Malcolm McDowell makes dangerous people enjoyable company without softening what they do. His Alex in A Clockwork Orange remains frightening because the charm survives the cruelty, though later casting has too often settled for another villain.
Fi1m perspective
In A Clockwork Orange (1971), Malcolm McDowell plays Alex as someone thoroughly pleased with himself. He makes the character's enjoyment plain without asking us to mistake it for innocence. We keep watching him because his ease makes him such agreeable company, even when we recoil from what he does. It is an exceptional performance in a film whose treatment of the people Alex hurts deserves much less admiration.
That unsettling appeal had an earlier use in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968), his film debut as Mick Travis. The performance led to Stanley Kubrick casting him as Alex. Anderson and McDowell returned to Mick Travis twice, ending with Britannia Hospital (1982). Those films offer a useful corrective to the habit of treating McDowell as a ready-made menace. His energetic, stylised acting can serve rebellion as readily as cruelty, provided the director has something for him to do with it.
Kubrick makes the attraction itself a problem, asking us to consider the freedom of someone who uses it to hurt others. We were sickened by the sexual violence in A Clockwork Orange, specifically by the delight McDowell keeps visible alongside it. The performance makes it difficult simply to dismiss Alex and stop thinking about him. But the film spends so much attention on that difficulty that the people he attacks receive too little, a failure his skill cannot excuse.
McDowell later worked extensively in the US, where antagonists became a recurring part of his employment. Dr Tolian Soran in Star Trek Generations (1994) is one mainstream example. We can understand the appeal to a director of an actor who makes a threat entertaining without making it harmless. But repeated villain casting risks asking him to supply the same pleasure rather than develop a different character. See A Clockwork Orange for him, with due warning for its sexual violence, then go back to if.... rather than straight to another villain.
Biography
Malcolm McDowell is an English actor. Born Malcolm John Taylor on 13 June 1943 in Horsforth, Yorkshire, he began his career with the Royal Shakespeare Company before making his film debut as Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968).
His performance in if.... led to the lead role of Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). He later played Benny Barratt in the BBC series Our Friends in the North (1996) and has appeared in numerous films and television series across several decades.
