No detail goes unnoticed when it comes to A Clockwork Orange. We receive many questions here at Film and Furniture about the furniture, decor and art in the film sets of Kubrick‘s disturbing dystopian 1971 film, and recently we were asked about a detail in Mr and Mrs Alexander’s house ‘HOME’ which sent me down yet another Kubrick rabbit hole.

HOME is the modernist open plan house with carefully placed ultra modern, space-age 60s furniture, where Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his Droogs reap havoc whilst Alex sings ‘Singin’ In The Rain’. When Alex visits later on in the film, he sits at a glass and chrome dining table eating spaghetti bolognese and drinking red wine. Mr Alexandra (now confined to a wheelchair) sits on on one side and his burly assistant (played by David Prowse who also played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy and known to many as the Green Cross Code man) sits to the other.

 

More Wine?

The recent question by a F&F reader was asking if we could identify the exact bottle of red wine we see in this scene in A Clockwork Orange.

I distinctly remember after watching A Clockwork Orange in the cinema on its rerelease after Kubrick’s self-enforced long hiatus, needing to immediately eat spaghetti bolognese and drink red wine afterwards! It’s a ritual my partner and I now perform regularly, so this question caught my attention.

The wine is referred to in the dialogue as “1960 Chateau, Saint-Estephe, Medoc” but the label is not clear.

After careful research I now believe it’s a 1960 Chateau Beau-Site-Haut-Vignoble, Saint Estephe, Medoc.

It can be identified by the similar crest as seen on these 1957 and later Chateau Beau-Site-Haut-Vignoble labels seen above. 

Alex wasn’t far wrong when he says in the film “It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen” as the red wine in the glass was apparently Ribena!  

It’s highly unlikely the prop itself still exists as Kubrick was famous for destroying props after filming, but who knows?

 

You may also be interested in:-

The film sets and furniture of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange: “A real horrorshow” Part 1

The filmsets and furniture of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “A real horrorshow” Part 2