My problem with \u201cThe Shining\u201d 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 \u201cFroggy\u201d 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.
\n<\/p>\n
Okay, so maybe my version of \u201cThe Shining\u201d is a tad different from Stephen King\u2019s source text \u2013 but, then again, so was Stanley Kubrick\u2019s. And while I never read the King novel, I\u2019ve seen the Kubrick film three times \u2013 and with each new viewing, I find the production to be hopelessly silly.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 I like \u201cThe Shining.\u201d In terms of cinematography, production design, editing, sound effects and sheer audacity, it is brilliant. But while I like the film, I don\u2019t love it. <\/p>\n
Indeed, it is impossible to watch the film\u2019s final half-hour without laughing out loud. Jack Nicholson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
There have been endless theories on what \u201cThe Shining\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
Still, wouldn\u2019t it have been great if Jules White had a crack at \u201cThe Shining\u201d? Especially if he could cast Christine McIntyre as the woman in Room 237 who mistakes Shemp Howard\u2019s Jack Torrance for her cousin Basil. Pity that Kubrick didn\u2019t go that route. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My problem with \u201cThe Shining\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":47895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1369],"tags":[219,477,518,3291,3716,2159,978,1074],"class_list":["post-47894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-retro-cinema","tag-comedy","tag-horror","tag-jack-nicholson","tag-jules-white","tag-shelley-duvall","tag-shemp-howard","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-the-shining"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47894"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47914,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47894\/revisions\/47914"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}