When it was released Spanish critics accused it of heavily plagiarising Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Director Eloy de la Iglesia reacted with outrage to the accusations but those critics had a point. Large chunks of this movie are lifted directly from Kubrick’s movie. This is not an homage, this is grand larceny. Interestingly the scenes copied from A Clockwork Orange are copied badly. It’s like a backward pupil copying the homework of the smartest kid in the class but still getting the answers wrong.
It has the same kind of not-too-distant future setting as Kubrick’s movie. There is a juvenile delinquency problem. We see a home invasion, carried out by a gang of four juvenile delinquents (just as in Kubrick’s film). We see the gang driving along a quiet country road at high speed (just as in Kubrick’s film). The gang members brutalise the husband and rape the wife (just as in Kubrick’s film). But while the scene in Kubrick’s movie is genuinely disturbing because it’s filmed with so much skill and style the equivalent scene here is dull and obvious and crude.
Then there’s a fight as the gang leader tries to reassert his dominance over the gang (just as in Kubrick’s film).
This ends with David (Christopher Mitchum) being cast out of the gang. Later he will be beaten up up by his former gang-mates (just as in Kubrick’s film).
Dr Sender (Jean Sorel) is working on a new technique of behaviour modification to cure violent offenders (just as in Kubrick’s film). David ends up in custody and is chosen to be one of the experimental subjects (just like Alex in Kubrick’s film).
But Murder in a Blue World is actually more like three or four movies jumbled together without rhyme or reason. There are two main plot strands. The first is the one stolen (sorry, homaged) from A Clockwork Orange.
The second is much more interesting. It’s a serial killer story with some genuinely intriguing and unsettling elements. A number of young men have been murdered. We know that the killer is Ana Vernia (Sue Lyon), a nurse at Dr Sender’s clinic. I’m not revealing a spoiler here - we know she is the killer pretty much from the beginning.
Ana is one crazy chick. She thinks the world is entirely inhabited by dead people who think they are alive. It’s OK to kill them because they’re already dead. In fact she’s doing them a favour, freeing them from their nightmare existence. She is an angel of mercy. Killing them is an at of love. She always has sex with them first - for her the killing is just an extension of the love-making. This is all truly creepy and Sue Lyon is great - she makes this strange confused twisted character oddly believable.
This part of the movie is excellent and it should have been the focus of the whole movie.
Director Eloy de la Iglesia was gay and he adds lots of gay elements that feel like they’ve been shoehorned into the story. There’s a scene in which Ana masquerades as a butch lesbian. Why? I have no idea. There’s also a gay rape which I assume was included to shock the bourgeoisie.
Eloy de la Iglesia was also a communist so there’s political content that is also shoehorned into the story, stuff about the evils of capitalism and consumerism. It’s heavy-handed and embarrassing.
While Sue Lyon is terrific the other main cast members present problems. Christopher Mitchum is very good but he makes David much too sympathetic. A Clockwork Orange works because the viewer feels so conflicted about Alex - he’s so likeable but he’s also a vicious little thug. We are conflicted about the things that are done to him - are they justified or not? David is just likeable. He’s just a slightly naughty little boy. David needed to be given much more of a nasty edge for the Clockwork Orange Rip-Off plot strand to work. I’m not sure if the fault is Mitchum’s or the director’s.
Jean Sorel was a superb subtle actor with an extraordinary knack for playing super-nice charming guys whom we do not trust one little bit. He’s entirely wasted here in a nothing part.
The few really striking images are mostly lifted (sorry, homaged) from Kubrick’s movie.
There’s an attempt to link the two major plot strands but it just doesn’t work. The two stories just don’t mesh. The final scene is just so absurd that it pretty much makes a mockery of the whole movie.
There’s an extraordinary lack of erotic heat, perhaps not surprising given that the director presumably had no interest in male-female eroticism.
Murder in a Blue World is two movies in one, one of them really interesting and one of them a total failure. The Clockwork Orange stuff ends up going nowhere, although maybe the director thought it was some kind of critique of capitalism.
Almost worth seeing for Sue Lyon’s performance and the interesting twists on the serial killer theme but overall it’s a bit of a trainwreck. Hard to recommend this one.
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