The Stanley Kubrick movie Peter Sellers hated with a passion: “The biggest load of crap”
Peter Sellers delivered a performance of a lifetime in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, which followed a vital role in his earlier film, Lolita, but that didn’t mean that the actor was only going to say nice things about the legendary director.
Sellers might have been a comedy legend, but he was also quite the controversial figure, frequently clashing with his colleagues in a way that you can hardly deem professional. But when you’ve delivered a performance as magnificent as Sellers doing three different parts in Kubrick’s anti-war classic, you can get away with a lot. And that includes slagging off the director’s great meditation on the nature of violence, A Clockwork Orange.
The film was released in 1971 to mixed critical reception, because while the film was undeniably stylish and well-acted, some scenes just seemed too far for some audiences to stomach. When your main character is as criminal as Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge, audiences are naturally going to struggle. You’re typically meant to root for your main character to some degree, even when they do something bad, but here, we see Alex perform a rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ as he rapes a woman, and he even kills another with a giant penis sculpture.
He has no respect for others, even his so-called friends, or droogs, as he calls them, and sees himself as some violent cult leader, not exactly a Manson-esque figure but certainly the kind to recognise a power in himself to get his dim-witted droogs to do whatever he wants them to do. Evil seems to be an inherent part of Alex’s personality, which leads him to be subjected to a new kind of psychological treatment known as the Ludovico technique. It’s pretty brutal.
Forced to listen to his beloved Beethoven with his eyes clamped open as horrific videos play out in front of him, Alex’s whole demeanour soon changes, becoming a shell of his former, violent self. It’s a terrific satirical exploration of violence, morality, and the irony of a government’s attempts to crack down on the public’s disorder. What does being good really mean?
Sellers wasn’t convinced that Kubrick’s film sent a good message to audiences, telling the Chicago Sun-Times, “I hated A Clockwork Orange. I thought it was the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen for years. Amoral”. Going as far as calling the movie “amoral” shows just how off-putting Sellers found the film, and that he potentially missed the point.
“I think because of the violence around, today it’s lamentable that a director of Stanley Kubrick’s distinction and ability should lend himself to such a subject. I’m not saying that you can’t pick up that book, read it, and put it down. But to make it as a film, with all the violence we have in the world today, to add to it, to put it on show, I just don’t understand where Stanley is at.”
The conversation of screen violence ethics is one that has long caused significant controversy and endless debate, with movies like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games directly addressing the topic with a meta edge. You’re never going to satisfy every viewer; someone is always going to find a film too violent or too tame, but it’s important to get people talking about how we consume violence in the media, which I’d argue A Clockwork Orange certainly achieves. It seems like Sellers just didn’t care for the bold film, and he had no qualms about making his opinion known.
