A Clockwork Shamrock (The Seven Irish Connections In Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange)

A Clockwork Shamrock (The Seven Irish Connections In Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange). By Steven G. Farrell.

Stanley’s Kubrick’s groundbreaking film, A Clockwork Orange, was released in 1971 to stunned audiences throughout the world. The film was a shocking preview at a nightmarish near future, featuring Little Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell and his fellow droogs (“friends” in the Nadsat speech patterns used by the futuristic youth of London) Dim (Warren Clarke), Georgie (James Marcus) and Pete (Michael Tarn). The movie was deemed so vicious that it initially received an x-rating here in the USA, and it was banned for years in the United Kingdom, where it had been produced.

Over the years, A Clockwork Orange has achieved a cult-like status, especially amongst young white males, due to its landscape of a decaying London populated with teenage thugs who terrorized the rest of the citizens by gangbanging, raping and stealing automobiles to go joy-riding in the countryside, (playing “hogs of the road.”). The first half of the movie, a tough watch for many viewers even fifty-years plus later, climaxed with Little Alex murdering a woman and being betrayed by his gang. The second part of the films focused upon Alex’s time in prison, where he offers himself up as a guinea pig in an experiment to purge him of his evil ways by making him violently sick whenever he encountered any sort of sex, violence or the music of his beloved Beethoven.

The young man is released from prison as he ruled to being cured of all of his violent tendencies. However, in the third part of the film Alex received punishment to atone in full for his past sins.  He encounters his former victims, and he is beaten up by two of his old droogs, Dim and Georgy, who were now punks wearing police uniforms. Even his parents wanted nothing to do with the “reformed” Alex. He considered jumping into the Thames River to end his anguish. He had gleefully inflicted pain upon others; now it was her turn to tormented.

I hadn’t watched A Clockwork Orange in about forty years, and upon sitting through the film after all of these years I quickly noticed that Stanley Kubrick’s film had very strong Irish connections. I thought I’d have some blarney with this paper revealing what I have discovered. I counted seven of these blatant points of Irish references.

1. Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993), author of this dystopian satire, was born of Irish parents in Manchester, England. His tobacconist parents were lower-middle class and Roman Catholic in a very class conscious and Protestant British society. Burgess was able to write about outsiders like Little Alex and his alienated droogs because he was one himself. Burgess wrote: I was either persecuted or ignored, I was one despised. Ragged boys in gangs would pounce on the well-dressed like myself.’ The author’s psychological makeup was further rattled when his pregnant wife, Lynne, was   robbed and beaten by a gang of American army deserters during the second world war. She died before the film wawas released of liver failure brought on by years of alcohol abuse.

2. The film began with Little Alex and his gangs getting stoned at the Korova Milk Bar, consuming tall glasses of Moloko (Russian word meaning “milk’) Plus, a mixture that blended milk with drugs. The concoction heightened their senses for their upcoming violence under the cover of the darkness of night. The four punks attacked a drunken man lying in a tunnel. Paul Farrell (1893 to 1975), an Irish television and film actor, was credited as the “Tramp.”  Farrell’s had worked with James Mason in Odd Man Out (1947) and James Cagney in Shake Hands with the Devil (1957). The Tramp later extracted revenge on Little Alex with his own gang consisting of old bums such as hAlex objected to the drunk howling out “the filthy songs of his fathers.” The song Farrell’s homeless man was singing was Molly Malone (aka In Dublin Fair City), one of Ireland’s most beloved traditional folk tunes that dates back perhaps as much as three hundred years ago. It tells the story of a fish monger pushing her wheel barrel through streets (broad and narrow), hawking her wears. Another theory is that the tune is a more of 19^th century music hall standard. Farrell’s Irish drunk singing an Irish singalong song is a reference to the old stereotype of the besotted Mick bellowing out a pub song.

3. Three of the droogs (Alex, Georgy and Pete) were carrying shillelaghs, Irish walking sticks, that they used as weapons against Billy Boy and his motorcycle gang. Later on, Little Alex seduces two girls at a music store carrying his walking stick that he had recently used as a cudgel in a rumble. Why did Kubrick insert an Irish shillelagh instead of a fine stick from the Victorian Era? I wonder if the director was paying a sly homage to Anthony Burguess’s Irish heritage.  All Weaponry was outlawed for Irish Catholics in Ireland by the British with the 18^th century penal laws. The walking stick looked harmless enough, but could be used as a lethal weapon in combat amongst downtrodden peasants. Kubrick was having fun by absorbing the past into the future. Characters talked in a futuristic slang that was a blend of Russian and old Cockney rhyme. Burgess labeled this new speak as Nadsat. I have heard that this speech pattern included Romani. I didn’t recognize any Irish words.

4. Three of the droogs (Alex, Georgy and Dim) were wearing black bowlers; this headgear is comparable to what the Orangemen of Northern Ireland are still wearing whenever they attempt to march into the Catholic neighborhoods of Derry and Belfast. It is another possible symbol used by Kubrick: these hats, along with the with orange slashes are still worn in honor of King William’s Protestant army victory over king James the Second’s Catholic at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This battle fought on Irish soil made the Ulster planters a permanent fixture in Ireland: it also ushered in the hateful penal laws, as well as more than 300 years of fighting. The Irish Protestants, like the Droogs, have a very complex sense of identity, trying to balance the past with the present for the future generation, trying to decide if there British or Irish in a brave new world.

5. One of Alex and the Droogs victims, Mr. Alexander, was played by Northern Irishman (County Armagh) Patrick Magee (1922-1982), a brilliant stage actor, who also appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Mr. and Misses Alexander were paid a surprise visit by the four thugs. The man is beaten and forced to watch his wife being raped in one of the most horrific scenes ever filmed. Magee’s got sweet revenge in the third part of the film when he is the one who compelled Little Alex to jump from a building in order to commit suicide by playing a sympathy of Beethoven, music he now has an aversion to since the therapy he received in the prison hospital.

6. Gene Kelly (1912 to 1996) the Irish-American actor, song Singin’ in the Rain” (written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, 1929) was sung by Little Alex during the vicious attack upon the Alexanders. Kubrick told Malcom McDowell to sing any song that popped into his head. Malcolm could only think remember the lyrics of the version Kelly had belted out in his own film, titled Singin’ in the Rain, 1952.Kelly’s cheerful ditty was a stroke of genius to be used as a non sequitor as the musical soundtrack to a gross act of perversion.  The original Kelly song was also played during the closing credits of the film. Years late, Malcolm McDowell claimed that he was given the cold shoulder by Gene Kelly when the two were introduced at a Hollywood party two decades after A Clockwork Orange release. Malcolm put down Gene’s frosty behavior to the use of “Singin’ in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange without his permission. The actor eventually learned the truth through Kelly’s widow that Gene was actually not upset with Malcolm but, rather, with Kubrick because he had never received any money from the production company for the inclusion of his song.

My challenge to my readers is to watch A Clockwork Orange and to keep count of any other Irish connections you may observe. However, beware of Little Alex and the Droogs; for their antics aren’t to everyone’s tastes.