Based on the influential novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange delves into the mind of a youth gone bad to uncover difficult notions about social conditioning, free will and the nature of criminal actions. Tagged with the catchy and thematically correct line, "Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven", the resulting film is formally rigorous and intensely controversial.

Using the Burgess-invented language of "Nadsat", a mixture of English, Russian and then-contemporary slang, it's set in the not too distant future where all the trappings of our civilization are skewed to accommodate a parallel, though utterly foreign, locale. The name of the story itself is unusual, having been derived from two different possible sources. The first is the colloquial British expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange," referring to the impossibility of mechanical fruit and the second has to do with the rape of Burgess's wife when they lived in Malaya during World War II. She eventually miscarried and its possible the Malay word "Ourang" is punned to commemorate this tragic event with Alex's crimes.

With its unusual mother tongue, then, a cast of misfits and eccentrics and an otherworldly look redolent of pop art influences and urban decayed realities, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange ends up a scathing social satire dressed up in a sci-fi movie's clothes. For the last 30 years it has equally been the focal point of much speculation on the twinned powers of film art and exploitation if not also as one of the central texts for movie fans the world over. Featuring violent sequences along with a thoughtful consideration of these activities that's rendered through black comic inversion, a voice-over narration and a fairly distant attitude towards the action at hand, the picture indicts the violence so centrally part of its appeal and therein lies the rub.

Positing a natural condition towards destructive expression within humankind, Kubrick subjects his characters, and therefore his audience, to an unrelenting exploration of the point. One result is to convince us of the ways in which violence is the inevitable basis of our technologically advanced, though interpersonally troubled, society. Another is to help us consider this self-same violence as repugnant, though we are everywhere asked to take pleasure in seeing the commitment of destructive acts as a sensual activity. That is, much of the movie's appeal lay in its graphic treatment of beatings, rape and murder and even if this depiction is intended as an antidote, sex and violence sell movies tickets.

Centered on a gang of miscreants led by Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), the action begins with one of their nightly rampages while juiced on narcotics, alcohol and the thrill of enacting cruelty. Accompanied by his three "droogs", Alex and his thugs ravage the homeless, tangle with a rival gang, destroy property, steal cars and finally grumble among themselves over a share of stolen property and the power their exploits afford them. All the while Alex joyously seduces shop girls and listens to passages from his favorite music in passages from Ludwig van Beethoven's 9th symphony.

As the central intelligence of his small organization, Alex lords over his world with an impulsive selfishness and the rights by power that is uniquely his. A truant schoolboy, an experienced criminal and an expert manipulator of social circumstance, he's a latchkey child turned adolescent monster. But he's also deeply sensitive and appealing monster with a well-spoken and courteous, if amoral, free spirit.

When Alex and his droogs perform a home invasion, they end up sending a boomerang of sorts that echoes throughout the rest of the picture. Entering the home of a writer under the ruse of needing help after a car accident, they beat him brutally and rape his wife while Alex hums "Singin' in the Rain." Unfortunately, the crime creates dissension within the gang thereby forcing Alex to assert his dominance and beat up his droogs Dim (Warren Clarke), Georgie (James Marcus) and Pete (Michael Tarn) which sets in motion a second boomerang of bad acts for which he'll eventually pay a price.

A few nights later they invade a supposedly empty sanitarium intending to pillage and plunder. Talking his way past the estate's lone human lodger, Alex proceeds to bate his would-be victim until she fights back. In the struggle he accidentally kills her and learns, too late, how his droogs set him up as the fall guy with the police who are already on-scene to arrest him.

Sentenced to a long term of imprisonment and locked up without hope of escape, Alex learns of an experimental treatment called Ludovico that's intended to condition inmates out of their criminal impulses. Volunteering immediately, he is subject to a combination of drug treatments, aversion therapy and negative association between images of sex and violence and his beloved Ludwig van until his hard-wired violent impulses are rendered sterile. He's conditioned to feel sick when overtaken by sexual or violent thoughts and is finally able, through the intervention of state-sanctioned assistance, to curb his appetites and the prerogatives of free will.

He's released into the civilian world where Alex is a pariah to his friends and family. Known as a criminal deviant who's been recuperated for society with an experimental new treatment, he's harassed by some of his old victims. Then Dim and Georgie, who have since become brutish police officers, stumble onto their old thug leader and win the upper hand because he can no longer act against them without feeling sick.

Ridiculed, beaten and left for dead, he stumbles to the house of his former victim, the now widowed and paraplegic writer. At first unrecognized as the masked home invader, Alex is treated to a bath and warm meal until he absent-mindedly starts humming "Singin' in the Rain." The writer flies into a rage, drugs Alex and forces him to listen to the Ludovico trigger of Beethoven's 9th symphony.

Jumping out of an upstairs window, seemingly to his death, Alex awakens in a state-run hospital with a broken body and the broken associations of the Ludovico treatment. He's temporarily crippled and bedridden but his free will has been returned along with the public's sympathy that looks up his treatment as a violation of the human condition, never mind Alex's conviction as a rabble-rouser, murderer and rapist. The grand experiment of changing man's nature is considered the true crime with Alex being given his freedom to dominate once again with a raised fist and aimless erection.

Budgeted at $2.2 million A Clockwork Orange was an instant screen classic and commercial success. Controversial from the first and disliked or worshipped simultaneously, it divided audiences and sent ripples of influence into the circles of both its admirers and critics that range from TV shows like The Simpsons and to X-rated fare like A Clockwork Orgy.

Unable to ignore the strong images of violence enacted in the film, but especially of the rape scene choreographed to "Singin' in the Rain", feminist-oriented critics took the film to task for its presumed misogyny. In the same vein Kubrick was tarred and feathered for glorifying that which he was setting out to criticize in screen violence and yet A Clockwork Orange has become a primary reference for virtually every film of the last 30 years addressing the issues of youthful angst and rebellion.

Interestingly, Burgess's novel had been batted about as a film project long before Kubrick's involvement. Reportedly sold as a movie option for just a few hundred dollars and late renegotiated for a much higher pay out, early casting ideas for Alex and his droogs included a group of women or old-age pensioners and even a celebrity vehicle for The Rolling Stones.

Once cast with McDowell in the central role, however, the movie was shot on-location and in the Pinewood Studios of England from October 1970 through April 1971. Asked to sing a song to organize the rape scene, McDowell responded with "Singin' in the Rain" because it was the only song he knew by heart. With this simple act of memory he imbued the sequence with an ironic twist of lighthearted whimsy and terrible malice that spoke to the pleasant fantasy of Gene Kelly and the basest of human violation.

Of course the laws of karma were clearly in effect because McDowell sustained various injurious during the film's production. Among them was a scratched cornea during the Ludovico therapy scenes that left him temporarily blind, a cracked rib during the humiliation stage show punctuating the end of his re-conditioning and a near drowning experience when his breathing apparatus failed during his brush with Dim Georgie after his parole from prison. Altogether Malcolm McDowell gave himself quite fully to the role of Alex DeLarge and without exception it has been his signature role despite years of toil in both good and bad movies and TV.

Likewise A Clockwork Orange has become one of Kubrick's two main movie memories for many cinephiles and film historians who frequently place it alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey as high points in the Age of Aquarius. Through a certain lens, too, 1971 was a pretty good year in film.

Even though consumer-friendly formula films were largely unknown with the possible exception of directly exploitative staples like pornography, there was ample hope for artistic and commercial success without simplistic stencils to organize movie production. As a consequence, the measurable success of individual pictures was arrived at in various ways and was determined with a new sense of what mattered, sometimes through studio-led efforts that were bottom line centered, sometimes not. The overall result was eclecticism in production circumstances and projected results, all of it aimed at an increasingly diverse audience in ever expanding international markets during the generational shift of the maturing Baby Boom.

Major American movie awards took on an edgier feel and many more experimental, less traditional films held sway with both audiences and critics. The William Friedkin-directed The French Connection earned top billing at the Academy Awards competing with the likes of A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, The Last Picture Show and Nicholas and Alexandra. Meanwhile other such interesting and provocative titles as Dirty Harry, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Carnal Knowledge, Straw Dogs, Billy Jack, Shaft, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Play Misty for Me saw the light of strong box office earnings and wide release.

It was a time of formal and thematic innovation that was used to compete with the omnipresence of television and the rise of corporate conglomeration at the level of studio organization. What all of this meant for American movies was a gilded age for movie directors eclipsing virtually all other consideration of judgment and interpretation.

Championed by Andrew Sarris who popularized the ideas of French New Wave writers at the Cahiers du Cinema, the times were ripe with homage, new technologies, increased self-consciousness and reflexivity and a willingness in the hearts and minds of filmmakers to explore previously unknown subjects on-screen. Sometimes these explorations even took on the extraordinarily graphic exploration of sex, violence and socially taboo experiences like homosexuality and miscegenation.

Into this relative inhibition Kubrick released A Clockwork Orange with the full weight of his hard won independence as a cultural outsider. Born in America and raised with an abiding love for chess and photography, his earliest feature films were independently produced and distributed works that earned him an audience with the old Hollywood studios. What followed were a series of disappointing creative experiences, perhaps culminating in the ego-fraught production of Spartacus, after which Kubrick withdrew to Britain and rounded out the final decades of his life in relative mystery.

Centering much of his post-Lolita work on the depiction and criticism of violence, arbitrary social controls and the potential for destruction within virtually all cultural groups, especially those groups pushed to their extreme, Kubrick's later films have been admired as masterworks all. Managing to take on the experimental tone of the late '60s and '70s to unearth seminal ideas and images of exploration and discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, he followed up his bedrock "head" film with the scathing satire of A Clockwork Orange only to offer his take on the historical costume drama in Barry Lyndon in 1975. The Shining followed in 1980 with its study of madness, memory and the supernatural and then Full Metal Jacket revealed a parallel between the making of war and the creation of masculinity in 1987. Eyes Wide Shut was to have been a sort of swan song and meditation on desire, fantasy and devotion, but instead it turned into a half-hearted, posthumous capstone to a career that begs for a more comprehensive eulogy.

Thus we are returned to A Clockwork Orange with the still credible impact of its "Singin' in the Rain"-inspired rape scene and the now infamous Ludovico treatments. Clearly not a motion picture to suite every taste, this film is instead a persuasive meditation on both the problems and triumph of free will. On the one hand, free will motivated by destructive impulses like the compulsion to rape and murder is a terror to behold. On the other, humanity organized into individual psyches is a collection of creative and destructive impulses, the reduction of one necessarily reducing the other. Balancing this equation with the utmost ambivalence, Kubrick's film seems to side with the importance of free will despite all else for, in the end, there is little more than choice and action separating each of us from the wilds of nature.