RIP Robert Osborne: Movie Truth Teller

With the passing of original Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne  at age 84, classic movie fans have lost both a genial movie host and a man with a profound love for and encyclopedic knowledge of film and its history. And in this one TCM introduction I happened to stumble upon while looking for something to post that would represent Osborne's talents in a nutshell, there exists a goldmine. In introducing 1971's Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange for a scant  two minutes and seventeen seconds, he manages to do three things:

1) Impart a movie truism: Movies don't change. We do.

2) Educate and/or remind us that the film had its supporters and detractors. And indeed, a quick check of the IMDb reveals that the film divided the critical establishment. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times hated the film for its violent  and cynical worldview and cavalier treatment of subjects like murder and rape, while Vincent Canby of the New York Times praised it for the same things.

3) Osborne's admission that he himself was initially one of Clockwork's detractors, walking out of a Christmas season 1971 preview screening after witnessing Malcom McDowell's sadistic and demented Alex stomp a hobo to death while pretending to be Gene Kelly in Singing in The Rain. Not the best way to get into the Christmas spirit, he thought. And he's obviously right. But leaving a screening can be a ballsy and potentially career-damaging thing to do, particularly if he was there to review it. I know I got a stern talking to from my editor for leaving a screening of Constantine that I was reviewing for a college paper simply to answer the call of nature. To give Robert Osborne the posthumous benefit of the doubt, I will assume that the screening was an opinion maker one, to generate buzz in the Hollywood community among critics and other notables, and not one he had to cover.

4) And finally his assertion that with all the things going on in the world in the last while, A Clockwork Orange's cynical, downbeat tone seems more timely than ever.




MTMG