50 years ago tonight, April 12, I saw this film for the first time at a special preview screening at Cincinnati's Westwood I Theater. I was still just 15 and watched it in a state of shock because, just before my ride arrived, a call came from a neighbor asking if we had heard that my best friend Mike had died. That's when my ride pulled up. I didn't know what to do; my mother encouraged me to go anyway—I'd read the novel and had been looking forward to the film for more than a year, and as she reasoned, it might turn out to be a misunderstanding. She promised to run up the street and check things out, but I had to "go now." So I reluctantly went and experienced this very disturbing film (which I was not really old enough to see), all the time my mind weaving in and out of realities, not knowing whether my friend was alive or dead.
When I got home, my mother confirmed the bad news for me and we hugged each other for what felt like the first time in years. I realize I'm being elliptical; I don't want to do into specifics because they would involve other people and the fact is, we none of us really know what happened or why.
I spent the next couple of weeks at home, trying to make sense of what had happened. During that time I wrote a review of the film, which—as Mike had been encouraging me to do—I folded up and submitted to CINEFANTASTIQUE. While that review wasn't accepted (it would have been, I was told, but this coveted title had long been promised to another reviewer), they did accept a shorter one I also sent along. It became my first-ever magazine publication.
Half a century later, my review of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (as returned to me by CFQ's Fred Clarke) has remained unpublished, folded and pressed into a folder of my original typescripts for the magazine. One of my current projects is a collection of my film writings and it is my intention to include it there; but I've also decided to "seize the day," as it were, and present those two pages as they were originally typed on my very own Royal manual typewriter, as my tribute to Mike.
And here is the review Fred accepted (with an open invitation to submit more, which I followed up on in early 1974), in an easy-to-read size and as it appeared on the printed page in context.
Reading the other reviews on this page reminds me that, whether or not one agreed with the reviewers, CINEFANTASTIQUE was the finest magazine in my world at that time. It was an honor to be a part of their roster, and I would stay with them until sometime in 1983.
The least that can be said of these submissions was that they needed an editor, and I had no business invoking 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY since (to be absolutely candid) I still hadn't seen it at this time and wouldn't till its 70mm reissue in the mid-1970s; but it's best to present them here exactly as they came out of me at a time when something scared me into becoming myself. Naturally, I don't look back on this material with much charity from where I sit now—it's a mess, really—but (I tell myself) it's not as bad as it might have been, coming from an emotionally shattered fifteen-year-old with not very broad experience of film, life, or even grammar, all of whose adjectives carry the exact same absolute weight. Taken altogether, it does provide the best answer to a question I'm sometimes asked: "How do you start out as a film critic?"—which is, "You just start, however, wherever, and as best you can."
In the spirit of acknowledging those mysterious coincidences and synchronicities that sometimes pop up in life, the next audio commentary on my schedule is for a film directed by... Stanley Kubrick. I'll be writing it 50 years to the day when I sat down and wrote that first professional review.
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