I mean, yes, it's violent ... McDowell sees the violence in "A Clockwork Orange" as wholly artificial and presented in a so wild a context that one could watch it without being disturbed.

Malcolm McDowell's defiant and smug performance in If... inspired Stanley Kubrick to cast him in A Clockwork Orange.

"In 1945, back from the army," an extract reads, "I heard an 80-year-old Cockney in a London pub say that somebody was 'as queer as a clockwork orange'. "The 'queer' did not mean homosexual ...