“The problem with candy...”

On a foggy night less than a week into the new year of 1974, film director Stanley Kubrick and his entire family, using assumed names, boarded a ferry at Dun Laoghaire. They were making the trip from Ireland back to England days ahead of the planned return. This sudden cloak and dagger exit occurred shortly after resumption of shooting on the film Barry Lyndon (1975) following a Christmas break. Coming as a complete surprise to his production crew, Kubrick's departure brought an abrupt end to the work that had been scheduled. Within twenty-four hours, the entire crew, which had been active for several weeks near Dublin, closed operations and headed back to England to find a new location for the completion of filming. Shortly after his return, Kubrick consulted with executives of Warner Brothers, his studio partner and film distributor, and made the decision to withdraw his previous film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), from further distribution and viewing in the United Kingdom.

        The extraordinary change in plans for the production work on Barry Lyndon and the subsequent withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange from its theatrical run were apparently triggered by a single incident. Although officially denied by Kubrick, on the morning prior to his departure from Ireland a member of his staff had received a call from an officer of the Special Branch from Dublin Castle stating he had learned from a reliable source that Kubrick had been placed on the IRA's hit list (Baxter, 289).

        Though no one seemed to know the specific details regarding the reasons for the IRA's death threat, speculation centered on two sources of aggravation—the staging of British “redcoats” in a field in Kilkenny for scenes in Barry Lyndon and the accumulated outrage over scenes of sex and violence depicted in A Clockwork Orange. These scenes had allegedly spawned an outbreak of copycat crimes in many urban areas where the film had been showing. The most recent of such crimes had occurred just across the Irish Sea only a little more than a month prior in November of 1973 in Lancashire. A gang of teenagers was reported to have been crowing “Singing in the Rain”—a favorite song of the film's anti-hero Alex—as they raped a seventeen-year-old girl (Parsons, 5).

        According to Ken Adam, the interior set designer for Barry Lyndon, Kubrick dismissed the Kilkenny staging as the source of the IRA's ire and insisted that A Clockwork Orange was primarily to blame for the death threat. Apparently, similar though less credible threats—not from the IRA— had been received by Kubrick over the course of the last two years (Baxter, 290).

        Kubrick's retreat from Ireland, however, was probably an action taken more with an eye for the well being of his family than for his personal safety. Nevertheless, the withdrawal of the film was, for a man of his confidence and pride, an extraordinary about-face. But the film contained such wanton violence, presented from the cavalier point of view of the perpetrators, that it gave many consumers reason for pause and many others reason for outrage. Newspaper ads at the time of the film's release promoted it with a portrait of a slyly smirking Alex along with the caption: “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven”—to which could have been added “molestation, mugging, and murder.”

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Topics addressed:

analysis commentary review of a clockwork orange

a clockwork orange media effects

effects of a clockwork orange on society

a clockwork orange banned and censored

a clockwork orange audience effects

a clockwork orange and the pittsburgh murder

a clockwork orange kubrick and the ira

differences between the book and film a clockwork orange

similarities in kubrick and burgess reactions following release of the film

the ludovico treatment and a clockwork orange

sarris and canby on a clockwork orange

anthony burgess on a clockwork orange

michale anderson and karen hurwitz and a clockwork orange

tony parsons on a clockwork orange

a clockwork orange and media violence

a clockwork orange and ultraviolence

a clockwork orange and copycat crime

imitation violence and a clockwork orange

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