Malcolm McDowell NY Times Clockwork Interview 1/30/72

This interview first appeared in the New York Times Sunday paper on January 30, 1972, Part II, Page 13. This is the interview which led to the 2/13/72 Fred Hechinger article called "Does ACO speak the voice of fascism? Yes". As you can tell by the title it wasn't very favorable to ACO. To reprint it and go into it would not be very interesting. I have read the long-winded article and it is very boring and makes you tune out almost immediately. He takes Malcolm's quotes from the interview and everything else out of context for his inane diatribe. Stanley Kubrick wrote a very intelligent butt ripping reply to it . But what's important for us is that we now have the interview and Malcolm's reply to the article together. What follows is a rare bit of insight into a young Malcolm's mind.

Malcolm McDowell: The Liberals, they Hate 'Clockwork' by Tom Burke

     There is literally nothing about Malcolm McDowell that remotely suggests the dashing ogre Alex of A Clockwork Orange, or even the more earthly, recognizable paraplegic of Bryan Forbes's "Long Ago Tomorrow", none of the odd, sardonic, almost Gothic intensity he is capable of on camera. In this quiet hotel suite, he could be a forthright, articulate scholar just in on holiday from Oxford. But you note something erratic behind the alert eyes, which are the color of West Point uniforms. And then, abruptly, from one of his brief contemplative silences, comes this: "People are basically bad, corrupt, I always sensed that. Man has not progressed one inch, morally, since the Greeks. Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers and it shows them realities, shows 'em not tomorrow but now. Cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth?"
     Not that those are his opening remarks: there's a gentlemanly reserve about him at first. Though he has been famous for three years, since his striking impersonation of a young revolutionary in Lindsay Anderson's "if....", he's not accustomed to talking about himself.
     Of the dawn of "A Clockwork Orange", for instance, he simply says, "Uh, well, Kubrick rang me up one day two years ago; we'd never met. 'Can you come and see me?' he said. Out at Borehamwood, where he lives, we chatted, then he said, 'Got a book for you to read, by Anthony Burgess.' Asked him what it's about. 'You tell me after you read it,' he said. Read it three times, told him I thought it a modern classic. He said, 'Great, Malc, great.' Asked him to come to my house and talk, not realizing that Stanley never leaves home unless absolutely forced to, but he came, and again we chatted. Finally I said, 'Uh, Stanley, you're going to make a film of this? And you want me to play it?' He looked quite startled. 'Oh, yeah, Malc, that's what this is all about.'"
     Kubrick, who vastly admired "if....", hadn't considered anyone else for the role, but by the time shooting began nine months later, Malcolm had finished "Long Ago Tomorrow" and had studied the Clockwork script relentlessly, "and still I had no idea of how Stanley would handle this story, and no idea of how to play my part. I couldn't draw on experiences of my own, and with Alex, you're not so much playing a character as this --force. "And much of the film was never in the scenario. When we got to the scene where the writer is beaten and his wife raped, Stanley suddenly called, Hey, Malcolm, can you sing and dance?' I can't do either. I said, 'Oh, yes, Stanley, sure,' and just sort of started dancing, then kicking the writer. And I began 'Singin' in the Rain,' as it's the only song I know. Within three hours, Stanley had bought the rights to it. You see, this was the kind of thing I knew I must look for: Alex larking about happily while doing this terrible violence. It's the kind of contradiction, the extra dimension that I had to find for him."

***     But hadn't Kubrick spent his days, weeks, discussing Alex with him? Malcolm considers, exhaling vigorously. "It's not his way. We spoke about the costumes, my make-up, the enormous technical problems, but I think Stanley does not want to have to give acting lessons. He expects you to get on with it. Loves to rehearse, he does, from 7:30 A.M., all day, full tilt, and he wants the performance when you arrive the morning of the first rehearsal. His genius, truly, is his ability to somehow create the atmosphere that you as an actor need to do the performance he wants. Without words. Quite remarkable. That's the golden key of the door, y'know, for an actor-director relationship: you're somehow on the same wave length and talk becomes unnecessary."
     If Kubrick is not exactly given to logorrhea, neither, according to Malcolm, is Bryan Forbes, or Joseph Losey, who, in 1970, guided him and Robert Shaw through the markedly ignored "Figures in a Landscape." Possibly all his directors have sensed that they'd best leave him to his own instincts. "The cripple in 'Long Ago Tomorrow', now he was quite easy, he's a bit of a lad, y'know, and one has been a bit of a lad, and it's not hard to imagine his bitterness when he's paralyzed.
     "But I was naive. I thought I'd learned everything about acting from "if...." and I hadn't scratched the bloody surface. One thing I discovered: it's no good talking about a character, what he had for breakfast an' like that, who the hell cares? I want to know what the scene's about, and then concentrate every emotion, like a ray gun, on that and make the audience believe that, if you aren't totally concentrated your eyes go dead, and on the screen it shows, even in the briefest shot. Remember in 'A Clockwork Orange' when I come home after prison and my parents have replaced me with this lodger? And I say, 'There's a strange fellow sitting on the sofa, munchy-wunching lomticks of toast.' Well, the scene went fine, but somehow I had a hell of a time coming through the door naturally at the start of it. Can you remember me entering? No? Good, terrific! If you could, I'd have done it all wrong...
     "An' it's all bloody 'ard work, it is," he adds, grinning for the first time, demonically. Room service has not yet accomplished delivery of the coffee he's ordered; jumping up, he dials and deals wryly but politely with them, then glances with a gargoyle smile at the typed biography of him that the film's press agent has left in the suite. "Only one page, eh? For 'Long Ago Tomorrow' it was two."
     It's stated on the sheet that he was born in June, 1943, in Leeds, which is in England's gray industrial north. Asked about that, he frowns, and the dark sky of his eyes looks threatening. Again his enunciation is precise. "In a sense, the British class system is good, I agree with it, because if you're born working-class as I was, you've got something to fight against. That's why New York is such an incredible city, you've got to fight it! If I'd not been aware of class early on, I'd still be working placidly at the coffee factory."
     Which is what he did do for a time: instead of attending a university, he attended customers in his father's public house in Liverpool, before matriculating to a salesman's job with the Yorkshire office of an American coffee firm. "Yorkshire is England's largest county, and I had to drive the whole of it, selling coffee from restaurant to prison to mental home to nuclear power station, and it was horrendous."
***     Moreover, his girlfriend vanished mysteriously every Friday night, "and Friday was payday, y'know, so I thought she was seein' another man." Under pressure, the girl confessed that she'd been taking acting classes, and was afraid Malcolm would laugh at her. "I told her, 'Great, marvelous, I'd like to go along with you some Friday. I knew nothing then, had read nothing: James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, these were just names to me. But I'd done leads in Shakespeare in school, acting had seemed the easiest thing in the world, I'd always intended to try it some day if all else failed."
     His girl's teacher was "a dear old lady of 82 who loved to tell stories about her silent picture days. I found her totally absorbing. She was a parent-figure -- that's getting pretty Jungian -- a light to follow, she convinced me thatt acting was not a degrading profession. I knew I'd been muckin' about for years waiting for this." After months of private study ("I had to get rid of that Yorkshire accent"), he joined a repertory theater on the Isle of Wight ("I'd learned my entire part in the first play before I arrived. I actually did not know there would be rehearsals"), and a year and three auditions later was accepted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. "And spent 18 months carrying a spear. I loathed it, with venom. The world's great ensemble troupe!? It's an arse-creeping hierarchy without the slightest interest in what talent there may be among the lesser company members. Herded us 12 to a dressing room like cattle. I never even met Peter Hall, the director then, until the day I left." He worked for a while as a messenger, began getting television roles, and Lindsay Anderson, who'd seen him on the tube, called about a picture he was planning, set in a British public school. When "if...." opened, it looked as though Malcolm would never again carry a message, or a spear.
     "Of course I had luck," he says of this rapid ascent, frowning. "My mother and dad -- they're retired now, got a little house and garden outside London -- and my two sisters, they're proud, my mother likes to show the awards I won. But I'm not going to do the false modesty bit with you. I'm not really a modest person. I've not said this before, it sounds conceited and presumptuous, but I do consider myself an artist. I know exactly what I will do: direct a film, within five years, when I've accumulated enough knowledge. It's the director who's the real film artist. You didn't think I wanted to be just an actor, did you? Never! I think that if you're semi-coherent, semi-intelligent...you could not remain long an actor, unless you're content to let yourself become a monster. That's the only way to survive it."
     He's speaking quietly again, subdued by the melancholy that frequents hotel rooms at dusk. A dark, beautiful girl enters, they smile, introductions are made, she murmurs politely and retires to the bedroom. She is Margot Bennett, once an actress, once the wife of Keir Dullea, who has been with Malcolm two years; all further questions about her he cheerfully deflects by pouring Scotch and lighting lamps. Life should be simple, he asserts: he lives in a studio in Kensington and isn't moving soon. "I have only one friend whom I lean on heavily. When I can't see the wood for the trees, I've got to go to him. He's a director: Lindsay Anderson."
     Malcolm's next movie, "O Lucky Man!", is based on his own idea and Anderson will direct. "I'd play the tiniest part for Lindsay," he adds, and in the same breath, "Come on, let's go out for a drink." Downstairs in the bar he orders a small white wine and indicates that he has not been over-awed by the reporters who've interviewed him. "They ask, 'What is Clockwork Orange about?' and 'Are you in favor of violence?' Jesus! I hate violence, but it's a fact, it's the human condition. Why would movie violence necessarily make people who see it more violent? Movies don't alter the world, they pose questions and warnings. The Clockwork violence is stylized, surreal, Kubrick uses it only to warn us." Of something that's already past remedy? "No, I see a hope in this vision of Stanley's. People are discussing Clockwork endlessly, and maybe, maybe that will lead to something actually being done about street crime. The English are violent, too, no question; but you've got 88 rapes a day in New York alone. Okay, but you are getting together about your police, with the Knapp Commission. Enough of that sort of thing, and you'll see improvements. Why, this is a country where things like the Pentagon Papers can get published! That's a mark of hope."
***     "Now, another way that Clockwork is optimistic: Alex is finally restored, after the therapy, to his old, violent self, they return his mind to him, and though it's done for political gain, it is done. Good! Tampering with men's brains is worse than murder; I'd rather a man be a man, even if he's a monster. If they're allowed to start screwing around with the insides of your head, Christ, where's it to stop? Alex is free at the end, that's hopeful: maybe, in his freedom, he'll be able to find someone to help him without mucking his brain. His 'Ludwig Van' can speak to him, perhaps others will."