Long Banned Clockwork Orange Airs
Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which hasn't been seen in Great Britain for 30 years, airs on British television for the first time today. Sky Box Office, a pay cable channel, said it would air the film nearly every day until mid September. The dark, futuristic, violent 1972 film, based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, generated such strong reactions in its original release that Kubrick voluntarily banned it from circulation shortly thereafter. The ban ended after his death in 1999. The film's protagonist, gang leader Alex de Large, played by Malcolm McDowell, lived according to his philosophy of being ultra-violent, raping and listening to Beethoven. Despite the film's brief run 30 years ago, it still had a wide influence in Great Britain, making boiler suits popular and generating a new slang that mixed Russian with rhyming slang, such as ``tolchock'' (to hit) and ``razrez'' (to rip).
http://www.comicsutra.com/cs/news/2001july/long_banned_clockwork_orange_air.htm