Malcolm McDowell: ‘Clockwork Orange’ Star Crashes Showbiz
Malcolm McDowell squinted into the sun. “Oh yes, it’s dead easy to sit by the old swimming pool here in Cannes and be flippant about it all.” He put a finger into a glass of wine and swirled it around. “Not bad,” he said, smacking his lips like a television gourmet. “Cheeky little number, perhaps a trifle fresh … but I can remember the first day of If, when we started shooting, like yesterday. I thought, ‘Hello, this is it, this is what it’s all about.’ Bloody torture, real bloody torture.”
The Riviera sun had already drawn a pink flush to McDowell’s chest, which had greeted the day with the pallor only the English possess. He scraped his chair closer to some shade. “Don’t get me wrong about that torture thing. I’m not talking about the same thing that those actresses go on about. You know, the agonies of the theater. I loathe that kind of attitude. Actorish actors.” Malcolm rolled his eyes and deadpanned a melodramatically demented expression. “It’s not difficult to have a nervous breakdown in front of the cameras. That’s just the way to win an Oscar. We can all do that. But they’re not the performances that people remember in 10, 15 years.
“It’s difficult to talk about this side of the job because the good ones make it look easy. Cagney, Bogie, Stewart—Fonda, too—it looks like they’re not even trying. I’ve only just started to appreciate that fact.” McDowell taps the side of his head. “It’s up there, the torture. It’s ‘Can I do it? Can I pull it off?’ ”
A weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune was lying on the stone paving by the side of the pool, soaking up splashes like blotting paper. McDowell picked it up. “Have you seen them?” he asked, leafing through the soggy pages. He found the financial page with the stock market listings. “Poor fellers, here they are in lovely Cannes and every morning the first thing they do is look at the stock market figures. Mustn’t laugh, though, we all need them.”
He was in Cannes with his new film, O Lucky Man!, the official British entry for the Festival. Directed by Lindsay Anderson, whose two previous major films—The Sporting Life and If—both won prizes at Cannes in previous years, O Lucky Man! is a contemporary epic, a three-hour Pilgrim’s Progress which plots the picaresque ups and downs of one Mick Travis, a former coffee salesman whose ambitions lead him through corruption in business and politics and finally to prison. He leaves prison still curiously innocent, believing, like the hero of Candide, that everything is for the best. Travis is not only played by McDowell, but the original story concept is also his. It’s been a four-year project, ending with a $1.8 million shooting budget and a letter virtually every day from Warner Bros, nagging about the R rating demanded by a production clause.