The Shared History of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)

Abstract

This article aims to offer a comparative critical discussion of both Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) as contemporary texts. Outwardly and at first glance their works, seems stylistically and aesthetically distinct from each other, nevertheless these films released within a year of each other, share a set of historical overlaps, occupying the same cultural and cinematic space and context: a cinema which emerges out of the rubble of the previous decade’s counterculture and utopianism, and which replaces ‘free love’ with libertinage and cruelty. The relationship between the two has, maybe surprisingly, gone largely unremarked upon hence this paper aims to provide a critical, historical discussion of their overlaps. Drawing on a body of archival research as well as offering a critical discussion of the Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker’s contradictory attitudes to these films, this article hopes to show how the fates of these two films overlap and how they are historically (and competitively) interconnected in terms of their distribution, festival exhibition and (interestingly) how it seems Kubrick, himself, imagined The Devils as the film with which A Clockwork Orange would most clearly compete.