My problem with “The Shining” is that it was made at the wrong time by the wrong people. It should have been made by the Columbia Pictures short subjects department in the mid-1940s with Shemp Howard as Jack Torrance, Vera Vague as Wendy Torrance, Dudley Dickerson as Dick Halloran, and (in a loan-out from Hal Roach) Billy “Froggy” Laughlin as Danny Torrance. And behind the camera, Jules White would direct the film by filling the Overlook Hotel with a gorilla throwing pies and skeletons operating on clearly visible wires.
Okay, so maybe my version of “The Shining” is a tad different from Stephen King’s source text – but, then again, so was Stanley Kubrick’s. And while I never read the King novel, I’ve seen the Kubrick film three times – and with each new viewing, I find the production to be hopelessly silly.
Don’t get me wrong – I like “The Shining.” In terms of cinematography, production design, editing, sound effects and sheer audacity, it is brilliant. But while I like the film, I don’t love it.
Indeed, it is impossible to watch the film’s final half-hour without laughing out loud. Jack Nicholson’s hammy emoting is so wildly over the top that he generates giggles instead of chills. And poor Shelley Duvall pinballs between feats of Amazonian strength (clubbing her husband with a baseball bat and then dragging his sorry ass through a hotel before locking him in a pantry) and cringe-inducing shrieking and whimpering. Their emoting is so overdone that it feels as if Kubrick directed them as if they were on a proscenium stage and were to play to the last row of the balcony.
There have been endless theories on what “The Shining” is all about, ranging from an allegory on the Holocaust to a symbolic condemnation of capitalism. From my perspective, it is a highly artistic version of a Jules White-directed haunted house comedy where a bunch of silly people react in exaggerated terror over spooky doings in a creepy place.
Still, wouldn’t it have been great if Jules White had a crack at “The Shining”? Especially if he could cast Christine McIntyre as the woman in Room 237 who mistakes Shemp Howard’s Jack Torrance for her cousin Basil. Pity that Kubrick didn’t go that route.