Malcolm McDowell

Malcolm McDowell was 25 when he played Mick Travis in If...., Lindsay Anderson's film about an English boarding school that ends in armed revolt on the roof. Stanley Kubrick saw it and cast him as Alex in A Clockwork Orange, and the whole trajectory was settled inside four years: McDowell became the most articulate face of charming violence in English cinema, and has been asked for a version of it ever since. He returned to Travis twice for Anderson, in O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, neither of which is in this catalog.

He is far better than most of the parts he takes, and he takes almost everything. The instrument is the voice and the eyes. He can deliver a threat as though it were a courtesy, and he can play a man enjoying himself well past the point where anyone else would stop. Time After Time, in which he plays H. G. Wells pursuing a killer through 1979 San Francisco, is the counter-example that proves the range, because he is entirely sweet in it.

The last four decades are an enormous and eccentric filmography: a Roman emperor in an infamous production, a Star Trek villain, Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie's Halloween films, the silent butler in The Artist, Rupert Murdoch in Bombshell, and a great stack of direct-to-video work he does not visibly resent. He is also a first-rate voice actor, which is where much of his best recent work lives. Very few of these films are good. He is rarely the reason.