A Clockwork Orange and UK teens, 1973

'A Clockwork Orange' and UK teens, 1973

Nowadays films are likely to spawn their own niche in Cosplay culture, leading to the appearance of young people in elaborate costumes at comic book and geek culture conventions. It's all wholesome, good clean fun.

According to Chris Brown in his 2009 memoir of being a soccer thug, Booted and Suited,  the release of the film A Clockwork Orange in the UK during the early 70s led to quite a different outcome. 

Here's his insightful take on the tremendous impact the film had on the culture of the young, white, working-class fans of the Bristol Rovers football club, as they journeyed to a match at Chesterfield in April 1973:   

There had been a bizarre and sinister change in fashion and youth culture over the past 12 months. It was blamed on a joint attack on British sensibilities by a freakish American rock singer named Vincent Furnier, better known as Alice Cooper, and the eventual release of the classic, but very controversial Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. Young men up and down the country had taken to wearing make-up. It was not worn in the same way that women wear make-up – to make themselves more alluring – but in such a way as to make us appear more menacing, more evil. Unfortunately this wasn’t just a fashion or a mere fad, it was something altogether more malevolent.

Whereas Alice Cooper and his snake and whips were purely theatrical, the menace of A Clockwork Orange was very real indeed. After much deliberation by the British Board of Film Censors the uncut film was eventually released in December 1971 with an X-certificate. Many provincial councils, however, refused to allow the British-made film to be shown in their local cinemas due to the graphic scenes of rape and violence – one scene shows a gang rape set to music by Rossini and another a vicious mugging set to the tune of ‘Singing in the Rain’. Eventually Kubrick himself pulled it from British cinemas in 1973 after the film had been linked to a number of horrific incidents, including the rape of a 17-year-old Dutch student in Lancashire by a gang chanting the words to Gene Kelly’s jolly show tune. A judge in another case spoke of the ‘horrible trend inspired by this wretched film’. The film remained banned in Britain for the next 27 years. However, what was really disturbing about the film was that it was supposedly portraying Britain in the future, when casual violence and gang warfare were a way of life for Britain’s youth. It was a true tale of life in Britain all right – but 1970s style.

In the manner of Malcolm McDowell’s gang leader, Alex, and his assorted Droogs, disorder reigned as innocent citizens were set upon in random and unprovoked attacks of ‘ultra violence’. Tramps in particular (one is set upon in the film) came in for unwarranted attention as delinquents the length and breadth of the country mimicked both Alex’s actions and his vocabulary with his boasts of going to ‘tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in blood’. Ludwig van Beethoven topped the album charts as thousands of adolescents clamoured to buy the soundtrack of the most controversial British film ever made. As the awesome effect of Clockworkmania raged, the strains of ‘Singing in the Rain’ echoed out from every football terrace in the country as a prelude to violence. I rushed to buy Anthony Burgess’s original 1962 book but its bleak vision of Britain in the supposedly not too distant future and its use of the bizarre Nadsat teenage vocabulary made it demanding and laborious.

Myself and a number of other young smoothies sported false eyelashes and heavy black mascara as we arrived in Chesterfield. Our minds were as warped and twisted as the town’s famous spire – and with our white overalls, white strides and single, solitary black leather-gloved hands we all thought we looked the epitome of terrace fashion culture. Brian Willis and the rest of the Tramps thought we looked total prats.

Lest anyone doubt that film - or by another name, Art - can impact human behavior and pop culture for good or for ill, they need look no further than what happened in the UK with the release of this one film. 

Somehow I don't think that Crazy, Rich Asians is going to have quite the same impact........