The Shining ***** (1980, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Anne Jackson, Joe Turkel, Philip Stone) – Classic Movie Review 85

Jack Nicholson’s barnstorming performance dominates Stanley Kubrick’s superlative 1980 chiller The Shining, based (remotely) on the Stephen King novel. Shelley Duvall is also admirable in a tour-de-force as his highly-strung wife in peril.

Jack Nicholson’s barnstorming, grandstanding performance dominates Stanley Kubrick’s superlative 1980 chiller The Shining, based (remotely) on the Stephen King novel. Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a slick but rather seedy loser who is hired by smooth hotel boss Stuart Ullman (creepily played by Barry Nelson) to be the winter caretaker of The Overlook, a huge, posh, vintage hotel for rich folks in the remote Colorado mountains.

Ominously, Nelson mentions the stresses of this lonely job that had led a predecessor to commit murder. Nelson settles Nicholson, his highly-strung wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and haunted young son Danny (Danny Lloyd) into the hotel as the last guests and staff are leaving. Once the snows have set in, it’s sealed off from the world till spring, but there is an old timer, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), on hand to dispense advice and conveniently explain the film’s title – a telepathic gift.

While supposedly looking after things out of season, Nicholson’s trying to write a novel, but is suffering writer’s block, just typing ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, while going crazier and crazier. Soon, he appears to be having disturbing visions somehow linked to Room 237 and two young girls – and so does his son – and finally he goes on the rampage, trying to attack his wife and kid, axe in hand (‘here’s Johnny!’).

With a fantastic production (designed by Roy Walker), marvellous cinematography (by John Alcott) and brilliant music (by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind), obsessive director Kubrick ensures this is a mesmerising, haunting movie, as brilliant and enigmatic as his 2001 A Space Odyssey, to which it is a companion piece.

Kubrick conjures up the sinister atmosphere of the deserted hotel in winter beautifully and keeps a long, sometimes talky movie tense, nail-biting, buoyant and dynamic with thrillingly controlled Steadicam filming.

You can hardly keep your eyes off Nicholson, pitching it somewhere between great screen acting and self-caricature in a dazzlingly hysterical, unsettling performance. But all the other virtues of the film really do shine through, and Kubrick knows how to manage some sudden scares and bursts of violence that really deliver the goods.

Duvall is also admirable in a tour-de-force as the squeaky lady in peril, the six-year-old Lloyd brings the right eerie quality to the kid (‘Redrum, Redrum!’), Crothers is a model of warm and wise, Philip Stone is creepy as an old retainer called Delbert Grady. Adding to texture in small roles, Anne Jackson adds authority in her one little scene as the boy’s doctor/ child psychologist and Joe Turkel is fun as Lloyd the barman.

This is that rarest of things, a horror film of true, extraordinary quality and a puzzle movie that has no one answer and keeps audiences guessing forever but still isn’t annoying.

Almost unbelievably, the isolated hotel and the snowy exteriors were all created meticulously in the studio – Elstree, north London. Shooting took more than an entire year. Principal photography began in May 1978 and wrapped in July 1979. There was no aircon in the studio, so the actors were sweltering even in the snowy exterior scenes. It was the same studio Kubrick filmed Lolita in, back in 1961.

Nicholson stopped even bothering to read each new draft of the script as Kubrick and his writing partner Diane Johnson were changing it so often. Kubrick fell out with his actors, arguing frequently with Duvall, whom he isolated and put through filming exhausting sequences, especially the baseball bat scene, which she shot 127 times.

After filming, Duvall presented Kubrick with clumps of hair she said had fallen out because of the stress of filming. She recalled that she was required to cry 12 hours a day, five or six days a week for the entire last nine months of shooting. She said: ‘It was so difficult being hysterical for that length of time.’

Kubrick hacked 27 minutes out of The Shining for European release after its tepid box-office in the US, and this version run at 119 minutes, but in October 2012, the British Film Institute finally released the full 146-minute original version for the first time in British cinemas. The cut US TV version runs at 142 minutes.

Three days after the release of the film in the US, Kubrick ordered all cinema projectionists to cut two minutes from the end of the film and return the footage to Warner Brothers. So it runs 144 minutes.

Danny Lloyd was picked because he look right and could concentrate for extended periods. Because he was only seven, he was closely guarded by Kubrick during filming and didn’t know it was a horror film until several years later. Despite his notoriety and fame for his line ‘Redrum! Redrum!’, Danny made no other cinema movie. After filming one TV movie in 1982, he said he didn’t fancy an acting career. He’s now a science teacher in Missouri.

In November 2013, horror director David Cronenberg caused a rumpus: ‘I find The Shining not to be a great film. I don’t think Kubrick understood the horror genre. I don’t think he understood what he was doing. There were some striking images in the book and he got that, but I don’t think he really felt it.’

A sequel titled Doctor Sleep, based on King’s 2013 novel. was released in 2019.

The cast are Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance, Danny Lloyd as Danny ‘Doc’ Torrance, Scatman Crothers as Dick Hallorann, Barry Nelson as Stuart Ullman, Philip Stone as Delbert Grady, Joe Turkel as Lloyd, Anne Jackson as Doctor, Tony Burton as Larry Durkin, Lia Beldam as young woman in bath, Billie Gibson as old woman in bath, Barry Dennen as Bill Watson, and identical twins Lisa Burns and Louise Burns as the Grady sisters, the ghosts of the murdered Grady daughters.

All scenes with Jackson and Burton are cut in the European but the credits are unchanged. Dennen is in all versions of the film, though in a limited way with no dialogue in the European cut.

The Shining is made by The Producer Circle Company, Peregrine Productions and Hawk Films, and is released by Warner Bros.

Release dates: May 23, 1980 (US) and October 2, 1980 (UK).

Running time: 146 minutes (premiere), 144 minutes (American) and 119 minutes (European).

Budget: $19 million. Box office: $47.3 million.

Incidentally, Steadicam, the brand of movie camera stabiliser mounts, was invented by Garrett Brown and introduced in 1975 by Cinema Products Corporation, so Kubrick was using relatively new technology to make his film look innovative and immersive.

Nowadays it is generally hailed one of the best horror films of all time but in 1980 there were many adverse reactions to the film, including nominations at the first Razzies in 1981 for Worst Director and Worst Actress.

Stephen King criticised the film for its deviations from his 1977 novel and criticised Kubrick as a director: ‘Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. Because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others.’

In more detail, King disliked Kubrick’s decision not to film at the hotel that inspired the story, The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Kubrick had said the hotel lacked sufficient snow and electricity. King also disliked the re-invention of Duvall’s character, saying she is ‘basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.’

Anne Jackson.

Anne Jackson, who was married to Eli Wallach (1915–2014), died on April 12 2016 in Manhattan, aged 90.

Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach.

Joe Turkel died at the age of 94 from liver failure in Santa Monica, California, on June 27, 2022. He is known for Stanley Kubrick’s films The Killing, Paths of Glory and The Shining, and as Dr Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner. He also acted in three of Bert I Gordon’s films.

Shelley Alexis Duvall (July 7, 1949 – July 11, 2024).

Shelley Duvall (July 7, 1949 – July 11, 2024) is known for her collaborations with Robert Altman, who cast her in Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), 3 Women (1977) and Popeye (1980).

She won the Best Actress award at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival for 3 Women.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 85

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