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RETROSPECTIVE
The Shining
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duval, Danny Lloyd, Scatman
Crothers
Directed By:
Stanley Kubrick
Produced By: Martin Richards
Written By: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson
Distributed By: Warner Brothers |
Originally released in 1980, based on the novel by Stephen King,
The Shining features Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in one of the
greatest horror films of all time. Stanley Kubrick produced, directed,
and wrote the screenplay for this movie; it just goes to show what a
genius at filmmaking Kubrick really was. He was extremely versatile,
directing both comedic masterpieces, as well as gripping horrors .
The Shining is quite an addition to his great collection of movies.
In this
horror/suspense film, which will keep you at the edge of your seat,
Nicholson plays a father and husband of a family who is hired to be the
caretakers of the Overlook Hotel for a winter. The hotel, a ski resort,
is positioned high in the mountains and is always snowed-in every
winter. The caretaker is instituted, in order to keep the hotel in
shape and fix things during the winter. It is closed for several
months, due to extremely cold weather and the common blizzards that
occur in its location, Colorado.
However, things
are quite odd from the start. The hotel’s past caretakers have been the
victims of tragic events. For example, the last caretaker went crazy,
and axe-murdered his two daughters to death. And, although Nicholson’s
character seems alright for some time, one can see that there is an odd
force at work in the film. You can tell that something is not quite
right. In addition, there is a black man (Scatman Crothers) who is
featured in the beginning of the film, showing the family around the
hotel. He has an odd power that plays a part later on in the movie.
This power is basically the power of telekinesis; the old man and
Nicholson’s boy can read each other’s thoughts. This boy, Danny (Danny
Lloyd), has the power to make this odd feeling appear more frequently in
the film, and does. As usual, King’s story is a tapestry of oddness.
For the first
couple of weeks, the family stays true to their normal activities.
Nicholson writes (he’s an author), the mother takes care of the cooking
and the looks after her son, and Danny just plays and rides around the
hotel on a tricycle. It seems to be going quite normally. However,
Danny does encounter some odd experiences while taking his trips around
the resort. He sees visions of the two daughters of the man who went
crazy and killed his family. He also sees massive amounts of blood pour
out of the elevators.
After Danny
starts to have these visions, things start to get stranger and
stranger. The visions start to talk to the boy, and Danny starts to not
only see the girls as they were in their living state; he also sees them
after they had been chopped to pieces. While these things happen,
Nicholson’s character starts to act strangely also. His temper grows
quite short, and when the wife, the only one who stays relatively
normal, looks at what he has been writing for the past couple of months,
she finds only one line written over and over again, thousands and
thousands of times:
“All work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy.”
Just pages and
pages of it. That’s when it hits her—her husband is going crazy.
Nicholson’s strangeness isn’t only reflected through his writing habits.
And he goes into the dreaded room of 217, where the remains of the last
caretaker’s family had been found. In there he finds quite an odd
hallucination. Nicholson also, hallucinates. He sees a man, at the bar
serving drinks, while a huge dinner party is underway, when, in fact,
the place is empty, save him and his family.
Finally,
Nicholson’s character goes crazy and, in a way, proves that history kind
of does repeat itself. The conclusion has an interesting way of pulling
everything together (big surprise considering its Stephen King), and it
kind of leaves you at a point where some things still don’t make sense.
Also, the last scene gives an odd twist to the movie, and the entire
idea and plot of the story. It is truly a classic horror film.
-Steven Cipriano, Bucket Reviews
