reviews of the shining -- 3/15/24

15 Mar 2024

reviews of the shining -- 3/15/24

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Today's selection -- from Kubrick: An Odyssey by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams. Stanley Kubrick’s extraordinary film The Shining received unflattering reviews upon its release:

“The last week before the premiere, Kubrick personally examined every reel of the first twenty-five prints of his film to make sure that the sound mix and reproduction, and the visual quality (colour and brightness) of each print met with his approval. They did, and The Shining opened on schedule in the US on 23 May 1980. By the standards of Barry Lyndon, The Shining had a much more clearly defined publicity campaign and target audience, along with being highly exploitable and more in tune with the tenor of the times. Kubrick edited and scored the thirty-second trailer. Warner Bros' attempt to cash in on horror's success led to a more concerted effort to make The Shining a blockbuster: it had a wide first-run release and an advertising budget of $11.2 million. 'I'll settle for half the gross of The Empire Strikes Back,' Kubrick told an interviewer. In the end, it earned some $45 million in the US and almost $47 million worldwide.

“The reviewers, though, as so often with a Kubrick film, didn't quite know what to make of it. Many were either baffied or hostile. Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, struck a by-now-familiar note about Kubrick the detached artist. 'How can anyone make a film so fastidiously beautiful and still leave so many loose ends?' she asked. 'First and foremost, it is mesmerizingly lovely, so handsome you may be halfway out of the theatre before those nagging questions arise.' She was put off by some of the film's inconsistencies but taken by Kubrick's greater artistry. 'The richness of his work,' she concludes, 'is something rare.' Variety was less charitable. 'The crazier Nicholson gets, the more idiotic he looks. Shelley Duvall transforms the warm sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric.' And of course, the worst complaint possible: that the film wasn't true to the novel. 'All that was so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller' has been lost. The review compared Kubrick's film unfavourably to a popular horror film of the moment, Halloween. Pauline Kael, dependably anti-Kubrick, criticized his preoccupation with the technical aspects of film-making and his meticulous visuals. In keeping with this sense chat Kubrick was detached from prevailing genre trends, Richard Combs, in the Monthly Film Bulletin, argued that 'Seclusion has taken its toll; Kubrick has no more discussable subjects to tackle or vogues to initiate; he has been driven back on his own resources; he has become an auteur' — as if creating from the artist's imagination was something unusual. But he recognizes the depth and scope of the film: 'All of mankind is contained here.' He recognizes as well that Jack, as 'the reclusive and frustrated creator' could well be 'Kubrick's negative self-image'. Mainstream critics expecting the cheap, fast thrills of American genre film-making derided The Shining’s possession of the very qualities they would celebrate in a European art film. Others saw more deeply, even understanding that the film required multiple viewings to fully comprehend its meanings.

“Kubrick was sanguine. 'I have never learnt anything about my work by reading film critics,' he told Canadian director John Hofsess. He utters the word 'critics' the way most people say 'sluts', the interviewer wrote. 'Film critics', Kubrick went on, 'only seem to have any importance when their tastes coincide with those of the general public ... I've never achieved spectacular success with a film ... My reputation has grown slowly, I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker — in that a number of people speak well of me ... But none of my films has received unanimously positive reviews; and none has done blockbuster business.' Was this a statement of some bitterness or simply resignation? Stanley Kubrick was comfortable enough not only in his own skin, but in his own imagination, to take the critics as they came and understand that his films grew in estimation with time. It is one reason that he laboured so intensively over the transfer of his films first to video and then to DVD as those new technologies of distribution became available.”