The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 477

LOS ANGELES TIMES FEBRUARY 13 1972 Author Has His Say on 'Clockwork' Film The brilliant English novelist Anthony Burgess, who wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in 1961, soon sold off the movie rights. Although not involved in either the making or the earnings of Stanley Kubrick's film version, he admires and defends it, as he explains in this article written for. The Times. iff 5 lllllilMHMai BY ANTHONY BURGESS nil; iv.i.i TMl A VU. 'A' I dL- Drug-dispensing milk bar, as seen in fim version, form? background for first paperback edition of Anlhony Burgess" best-selling novel, "A Clockwork Orange." Great Leap Fo wa rd Shirley in 'Characters' AUTHOR BURGESS violence as an act of catharsis.

BY MARY BLUME ti I went to see Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" in New York, fighting to get in like everybody else. It was worth the fight, I thought very much a Kubrick movie, technically brilliant, thoughtful, relevant, poetic, mind-opening. It was possible for me to see the work as a radical remaking of my own novel, not as a mere interpretation, and this the feeling that it was no impertinence to blazon it as "Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange" is the best tribute I can pay to the Kubrickian mastery. The fact remains, however, that the film sprang out of a book, and some of the controversy which has begun to attach to the film is controversy in which inevitably, feel myself involved. In terms of philosophy and even theology, the Kubrick "Orange" is a fruit from my tree.

I wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in 1961, which is a very remote year, and I experience some difficulty in empathizing with that long-gone writer who, concerned with making a living, wrote as many as five novels (this was one of them) in 14 months. The title is the least difficult thing to explain. In 1945, back from the army, I heard ah 80-year-old Cockney in a London pub say that somebody was "as queer as a clockwork orange." The "queer" did not mean homosexual; it meant mad. The phrase in-trigued me with its unlikely fusion of demotic and surrealistic. For nearly 20 years I wanted to use it as the title of something.

During those 20 years I heard it, several times more in underground stations, in television plays but always from aged Cocknevs, never from the young. It was a traditional trone, and it asked to entitle a work which combined a concern with tradition and a bizarre technique. The opportunity to use it came when I conceived the notion of writing a novel about brainwashing. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus (in refers to the world as an "oblate man is a microcosm or little world; he is a growth as organic as a fruit, capable of color, fragrance and sweetness; to meddle with him, condition him, is to turn him into a mechanical creation. There had been some talk in the British press about the problems of growing criminality.

The youth of the late 1950s were restless and naughty, dissatisfied with the postwar world, violent and destructive, and they being more conspicuous than mere old-time crooks and hoods were what many people meant when they talked about growing criminality. Looking back from a peak of violence, we can see that the British teddy-boys and mods and rockers were mere tyros in the craft of antisocial aggression; nevertheless, they were a portent, and the man in the street was right to be scared. How to deal with them? Prison or reform school made them worse; why not save the taxpayer's money by subject-ing them to an easy course in conditioning, some kind of aversion therapy which should make them associate the act of violence with discomfort, nausea, or even intimations of mortality? Many heads nodded as this proposal (not, at the time, a governmental proposal but one merely out out by private though influential theoreticians). Heads still nod at it. On the David Frost Show it was suggested to me that it might have been a good thing if Adolf Hitler had been forced to undergo aversion therapy, so that the very thought of a new Putsch or pogrom would make him sick up his cream cakes.

Hitler was. unfortunately, a human being, and if we could have countenanced the conditioning of one humari being we would have to accept it for all. Hitler was a great nuisance, but history has known others disruptive' enough to make the state's fingers itch Christ, Luther, Bruno, even D. Lawrence. One has to be genuinely philosophical about this, however mucK one has suffered.

I don't know how much free will man really possesses (Wagner's Hans Sachs said "Wir sind ein wenig frei" we -are a little free), but I do know that what little he seems to have is too precious to encroach on, however good the intentions of the en-croacher may be. "A Clockwork Orange" was intended to be a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice. My hero or antihero, Alex, ia very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: It is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished. Please Turn to Page IS PARIS Shirley MacLaine has been an original from the start and so for a long time she was labeled a kook, a word she traces to the Australian kookaburra, meaning the laughing jackass.

She's a woman of wide range, in work and in life. "I am a long-distance runner," she says. For Shirley survival is growth, and her career has taken a giant leap with her new film, "Desperate i Characters," a drama set in New York todav in which she plays Sophie Bent-" wood, a woman who would rather continue in a boneless marriage than face alone the blighted world outside. If, as the Olenda Jackson character says in "Sundav Bloodv Sunday," something is better than nothing, Shirley MacLaine shows with remarkable reticence what cold comfort just something can be. "For someone who can be all over the place like a cheese omelet, it was very economical," she says of her performance.

It should bring her her fourth Academy Award nomination shelve the dumb word kookie forever, "One of the things people like me suffer from is a confusion of images unless you draw a definitive portrait, which I think Sophie is," Shirley says. "I was thought of as fresh and bubbly, an American dandelion. Well, the flower's a little faded now." Not that the new maturity squelches the old spirit: "You'd be surprised at how I'd still like to push a peanut down the street with my nose." "Desperate Characters," budgeted for an absurdly low $350,000 and brought in for an absurdly lower $300,000, was shot in a house in Brooklyn Heights, with Shirley MacLaine wearing her own clothes and riding the subway to SHIRLEY MACLAINE a new maturity to the old spirit. work each day. The supporting cast was little known and highly skilled.

The director producer screenwriter, playwright Frank Gilroy, was making his directing debut. Shirley is familiar enough with the urban nightmare (she has been robbed twice in London and five times in one year in New York and no longer owns even a wristwatch or wants to. She is also expert on door locks and says the secret is to have three and leave one unlocked, the mathematical probability being that the burglar will go nuts before unscrambling which is which). But the, character of Sophie was very Please Turn to Page 24.