Kubrick's Horrorshow

Did Anthony Burgess hate Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of A Clockwork Orange?

Jul 31, 2026

A detail from a Brazilian edition of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (Aleph, 2021).

There has been much grumbling on social media about classicist Emily Wilson’s article in the London Review of Books about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. In the piece, she points out many of the nuances in Homer’s original work that are lost in the film adaptation. Although Wilson has some tough criticism the film, she is grateful that it will encourage people to seek out the original epic poem. For this she has been accused of ‘biting the hand that feeds her’, even though she has no credit on the film. She has also been compared to Anthony Burgess, who, as popular opinion would have it, hated Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.

How could Burgess turn on Kubrick, the man who made him famous? Such outrageous ingratitude. Or at least it might be, if any of this were true. In reality, Burgess was much more supportive of the film than the myth would suggest.

Long before A Clockwork Orange, Burgess had watched Kubrick’s films and admired them. While he praised Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey in his autobiography, he was rather more doubtful about Lolita, in which he felt Kubrick ‘had found no cinematic equivalent to Nabokov’s literary extravagance.’

Burgess was worried that the adaptation of A Clockwork Orange might be more concerned with sex and violence than with the language of his novel, thereby missing the point of it. His sense of unease was exacerbated by Kubrick’s refusal to use a screenplay written by Burgess, and by the director’s reluctance to consult the author during the production of the film.

Burgess met Kubrick for the first time in London for a private screening of the film shortly before its release in 1971. He enjoyed it more than his agent, Deborah Rogers, and his wife Liana, both of whom asked to leave the screening after ten minutes. Reviewing the film a few weeks later, Burgess wrote:

Its brilliance nobody could deny, and some of the brilliance was a film director’s response to the wordplay of the novel. The camera played, slowing down, speeding up; when Alex hurled himself out of a window a camera enacted his attempted suicide by being itself hurled.

He went into detail in a positive review for the Listener after the film went on general release in January 1972:

Technically brilliant, thoughtful, relevant, poetic, mind-opening. It was possible for me to see the work as a radical remaking of my own novel, not as a mere interpretation, and this — the feeling that it was no impertinence to blazon it as Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange — is the best tribute I can pay to the Kubrickian mastery.

Burgess’s respect for Kubrick’s film is clear, but the question of ownership over A Clockwork Orange, and responsibility for it, may be the source of the myth that Burgess ultimately hated the adaptation.

Because of Kubrick’s unwillingness to travel, Burgess joined Malcolm McDowell for a publicity tour in New York in January 1972 to promote the film. During a week of challenging interviews from influential journalists, he began to resent having to justify a work that was no longer entirely his own. Burgess wrote later:

I was not quite sure what I was defending — the book that had been called ‘a nasty little shocker’ or the film about which Kubrick remained silent. […] Kubrick’s achievement swallowed mine, whole, and yet I was responsible for what some called its malign influence on the young.

In any case Burgess did not feel that books and films such as A Clockwork Orange could be said to have a malign influence. Reflecting on this question twenty years later, he wrote: ‘From the film of A Clockwork Orange, youth did not learn aggression: it was aggressive already. What it did learn was a style of aggression, a mode of dressing violence up in a new way.’

It did not help that Kubrick himself was absent from the New York press tour, as Burgess put it, ‘paring his fingernails in Borehamwood’ while Burgess and McDowell did the rounds of TV and radio studios.

Burgess was infuriated (rightly) by the publication in 1973 of a book titled Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. This illustrated book contained the complete script of the film, almost every word of which had been written by Burgess, but with no acknowledgement of who had written those words. Burgess regarded this book as a clear theft of his literary work — and he gave Kubrick’s book a strongly negative review in the Library Journal. Beyond this, he had a strong feeling that he had not received a fair share of the financial rewards of the film adaptation.

As the years passed, Burgess became impatient with journalists who wished only to discuss A Clockwork Orange, and in particular Kubrick’s film version. He believed that the novel was a minor works in his canon, and that his subsequent literary achievements represented a wider, more varied, ambition. Despite these frustrations, he continued to think of Kubrick’s film as a brilliant piece of cinema.