A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange opened in 1971 and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, losing all four to The French Connection. From the day it opened it was the most controversial film of Kubrick's career. After copy-cat violence and personal threats he withdrew it from British distribution himself in 1973, and it stayed withdrawn until his death in 1999. Its look, and the Nadsat slang it carried over from the novel, have shaped dystopian cinema ever since.

Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell, in the role that defined his career) leads his three droogs (Pete, Georgie, Dim) through a night of beating, raping and stealing in a near-future Britain governed by lethargic bureaucracy. Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel himself, kept the Nadsat slang as a structural device, and cast McDowell partly on the strength of his work in Lindsay Anderson's If..... Burgess spent his later years uneasy about the book's reception and about Kubrick's film, and came to argue that the novel's twenty-first chapter, left out of American editions, had been essential to its meaning.

Kubrick's collaboration with the composer Wendy Carlos, including synthesised re-orchestrations of Beethoven's Ninth and Rossini's Thieving Magpie, produced one of the most influential film scores of the 1970s. The British withdrawal, which followed threats to Kubrick's family as well as the copy-cat attacks, was an unprecedented self-imposed ban. The film sits permanently in the upper tiers of the Sight & Sound poll, and it is still a standing reference in academic arguments about screen violence and an author's responsibility for it.