John Huston's 1941 version of the classic private detective story The Maltese Falcon remains one of the most faithful film adaptations of any novel ever made into a film in Hollywood History. Entire pieces of dialogue from not only lead character Sam Space, but all the other main characters are taken directly from Dashiell Hammett's novel and literally placed into the mouths of the actors who recreate the scenes just as they are found in the pages of the novel. Dialogue is only one of the elements of a work of literary fiction that can, however, determine the fidelity of a film adaptation. In the case of A Clockwork Orange, creating a film adaptation faithful to the style of The Maltese Falcon was made virtually impossible by author Anthony Burgess. His invented language that mixes slang, Russian and some gypsy elements for his character – a language he called Nadsat – densely populates the book's descriptive elements as well as its dialogue to the point that a glossary must be consulted every few scenes. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Trying to transfer such incomprehensibility intact to the screen would prove not only impossible, but futile since Nadsat's primary purpose is to allow the reader to disengage from the endlessly dark and violent narrative. Why make it virtually impossible for viewers without a handy glossary nearby to understand the dialogue when the novel could remain faithful to the myriad of other equally important literary elements while manipulating the visual power of cinema to remain faithful to the distancing aspect of the Nadsat? Stanley Kubrick's use of multiple cinematic techniques that equate to the literary devices employed by Burgess even if they do not actually replicate them serves to make A Clockwork Orange one of the most faithful film adaptations of a novel by choosing to focus on staying true to different elements . of dialogue. Aside from the decision to equate fidelity with the attempted scene-by-scene transformation that distinguishes The Maltese Falcon, the film diverges from the source material in other significant ways. For example, the choice of Malcolm McDowell to play the novel's protagonist, Alex, could be considered irrefutably unfaithful. The only way to stay true to the casting of the character that takes up virtually every second of screen time would have been to find an amazing teenage actor and then convince a movie studio in 1970 to let that young person perform scenes for a movie. he would be prohibited from actually participating due to age restrictions. Almost certainly today it would not be possible to make a film perfectly faithful to the novel; attempting it at the time would have been unthinkable or even a criminal offence. Casting has the power to make or break a film and it's probably true that if Kubrick had attempted to move Alex as described by Burgess into the novel intact, the film would have been a huge failure. Alex is not only the most extreme version of the young delinquent character ever depicted on screen, the story is told from his point of view. Alex would have been the villain in any other major feature film of the time and so throughout the film the audience is asked to look at the world he lives in from his point of view. That point of view for at least half the film essentially asks the audience to see the world from the point of view of a psychopath. And then, in the second half of the film, alter their perspective so that their point of view is now that of onepsychopath who should be pitied. Only by slightly altering the character's age so that an actor with McDowell's ability to project menace, childishness and pathos in equal parts and equally realistic can the audience respond to this genuinely indulgent request. What helps A Clockwork Orange's success in asking audiences to see the world through such a reprehensible protagonist is the way Kubrick uses cinematic techniques to transfer from page to screen the literary techniques that allowed readers to do the same thing , only at an even more extreme level. Nadsat creeps into the screenplay to a much less significant extent than in the book, but more as a recurring motif to distance viewers by situating the narrative as taking place at a certain point in the future. The novel's use of the often impenetrable slang used by its characters is for the purposes of constant distraction capable of alienating the reader from Alex just enough so that they do not fall victim to identifying too closely with him and thus fail to grasp the final message from the author. . Stanley Kubrick manages to achieve the same effect by avoiding alienating the viewer by presenting dialogue that he must struggle to understand or by treating Nadsat like a foreign language by translating its meaning through subtitles. The audience's necessary distance from Alex so that they can simultaneously be forced into his point of view to understand him while being forcibly alienated to gain objective critical engagement, achieved through non-diegetic sound during some of the film's most violent sequences, the use of low-angle close-ups of Alex to endow him with malevolence, and cinematic editing that reverses the natural movement of the camera towards the protagonist as a means of forcing identification through the repetitive use of reverse zooms in which moving the camera away from Alex has l effect of detaching the audience's identification. Through these and various other cinematic effects, Kubrick manages to maintain the distancing purpose of Nadsat while avoiding the irritating aspects of constantly consulting the glossary while reading the book, allowing the film not only to remain faithful to the spirit of the novel, but to actually be a more pleasant aesthetic experience. The film also manages to remain faithful to the novel's vision of a nightmarish, yet strangely seductive near-future, while at the same time managing to replicate the distancing effect on the reader of such an innovative yet disorienting environment. The world in which fifteen-year-old Alex and his droogs move in the novel is clearly established not as an absolutely fantastical fictional world, divorced from concepts of realism like a science fiction novel set hundreds of years in the future, but as a logically possible outcome. of current society no more than a few decades into the future. At the same time, the reader experiences a sense of dislocation from their time while reading the book due to the more bizarre outcomes of that future predicted by the book. The film uses all the visual power of cinema to bring that vision of a future that is entirely possible and at the same time alienated enough from the contemporary context to live fully. The furniture is brightly colored and populated by immediately identifiable objects which nevertheless increase that sense of disorientation resulting from being too large or too smooth or too rounded or simply too out of place. If the decor of sculptures of ridiculously large penises is disorienting by being recognizable enough, but simply not quite right, then the costume choices can be said to push the film to the limits of its own absurdity.