More than perhaps any other actor, Malcolm McDowell is famous for his roles as sadistic psychopaths – most iconically as Alex in A Clockwork Orange, about which Pauline Kael claimed “made you root for his foxiness, his crookedness.“ In the most famous scene, McDowell elegantly dances and playfully sings “Singin’ in the Rain” while brutalizing a bourgeois couple as he prepares them for a gang-rape. What’s most off-putting and peculiarly memorable about these scenes, as Kael notes, is that McDowell portrays a character who so clearly enjoys his sadistic behavior and performs these less out of psychotic cruelty than as an symptom of his eternal youth and endless creativity, problematically making Alex an endearing and stylishly influential sadist. One need do no more than google “A Clockwork Orange Halloween Costume” to realize this influence.
In this paper, I look beyond A Clockwork Orange to Malcolm McDowell’s productive and vexing films of 1979: The Passage, Caligula, and Time After Time. These films serve alternately as corrective and commentary on the critiques that A Clockwork Orange provokes. Unlike Alex, who thrives in the oversight of a broken dystopic society, in The Passage and Caligula, McDowell portrays (with varying levels of complexity and complicity) vicious figures of evil who are supported rather than reformed by the institution. In Time After Time, McDowell enacts the role of critics such as Kael when he, as a time-travelling HG Wells, must witness acts of brutality from Jack the Ripper on the loose in modern San Francisco. These later films are meditations on violent people and the violence they pursue, and as such offer fascinating counterexamples of the charismatic psychopath that made him famous.
About the presenterAndrew Black
I am an Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Murray State University. My focus is Eighteenth Century Literature and Rhetoric, but I have emerging interests in 1970s films.