The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 14

The Boston Globe Wednesday, February 9, 1971 1 THEATER ARTS 14 4A Clockwork Orange' review "THE ME NOHODT KNOWS" Opn Clrcl Thrnter. 78 W.irrrn-tnn at 2 onri tluouuH Feb. 20. The Broadway roik rnu ileal baard on compoiltlona Vtv ichnol children. Daily calendar "OODSPEIJ." Wilbur Theater, 2 and 7 Ml A rock-itylo rendition tor Tlio Goapal According to Hiilnl Matthew, 'PROMKNADK.

AIX" Colonial Theatw. at through Feb. 12, Hum Cronyn. Anna Jackson, and Ell W. Il.cn are featured In a light-hearted look at 80 yean oi American life.

"THE HOMKCOMINO" Boston Center lor the Arti. at 8 p.m. through Feb. 27. Harold Plnter'a celebrated modern drama prevented by the Marlboro (Vt.) Theater Company.

way at 8 p.m. Auociala Arltau Opera Company production. N.E.C. RVMPHONT ORCHESTRA Jordan Hall at 8:30. Oimther Schuller conductor, 01 Berg, Stravlnaky and Mllhaud.

ARTS LINE Botton'i Offlc at Cultural AffnliV event (telephone: Ml-lotiul. PolyArta" (Cambridge) Information lervlct i on "where to so. what to do" The incredible $240,000 Alpine I A Killing," "Paths of Glory," "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." But "Clockwork Orange," despite the sometimes deliberately appalling quality of its look; seems to me as meaningless as the violence it so graphically demonstrates. It's not enough that Kubrick spins civilization on an hysterical axis.

It's not enough that he shows the debasement of art. It's not enough for him to say the world is a stinking horrorshop, that we are held in a paralysis of terror. It's not enough for him to realize that violence 'creates violence and then present that as a new idea from which we are all supposed to learn. And, further, when Kubrick comes to make any of these already self-evident points, he makes them over and over, as though he expected his audience to be made up only of dim drop-outs. He has the chastened Alex return to the scene of his crimes and be brutalized by those he brutalized, including two of his hoodlum friends who, as rookie policemen, are now being paid (and possibly applauded) for their violence.

The balance to all this is an outrageous age," he is hurled headlong through the movie as a vividly cynical embodiment of Kubrick's Decline-of-the-West philosophy, which Kubrick has absorbed from the Anthony Burgess novel upon which the script is based. The time of the action is the slightly advanced future, years earlier than 2001 but (probably) not yet 1984. Alex leads three cohorts from one "horrorshow adventure" to another, the four nocturnally roaming the streets in black derbies nozzle-nosed masks white combat suits fitted with boxers' groin protectors (worn outside), heavy boots and an assortment of clubs and knives. Alex is further distinguished by heavily fringed paste-on lashes on his right eye. After a couple of vicious beatings and a rape, the hoodlums quarrel among themselves, one named Dim threatening Alex's leadership.

Then, in a double-cross job, Alex crushes a woman to death with a huge sculptured phallus after she battles him with a small bust of Beethoven He's caught, sent to prison for 14 years but is released after two years to become a subject in a radi cal scientific experiment. In this so-called Lodovico Treatment, all his nasty responses are to be conditioned, through mechanical control, and he will be changed into a model citizen. Like Pavlov's dog taught to drool on cue, Alex will become nauseous a few seconds after he has been stimulated either to sexual activity or violence. By coincidence one of the filmed sequences designed to sicken his normal (i.e. vicious) response has background music by Beethoven.

Thus, in addition to eliminating his impulse toward passion and brutality, the treatment also cancels his desire for Ludwig van, which, eventually leads him to a suicide attempt. After a public outcry, the government, responsible for the Lodovico experiment in the first place, makes amends to Alex and, at the movie's end, he is "cured," that is he's returned to society in his unconditioned state, as a menace, ready to meet the world's madness. Now just what does all this come to, I mean beyond the easy fascination of the Burgess outline? I've liked some of Kubrick's work up to this point, particularly "The "MIlXHOI'MKi A WHITE COME-. Oi" video jnpairr, nnum- on at and indiTimi run, Tel-cior oil on rrom-dt'iitlal watert. BRKI.

Hold Somerset'! Mualcal Theater I. at tndeflnttt run. A trouhador-1 able trlliut to i popular alnger-compoaer. CM The world's greatest skier in his first full-length feature motion picture. PARENTAL GUOANCE SUQGESIEO series features harpsichord JEAN-CLAUDE KILLY inSNOW DANIELE CLIFF POTTS Also Starring V1TTORIO D.ESICA Ari Englund-Rissien Production 1 Screenplay by Ken Kolb and Jeffrey Bloom Produced by Edward ll Rissien Directed by George Englund Panavision Technicolor From Warrier A Kinney Company By Kevin Kelly Globe Staff "A Clockwork Orange" is a lemon of a movie.

The hero in Stanley Kubrick's latest surreal odys-sey, at Cinema 57, is a brainless although crafty hoodlum who has three principal interests in his warped life: rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven. He lives in a world gone mad, in a society ruled by a corrupt totalitarian system and overrun with teenage terrorists, in a world surrounded by expressions of art (painting, sculpture, music, architecture) defaced with obscenities or deliberately created as extensions of sex and violence. His own dedication to Beethoven (Ludwig van, as he calls him) is an erotic fantasy in which he imagines himself copulating to the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, and, at one point, he experiences a related Biblical dream in which he whips Christ, with ferocious glee, to the rhythms of Rimsky-Korsakoff's a-zade." Despite his amorality, hero Alex does have a kind of thuggish charm. Used as a self-excusing narrator, "a victim of the modern Museum's By Michael Steinberg Globe Staff At the beginning of this season Barbara Lambert, the new keeper of the musical instruments collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, started a concert series called Gallery Gigs, fairly informal, fairly short, given on Tuesday evenings when museum admission is free, designed to show off some of the instruments in the collection and sometimes to introduce some new players. The instrument for last night's gig was the museum's mellow sounding, giddily decorated Hemsch harpsichord (Hemsch was Rhinelander who worked in Paris) and the uncommonly interesting young musician who played it was Martin Pearlman, a pupil of Kirkpatrick and Leonhardt, and first-prize winner of the 1972 Bodky award of the Cambridge Society for Early Music.

Pearlman has a special feeling for the rhythmically and rhetorically subtle music of the 17th Century, and his playing of a Suite in by Louis Couperin and of a Frescobaldi Toccata was imaginative and full of authority. Pearlman also played a brief piece of his own called "Mask" one that owed something to Carter in texture and scoring, but put together with the same dramatic flair that is to be heard in Pearlman's playing. As an encore, Pearlman offered another fascinating 20th STARTS TODAY! malcolm Mcdowell three interests sense of humor (an orgy for three on speeded-up film, to the "William Tell Alex's sensitive-young-lad turnabout in prison), but the balance soon tilts, and we're left with Kubrick's ultimate banality of thought. Malcolm McDowell plays Alex in the style of a latter-day Leo Gorcey, with perfect smarmy presence. The others in the cast are generally acceptable, although Patrick Magee's looniness, as a revolutionary polemicist crippled by the hoods and whose wife dies after being raped by them, is as graphic as a cartoon.

So, for that matter, is "Clockwork Orange," which is already the most overrated work of the year (Best Film, Best Director, from the New York Film Critics). It is, I'm afraid, nothing more than a garish Pop-art poster pretending to be a work of art. "A HUNDRED LAUGHS." Norton. Record Amer. hume cronyn annejackson eli wallach in menade, all! LAST 4 DAYS iii ii, i Tonight at 7:30 litfrlWI Matinees Thurs.

at 2:00 p.m. "A Magical musical" "A JOYOUS CELEBRATION" NORTON, REC. AMER. TON ITE 7:30 MATS. WED.

SAT. 2: 00 Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are ultra-violence and Beethoven. chaste instrument in Memorial Church does not really have' the dirty sounds of the sort of organ Samuel Warren would have had in mind when he made his Wagner transcription in 1898, nor do the acoustics of Memorial Church lead to that diffuse Romantic roar; however, Fuller did a resourceful job of faking it. He knows his Wagner (as did and it made a festive, slightly campy end for the recital. I did miss that one magic triangle stroke on the first beat of the recapitulation, though.

And now I should like to hear the arrangement for violin and piano which auburn-haired Gerda Buddenbrooks played with her organist friend. FINAL WEEKS TONIGHT at 8:30 TEL. RES. 536-401 1 LBREL UXbftL ItHAiKt 1 iUMtrOtl HUIcL IK scholarship has been in Baroque keyboard music. There was Bach on his program the minor Sonata, most gracefully played but for the rest, he strayed from the paths of righteousness into the world of Marcel Dupre, Brahms, Julius Reubke, and even to an arrangement of Wagner's "Meis-tersinger" Prelude.

Reubke, who died at 24, was a pupil of Liszt. He was much enchanted by his master's music, but his big meditation on some verses of Psalm 94 shows that a remarkably vigorous talent was lost with him. It is a good virtuoso show, too, and Fuller played it both cleanly and dashing-tly, true also of his performance of Dupre's Prelude and Fugue in B. The Saturday Night DANCING 1st PUBLIC APPEARANCE The FONTAINES $5.00 per couple KING PHILIP Wrentham 384-3111 nnr 1 Eafc Century view of the harpsichord, Ligeti's "Continuum," a dazzling virtuoso study that sounds all like things that could not possibly be done on the harpsichord. I was disappointed only in Pearlman's playing of Bach's major Toccata, and that because I found the rhythmic distentions needlessly emphatic and then unconvincing.

Clearly, though, Pearlman has unusual gifts as musician, instrumentalist, and performer. Usually double-headers are madness, but I was glad I went from the museum to Memorial Church, Harvard, to hear the organ recital by David Fuller of the State University of New York, Buffalo. Fuller's distinguished work in Royal family leaves for visit to Far East United Press International LONDON Queen Elizabeth, her husband Prince Philip and daughter Princess Anne took off yesterday for Bangkok, Thailand, to begin a seven-week tour of the Far East, Buckingham Palace announced. Their Royal Air Force (RAF) VC10 jet took off shortly after noon from London Heathrow Airport for the 8000-mile flight to the US naval base at U-Tapao, Thailand. LIVE ON STAGE GREATEST MAGICIANS Hf Trmt Iostoif4g2-021 It takes two to make such a special one! CARL IERTOLINO THE WONDER SHOW OF THE UNIVERSE A8I1I1! IN PERSON 6 OF THE WORLD'S akwa8jkiJMaaaaUBaaaaaMaHa aaaaaaaaaMBaai 2 BIG SHOWS 2:30 P.M.

7:30 P.M. ALL SEATS RESERVED: $6.50, $5.50, $4.50 TICKETS AVAILABLE AT ALL TICKET OUTLETS THEATRE BOX OFFICE iff t-q I I Wv- LITTLE JACK HORNER JOKE SHOP I -X. Lee Paul Newman Marvin B5 Wednesday Feb. 9th Direct From Chicago Playboy Club The Collection Rawly Rtmot'ilii Es.trtainiTit.nf 7 ni(hft Ra Cow Chirp Op in 7 pm 1 am Dmcinj 318 Broadway. Somerville 661-3120 A Stan'-ey Kubrick Producer, "A CLOCKVORK Walcom McDrvI Ffctrick Magee Adrienne Corn and Miriam Karim Screenp'ay by Start'ev Kubrick Based on trie novel by Anthony Burgess Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick Fasbarji, Lw- From Warner Bros.

s-v jrty xorsx CONTINUOUS SHOWS DAILY Screened at 10:00 pjiu FIRST ARTISTS PSGDUCTHON "Pocket Money" STPO i hS MARTIN ttj. scns tcoet vcnet vikttk wo psfcsva st cwoie k3 vszk. i-KH sckevw ey tepy iiz -j wNr ft j.p.s. mm pccxc 57:: ocsesss; first artists wtsorTATiw EMCtMATi mm arm IFJL I rm I STARTS urn nam uuto TODAY PARIS CHEM Ml BOYLSTON ST. 267 JJ 181 2.6-8-10 P.M.

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