Strange post today. Or call it two half-posts, since I came across two things I wanted to comment on but neither is inspiring me to do a full piece.
First off, someone was posting on a Stephen King fan group I joined on Facebook, asking if other people agreed with them that Stanley Kubrick’s film version of “The Shining” came up far short of King’s book.
Well …
I have friends I respect who think the film is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. I don’t agree with them, just as I don’t care for Barry Levinson’s adaptation of “The Natural” as a baseball movie.
But while “The Natural” could have been a great movie if it had simply retained the ending of Bernard Malamud’s novel, my problems with the Kubrick film are far greater.
The evil character in “The Shining” is the Overlook Hotel itself, and the book is set up to show it working on Jack Torrance — a troubled, flawed man but not a killer — to drive him insane enough to kill his wife and son and then himself. King does that effectively in the book and almost as effectively in the 1997 television miniseries remake.
But Kubrick makes that impossible in his choice of Jack Nicholson to play Jack Torrance. Jack Jack is half-crazed the first we see him and into shithouse rat territory before he has been in the Overlook a week.
By the time we get to his big moment when he channels Ed McMahon — “Here’s Johnny!” — it’s impossible to believe he has ever sane enough to make it through college, get a job, marry a woman and father a child.
At that stage in his career, if Nicholson had played the Dalai Lama, we would have been waiting for His Holiness to go berserk with a flamethrower.
Don’t get me wrong. Stanley Kubrick was a wonderful filmmaker who if he wasn’t in a class my himself, it didn’t take long to call the roll. But for all the people who want to cll this the greatest horror film of all time, I have to disagree. My late father was a true film buff, and he always said the scariest movie he ever saw was a British film from 1945 called “Dead of Night.”
It has probably been 50 years since I saw it, but I have to agree. I would rate “Psycho” higher as well as Fritz Lang’s “M,” and in a very strange way, since the production was so cheap and cheesy, George Romero’s wonderful “Night of the Living Dead.”
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I’m putting the second half-post off till tomorrow, but I’ll give you a clue. The first census taken in the U.S. was in 1790, when there were 3.9 million people in America. The largest state was Virginia, with a population of 747,610, and the smallest was Delaware (59,094).
Tune in tomorrow.