[A late posting - I get P2 on digest - on this topic which has, by now, already been well covered here] : Bill Silvers: > ... was "A Clockwork Orange" in fact banned in the UK as was > reported here? ... Do you know if was Kubrick's own doing? Jon Johnson: > My understanding is that the film inspired some rapes and other > crimes in Great Britain that seem to have unnerved Kubrick. Stevie Simkin: > I think the issue was more a spate of muggings of tramps Iain Noble: > The film was withdrawn from circulation in this country by Kubrick > himself after several UK tabloids launched a moral panic about > copy cat attacks shortly after the film came out. It has never been > banned by the Board of Film Censors ... Iain's summary is correct. The file critic Derek Malcolm summarises the episode thus in his piece in The Guardian: "Kubrick, of course, was no stranger to controversy, having made A Clockwork Orange in Britain in 1971. That film, based on an Anthony Burgess novel, about the endemic violence running underneath so-called civilised society, was passed by the censor but hooked out of release by Kubrick himself because he thought the British, and particularly the British press, had mistaken its pessimistic message and proclaimed it as glamorising violence." One thing I wanted to add, with reference to the excerpts from Jon and Stevie's postings above, is that I do not know if any actual attacks inspired by this film were ever proved to have taken place here. (I mean, as opposed to the 'idea', or 'threat', of such attacks.) I think the reference above to a 'spate' of such attacks is almost certainly wrong. Ob Twang content: still humming Crazy Arms ... +-- ///\ Ian Durkacz ------------------------------------------+ | C-oo Department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering | | \ > The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England | +--- \_v e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------+
