things grow just
like that. He and his wife, American actress Mary Steenburgen, won't travel so
much soon.
"My parents worked very hard and it was difficult for them to spend too
much time with me. That's why I now spend a lot of time with my children because
I think it's most important to do that."
They are not part of the dodgy Bel Air A-stream crowd."I cannot think of anything worse than being Michael Caine," offers
McDowell.
Malcolm McDowell made it, aged 25, as the leering public schoolboy Mick
Travis in Lindsay Anderson's extraordinary 1968 film if.... A surrealistic fantasy
which told of boys terrorizing then crucifying their school's pedagogues, it
gelled Anderson's (continuing) reputation as a recalcitrant, provocative
director willing to hold a very bright light up to British silliness. The film
also set a youthful Charles Sturridge on his way as an actor and, in a
youth-obsessed decade, focused Malcolm as an icon of rebellion.
He was proclaimed the Hottest New English Thing since Finney and O'Toole. He
turned down £20,000 to make a film with Omar Sharif. Japanese teenagers wrote
to him and told him exactly what was wrong with their society. Strange girls ran
up and kissed him in the Kings Road, not that Malcolm minded, being a true child
of the flower generation. He grew up in Liverpool in the Sixties.
"To have been around that music scene and just going into the Cavern,
you know? I'll never forget it. Seeing those four rough young men bashing out
this absolutely extraordinary sound, it was punkness without the makeup - raw
energy and raw talent. John Lennon was an amazing character."
He won't go back there. "I think I'll be shocked and disappointed because I know what's
happened. It's ripped apart. My Liverpool went l5 years ago."
Although he played truant as a child and his publican father sent him to a
South London school supposedly good at dealing with the unruly, McDowell denies
he was a rebel in the official sense of the word - or that Anderson was
anti-public school as he was accused at the time (the film was shot at
Cheltenham College which Anderson attended).
"It was extraordinary making that film because we were shooting the
sequences up on the roof with sten guns, then we'd read The Times and there
would be pictures of students with sten guns on the roof of the Sorbonne. It was
an amazing period. We felt we were pioneers."
The film forged a long term friendship with Anderson who subsequently
directed him in O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital.
"He's one of the most extraordinary people in this country. I love his
philosophy of life."
And what is that Malcolm?
"Well he's a sort of anarchist I suppose. He'd like to rip everything
down. He loathes fools."
Stanley Kubrick knew immediately that Malcolm had to play Alex, the violent
milk-drinking droog of Anthony Burgess' 1962 book A Clockwork Orange.
The film's stark immorality - set to synthesized Beethoven - had a disturbing
and unsettling effect on people both here and in America, primarily because
Alex's gang, with their bowler hats and imaginary teenage argot, provided a
ready-made cult for unimaginative thugs teetering on the brink of derangement.
Home Secretary Reginald Maudling demanded a private screening because he was
so worried; two men were beaten to death after a 21-year-old saw the film;
copycat teenage gangs roamed around housing estates; judges muttered about a
"horrible trend", and doctors reported the major reaction from cinema
audiences to be one of revulsion - "the same Feeling as seeing a car
crash".
Even now you can hire (rent - Alex) the videos Virgin Among The Living Dead ("A
Ghoulish Journey Through the Very Center of Death"), The Black Panther
("THE GRISLY STORY OF A DERANGED PSYCHOPATH") and Ninja Terminator,
but you can't hire A Clockwork Orange ("THE ADVENTURES OF A MAN WHOSE
PRINCIPAL INTERESTS ARE RAPE, ULTRA VIOLENCE AND BEETHOVEN").
Burgess, Malcolm and Kubrick, the latter accustomed to controversy having
just made Lolita, remained unrepentant to a man. Burgess, whose first wife had
died as the long-term result of a vicious attack by a GI gang, always defended
the violence and said the point of the book was to illuminate the importance of
human free will. Kubrick and his actor were under the impression that they'd
made a black comedy.
"At the time people were so shocked - I was giggling my head off through
it. When I play a part I don't think whether it's bad or good, it's just a
character, a creation, a three dimensional piece with all its subtleties. I
never thought of Alex as being bad. I thought he was the most fun-loving person
you could ever possibly meet and just because he happened to like rape and
pillage and the rest of it...well, he was having fun. The great thing about
Burgess' creation was that he made an immoral yobbo with the saving grace of
loving Beethoven."
Although he got on with Kubrick professionally, it was Burgess he warmed to
personally. "He's an amazing chap. I was in New York with him when the film
opened and we were doing all these TV shows together. He was so funny, I just
sat back and watched him. He was always talking about bowel movements... Once we
got attacked, there was a whole lobby really punching us as we made our way to
the lift. I said, 'God this is exciting Anthony isn't it?' He just muttered
about 'those bastards'."
The public's reaction to the film, which began with glasses of milk being
sent to the actor's table at restaurants, became such that Burgess felt
compelled to deliver a final word on the matter with his defensive book, The
Clockwork Testament.
"It was infuriating actually. It should never have been. I still stand
by what I said to the New York Times, and they've never spoken to me since, that
the film was fascist."
McDowell moved to America in 1976 after making O Lucky Man! He became, he
says, an American immediately and subsequently married Steenburgen, an Arkansas
girl, whom he met on the set of Time After Time, a pleasant little time-warp
romp in which he played H.G. Wells.
"In a weird way I needed those ten years to find out who I was. The
truth of the matter is that I had to grow up. I rather resented being the rebel
of the early Seventies. It was a bit boring. I don't feel I am part of this new
England because I'm foreign now. I have an American wife and American children.
I sometimes miss this country very badly but it's strange coming back. I've
missed a generation. There's a new crowd of young people, and I don't know any
of the directors and actors."
The actor is not, he is unafraid to point out, particularly impressed by
England at the moment. But then who is?
"Don't you think it's become a sort of paradise for conformists?
Everything is so boring, frightfully boring. The unemployed are just taking it
like the good old Brits they are. It's extraordinary."
He is typical of the kind of person who likes Americans because, like them,
he speaks his mind. He does not believe in bottling things up and going stark
staring crazy at a later date, the dichotomy of this typically ex-pat contention
being that Americans might say what's on their minds (usually so predictable and
endless you wish they wouldn't) and go mad. Paranoiac Egomania is the lifeblood
of the nation. They push and shove and say "gimme a sandwich and I wanna
soda and wassyerproblemlady". Please and thank-you have not crossed the
Atlantic yet. But Malcolm likes that. He's never been one for manners anyway, he
thinks they get in the way. Americans are, he says, like Northerners - blank and
to the point.
This successful abrogation of his stiff upper lipness is one of the reasons
why his marriage to Steenburgen works. "We've changed together rather than
apart; we communicate all the time about why we're upset, what's on our mind and
so on. This is how the English system works against you, you have to learn to
communicate. That's very important. If you can't do that the relationship won't
work."
He returned to London this year to join Anderson again for Philip Barry's
play Holiday (at the Old Vic until February 28). Steenburgen, a screen actress
who won an Oscar for her part in Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard, was keen to
do some theatre, so over they came.
The piece, a characteristic Barry comedy, does not exactly tax Malcolm's
skills, playing as he does the amenable Johnny Case character who shocks all and
sundry by mentioning that making money is not the means to an end. His stage
fiancé can't get to grips with this idea at all but her non-conformist,
dissatisfied sister, played by Steenburgen, falls in love with him.
Steenburgen is noticeably good, exuding wit and charisma and exciting
interest the minute she sweeps onto the stage with black dress, black curls and
wry smile. Malcolm, who looks older than he should do for Case's naive, fresh
character, is less remarkable. In fact slightly annoying; his Case is deviant,
sure enough, but with little of the requisite mystery he seems to need to make
his creations three-dimensional.
This quality might emerge, however, in his forthcoming film The
Caller,
written by Michael Sloane and directed by Arthur Seidelman.
From McDowell's description it seems that he had to tap once again his
ability to project psychological duplicity. "It's written like a Pinter
piece, a mind game, which we shot in sequence. It was a tremendous restraint
reigning oneself in because it's always fun to let go. The idea is that you're
never sure who the victim is. I got sent the script first which is funny, but in
some things you are known as a specialist I suppose."
The film took him back to Rome where he had not been for ten years because it
stank of Caligula. He had spent 11 months in that city, along with Gielgud and
O'Toole, to end up with a blood and lust epic which one of the kinder reviewers
called, "a violent curiosity of interest chiefly to sadomasochists".
Malcolm went on chat shows to warn people against seeing it and nowadays
dismisses its producer, Penthouse supremo Bob Guccione, in no uncertain terms.
Fortunately the ludicrous Roman sex flick did not stigmatize his career. Perhaps
because it made so much money, a word which is synonymous with credibility in
Hollywood.
The Clockwork Orange legend thrives. A London band is so named, and Malcolm
is a continual source of fascination. Alex Cox, for instance, sent him a film
script. Apparently, "People of 16 in the States know more about me than
people in their thirties. They're obsessed with Clockwork Orange."
This interest will doubtless be rejuvenated by the publication last month of
a new edition of Burgess' book, this time as a score for a musical with lyrics
and choreographed fights.
This is a paradoxical move from the 70-year-old author who does not consider
it to be his best book by any means, and there are plenty to choose from. Nor
does he want to be remembered for it. Nevertheless some wag is bound to get hip
and put the show on in the West End with Tim Roth as Alex and Age Of Chance
doing the music.
Likewise, the if.... legend is set to live again as a script is prepared for its
sequel and Anderson looks around for locations (Cheltenham is said not to be too
keen). Malcolm will play Travis again. "We'll all return to the school much
later in life when we've become bank managers and things..." Some may think
that this continual perception of violence as an art form is neither
entertaining not aesthetically acceptable. Like Burgess, Malcolm doesn't want to
be remembered for A Clockwork Orange or any other of his films for that matter.
"I'd like to be remembered as a really wonderful father." Yes. That's the problem with Malcolm. He might be rather nice.
© The Face March 1987
Archived 2001-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net