“Be good,” Anthony Burgess taught us, “it can become somewhat horrible.” Who knows if one of the most famous lines of mechanical orange does not hide in his clarity the complicated history of premiere of his adaptation to the cinema. The 1971 Stanley Kubrick film of which this year is 50 years old had to suffer for his wild goodness and transparent as unspeakable. And for that reason it was withdrawn in the United Kingdom for allegedly incite violence, condemned to the category of X film in the United States and, since we are, defenestrated in a depleted Spain. And so until 1975, six months after the death of the Franco dictator and when four years of world legend had already been fulfilled, he could finally see. On April 24, 1975, an insompany vallisolethan enthusiast’s tail among those who were, among others, the writer Gustavo Martín Garzo spent the night in sailing to get the entrance that allowed him to see the forbidden. And there, in the edition of the most glorious seminci, what most than prophecy was curse was fulfilled: to be good, no doubt, sentence.
Malcolm McDowell, the actor and mythical protagonist on Alex Dearge’s skin of the tape, does not remember anything that happened in the Castilian city then.
Moreover, he had no idea.
«It is a surprise to discover that after all this time there are still stories about the Kubrick tape,” says the interpreter from the height and distance they give their 78 years fulfilled and their million and a half interviews recalling every detail of the film.
That, without a doubt, he scored his life.
And everyone’s.
McDowell appears in Valladolid in which he does the 66 edition of the seminci as a double protagonist.
He was then and it is now as a voice and narrator of the Documentary the banned orange, by Pedro González Bermúdez;
A film that recalls precisely what it was (that within its beauty had a lot of terrible) the rugged premiere of the film in front of Franco dying.
And so.
“He was very young and when they told me that he called me Stanley, I thought it was another Stanley.
Then, he let me know that he had seen me in if …, by Lindsay Anderson, and that he loved me for the new movie of him.
I just knew that he was the director of 2001: an odyssey of space, the science fiction tape that revolutionized the genre, and that when asked about my character in the orange … his answer was that that was my work ”
, comments as a prologue and presentation.
To situate, in the documentary of González Bermúdez, he is just the voice.
It is a surprised, almost stunned voice, which tells how in times of dictatorship and censorship, in a country for him unknown, a group of cinephilos not necessarily fans was insisted on premiere the unstreamable.
The regime loosened his hand and with the complicity of the distributor Warner he wanted to prove himself.
The film would be seen in the fact that it was a religious film festival before premiere in Spain.
“Actually,” reflects the actor himself, “the film was relevant then, since he talks about censorship and freedom, and it is now.
The forms of censures and oppression have changed, but the background problem remains intact.
In the decade of the 70s, a regime forbade a tape to be seen to hide the truth;
Now, the Fakees News make the truth irrelevant.
The modes have changed, the background problem is the same ».
McDowell refers to his dear Drugo of his youth with love. “For me he is like a distant cousin who always goes with me,” he says. McDowell recovers intact the painful memory of the Scene of the so-called Ludovic method that made him associate the music of Beethoven to violence to the nausea. “They told me that a doctor would anesthet my eyes and that he would not feel anything. Luckily he then discovered that his eyes recover fast because the corneas were destroyed. It is not the same as the droplets apply on a stretcher that while holding your eyes with tweezers, “he recalls and laugh. And McDowell feels forced to count his about the eternal controversy who pursues the most controversial film. “A lot of violence is spoken, but in reality any Sam Peckinpah tape is more evident and decapada than orange … in this case violence is purely psychological. I remember that when it was released, the households of the world came live the images of the Vietnam War in all their crudity. They were scenes of real torn bodies. Ynadie prohibited anything or scandalized nothing. How is it possible? I sincerely believe that the work of Kubrick, realistic but not real, also raises that question: Why irritates us both fiction and are so permissive with what happens to our fellow men? “He says, stops and adds:” Are we hypocrites? ”
In the documentary, in addition to those who attended the almost sacred pass, Vicente Molina Foix speaks, which was a translator, a narrow and unique interviewer of Kubrick.
Through him and the testimony of him, the perfect image of a perfectionist man is drawn up beyond the disease of perfectionism.
It is said that just before its projection in Valladolid, the order of suspending arrived.
Perhaps the conditions of the room, perhaps the slightly beate past of the contest … the case is that the Warner and the Director of the Seminak then, Carmelo Romero, had to give the rest (even the deception) for the event,
Indeed, it happens.
“Kubrick was Kubrick,” says McDowell.
«I had a fame of controlling everything and, nevertheless, with no other director I have felt more free,” he adds contradictory and happy to return to the paradox of the beginning: “Being good can become something horrible … What does God want
?
The good or that one chooses the path of good?
Perhaps the man who chooses evil is in a certain way better than the one who is imposed by good.
They are deep and difficult problems … ».
