The ‘mechanical mandarin’: sex and ultraviolence in Madrid in 1973

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the stormy premiere of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, the TCM channel (available on Movistar + and Vodafone, among other operators) has not only presented the esteemed documentary of its own production ‘The forbidden orange’ (a reconstruction of the arrival of Stanley Kubrick’s film to Spain through the Seminci in Valladolid four years late) but has also had the detail of rescue from oblivion ‘A drop of blood to die loving’, film directed in 1973 by the reckless Gipuzkoan filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia whose similarities to the Kubrickian adaptation of the novel by Anthony Burgess earned him in his day the jocular nickname of ‘the mechanical tangerine’ (or orthopedic, for the most perfidious critics).

The film is a Spanish-French co-production orchestrated by the illustrious Jose Frade to which De la Iglesia came immediately after directing two great (and very atypical) genre film samples: ‘La Semana del Asesino’ (1972), surprising ‘proto-slasher’ with Vicente Parra as a castizo ‘serial killer’, and the disturbing ‘thriller’ ‘No one heard scream’ (1973), starring Carmen Sevilla and, again, Vicente Parra.

Scientists and ‘pseudodrugs’

‘A drop of blood to die loving’ does not hide at any time its condition of product created to take advantage of the awe-inspiring scandal that had caused ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (a film whose showing was banned in Spain at that time). The presence in the film of a gang of uniformed youths who entertain themselves with indiscriminate practices of ultraviolence and non-consensual sex and the subplot that revolves around a scientific project promoted by the authorities to eradicate criminal impulses from the mind of repeat offenders point directly to Kubrick’s film, and Eloy de la Iglesia openly admits the debt by including a scene in which a family (who, by the way, is about to be mugged and terrorized by a gang of ‘pseudodrugs’ led by Antonio del Real) is about to watch & mldr; ‘A clockwork orange’ (at that time the film did not yet have a title in Spanish).

It is not the only tribute to the director of ‘2001’. The international cast of ‘A drop of blood to die loving’ (which includes Jean Sorel and the expressionless Chris Mitchum) is headed by the American actress Sue Lyon, a circumstance that De la Iglesia exploits with amusing impudence in a shot in which the interpreter appears reading the novel ‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov, whose film adaptation she herself had starred in 1962 under Kubrick’s orders.

Equally endearing is the setting of the story in a supposedly futuristic Madrid in which seventies aesthetics and cañí anticipation are mixedAll the vehicles featured are unmistakably from the era (from the familiar Seat 1500 converted into an ambulance to the Bultaco Sherpa 350 bought by Chris Mitchum) but people wear colorful ‘Star Trek’ inspired pajamas to stay at home and consume a strange fluorescent blue drink.

The psychopathic nurse

Now, the film is in no way a copy of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. In fact, it seems that all those elements that refer without dissimulation to the hyperviolent dystopian world created by Burgess and Kubrick were an imposition of the producers that Eloy de la Iglesia accepted to be able to shoot a story much closer to your interests and obsessions: that of a nurse fond of transformism (the aforementioned Sue Lyon) who cares for terminally ill and murders young people with whom she has just had sex, in an unhealthy combination of sweet compassion and psychotic cruelty.

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As a result of that frame overlap, the film has some incomplete pastiche in which the ingredients do not quite mix well. The script, signed by five people, no less (among them, in addition to De la Iglesia himself, Jose Luis Garci, who has always ensured that ‘A Clockwork Orange’ seems to him a detestable film), he laboriously advances between jerky movements and the director blurs some sequences with his usual formal sloppiness, although, in the scenes in which it is truly applied, achieves moments of indisputable poetic force (Like that Sue Lyon walk in a windy dawn with her nightgown splattered with drops of blood).

To clinch the nail of shameless exploitation, the film was marketed on video in the UK under the name ‘Clockwork Terror’. Nothing to do with the exalted and somewhat incomprehensible Spanish title. In Belgium it was released as ‘The Clinic of Horrors’. In Italy, where ‘retitling’ is a subtle art, like ‘The morbid vices of a young nurse’.