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An Evening with Malcolm McDowell - Chasing Chicks with Your Wang Out

Legendary English actor Malcolm McDowell was in town yesterday to premiere his new film Never Apologize.  The new documentary is actually a one-man show McDowell performed last year as a dedication to filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (If…, O Lucky Man!–both starring Malcolm McDowell and both featuring punctuation in their titles).  McDowell was in town for a Q & A after the film moderated by Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington.

McDowell’s entry into this year’s Chicago International Film Festival is actually a very pleasing and enjoyable documentary.  He reminisces about how he came to know and work with Lindsay Anderson and just how important the director was to his life.  McDowell, never veering too far from the topic of Anderson, is a captivating presence.  The stage he appears on is simple with an enlarged, framed photo of Anderson and McDowell on set juxtaposed with a photo of Anderson as a child.  He stands in between and tells his stories and reads from various diaries.

McDowell shows that he can be a great and effective story-teller.  Some of my favorite stories from Never Apologize involve McDowell running into various famous actors like when he was at the Cannes film festival in the late 60’s and was given drugs from three people he didn’t know, but later realized were Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson (there for Easy Rider).  We don’t hear many more stories about McDowell’s drug use or his most notorious performances in A Clockwork Orange or Caligula (which McDowell refers to as an “awful” film–and the only mention of it is an anecdote about the abundance of wiener on set) because this is a fond remembrance of Lindsay Anderson, and McDowell treats it as such.  It’s a very warm and inviting documentary and really makes me want to go see some Lindsay Anderson movies (which will be entering my Blockbuster queue momentarily–Anderson’s 1973 film O Lucky Man! is finally hitting DVD this month).  As far as a one-man show, it’s not nearly as interesting looking as, say, John Leguizamo’s Freak, but it is still very effective.

Afterwards, Michael Wilmington and McDowell engaged in more conversation about Anderson and McDowell spoke about his relationship with Stanley Kubrick and how he disillusioned himself into believing that he and Kubrick would be good friends.  There was supposed to be a Q & A with McDowell but CIFF (in its infinite wisdom) scheduled another premiere at 9:15, leaving no time to ask any questions.

My question would’ve been one of the following:

• How come your wig in Rob Zombie’s Halloween was atrocious?
• When will we see you on Heroes again and how hot is Hayden Panettiere in real life?
• So how much drugs HAVE you done?

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