Day 79: The Shining (1980)

Movie #49 – The Shining (1980) - 142 min, cert 15.

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is a struggling playwright. He has been employed as caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, way up in the mountains of Colorado, and it will be his job to stay in the hotel during the long winter when it is cut-off by the weather and look after the place. Jack, his wife Wendy, and his son Danny arrive as the hotel is closing up and get shown around the place. We find out that Danny has a low-level psychic ability, a talent he shares with the cook, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers). Everything begins normally enough. Jack is taking advantage of the peace and quiet to work on a new play, Danny rides his trike around the maze of corridors, and everyone is happy. But the hotel is haunted by the ghosts of people who have died there over the years, including a previous caretaker who ran amok one winter killing his wife and daughters, and then himself. Needless to say, it isn’t long before Wendy and Danny are looking for a way out.

As I believe I mentioned when reviewing the very first film on the list, Shawshank Redemption, I’m a huge Stephen King fan, having read all of his books. My first encounter with Stephen King was in an airport bookshop when I was quite young. Me and my sister were looking for some good holiday reading matter, and she said she’d heard he was good. We bought Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot and The Shining between us, and I read all three on that holiday. I was hooked and have been ever since.

While this is undoubtedly a good film, I struggle to view it as a film in its own right. Instead, I cannot help but see it as an adaptation, and feel compelled to judge it as such. Unfortunately, therein lies the problem. Kubrick rather butchered the book in the course of making the movie. I understand why he did it. A lot of the motifs of the book are primarily involved with what the characters are thinking about, and that would be very hard to convey on the screen, others would have been very difficult to film from a technical point of view, like the hedge animals that come to life. So Kubrick stripped them all out, and this presumably left something of a void, which he filled it with something entirely new and much more visual – the idea of the maze. It’s not just the obvious hedge maze, but also the maze of corridors that Danny rides down, even the maze-like patterns in the carpets and wallpaper.

I think it’s this addition of something new that jars the most. It takes a lot longer to read a novel than it does to watch a movie, so inevitably there is going to be too much substance in the book to make it into the film and some of it will need to be culled. While this is often a shame, it has to be expected, it just isn’t practical to include everything. But when a director starts adding entirely new elements, he crosses a line that fans of the original source find hard to accept.

Of course, Nicholson is fantastic in the role of Danny, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Shelley Duvall does well as the timid wife, although she’s a little too timid for my liking. In the book she was quite a bit stronger mentally. Danny Lloyd is superb as Danny Torrance, considering he was only 7 at the time, it’s an exceptional piece of acting.

Score – 5/10. I just can’t help scowling, tutting and shaking my head whenever the hedge maze gets mentioned.

Next up is Paths of Glory, an early black & white World War I film with Kirk Douglas. I’ve never even heard of it before, let alone seen it.