100. Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge
        A Clockwork Orange (1971)

It’s sickening that we could sympathize with a self-aggrandizing, sadistic rapist, but that’s because we’re powerless under McDowell’s spell as Alex, the tender young hooligan in Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian A Clockwork Orange. The exacting director heightened McDowell’s performance through some viciousness of his own, subjecting the actor to several modes of psychological torture, including his de rigueur multiple takes but also having him repeatedly spat upon for one scene, and subjecting him to a near-drowning experience for another. “I gave [Kubrick] everything,” McDowell said to Premiere in 1999, “broke ribs and had a blood clot on the back of my ribs; had the corneas of my eyes scratched . . . I went through a lot of physical torture to get the realism that he’d wanted.”

Well, it seems to have worked. McDowell’s performance shines, and he embodies the disaffected joy of youth with such finesse that you’d have to merge James Cagney with Laurence Olivier to get something close. No need—McDowell, with his tongue placed firmly on the bottom of Kubrick’s boot, had the goods.

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