“I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney. I should think that he is on almost everyone’s first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining, you believe he’s a writer, failed or otherwise.” -Stanley Kubrick

I think Kubrick is right. It’s one of the differences between Nicholson and Robert De Niro. I’ve never believed De Niro when he played cerebral guys, like in The Last Tycoon or True Confessions. I always get the sense that when he tries to play brainy guys De Niro is exposed as a mook. But Nicholson, or Robert Duvall, or Gene Hackman, for that matter, can play a certain kind of brainy intelligence convincingly.

I said as much to our pal Matt Blankmon in an e-mail and he replied:

I think DeNiro connects more to Brando and Dean – that emotional physicality. You can buy him as a streetwise guy, a clever guy, but not bookish or cerebral. I don’t know about Duvall as a brainy guy – he’s another guy I feel more as wise, but not intellectual – Tom Hagen, but not Michael Corleone. Nicholson is a guy who just comes across as smart and that’s part of his energy, even when he’s playing a mook like in The Last Detail. The connection to Cagney is apt–Nicholson, however, wouldn’t have been a very good Travis Bickle. I think Paul Newman always projected a certain braininess on screen, so much so that I had trouble buying him as a dumb guy in Pocket Money.

And speaking of The Passenger, what Kubrick is talking about is why you have no problem accepting Jack as a semi-famous world-traveling journalist.

Interestingly – how often has William Hurt played a guy who looks and seems smart, but then is actually kinda dumb? He’s very easy to buy as a scientist in Altered States, but he’s so well suited as the superficially, seemingly brainy guys in Broadcast News and Body Heat who are actually not so smart.

Good points by Matt, especially how all intelligence isn’t the same. And De Niro doesn’t lack intelligence just not the same brand that Nicholson has.

Tonight and tomorrow at the Film Forum…motherfucker.

Mark Jacobson on the new Kubrick documentary:

After Strangelove, the canon was filled in. There was The Killing, from 1956, in which Kubrick reconfigured time to stage a racetrack heist and had Vince Edwards tell Marie Windsor, “Don’t bug me, I got to live my life a certain way.” There was Tony Curtis, talking like Sidney Falco/Bernie Schwartz as he washes Laurence Olivier’s back in Spartacus. And, of course, there was James Mason’s Humbert Humbert shooting Clare Quilty in the boxing glove and telling Dolores Haze of the “great feeling of tenderness” he has for her. But how could anyone have predicted the transformative experience of 2001? Four straight nights, we lay on the carpet between the first row and the screen, staring up into the Light. When it was over, the usher peeled us from the floor.

Which brings us up to The Shining, which, like so many Kubrick fans of my vintage, I lined up to see the night it opened at the now-torn-down Criterion Theatre in old, scuzzy Times Square.* Barry Lyndon had been an oil painting. But The Shining augured so much more. Pre-Internet rumors had been circling for months: Kubrick, holed up in his English mansion, had ordered forklifts of books delivered to his file-filled study. He read the first few pages of each book, groaned, and threw it against the wall with a thump. A huge pile of discarded material grew, a dozen feet high or more. Then the thumping stopped. The master had found his new vehicle: a Stephen King horror story set in a haunted hotel. Brian De Palma had a hit with Carrie; King was hot. Bemoaning that for all his success he had yet to make a film that had “done blockbuster business,” Kubrick pounced. Aesthetically, it made sense—a Kubrick horror picture, a return to the reliable genre chassis, one more opportunity to merge the high and the low in that seamless wiseguy way.

Except it sucked. For the Kubrick fan, The Shining was like watching Roger Corman on Robitussin, a 16-rpm Fall of the House of Usher, some classroom chunk of faux-Pirandello absurdism. Among my ilk, the verdict was that the great Stanley, egghead avatar of Cold War cool, had gone terminally corny midway through A Clockwork Orange, halfway through the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene. The Shining seemed the final nail in the suddenly square-shape coffin. It was a rough year for the heroes of youth, with Bob Dylan born again, Muhammad Ali finished, and now Kubrick.

I mean, “Here’s Johnny!” This was supposed to be funny?

We are familiar with Nicholson’s greatest performances. Here’s a list of worthy ones that are less celebrated:

The Missouri Breaks, Reds, Heartburn, Hoffa, and The Pledge. There are others, of course. He’s funny in a cameo role in Broadcast News.

But one of my favorite Nicholson movies is The Border. He’s coiled but not a ham. It’s a wonderful performance.  Put it on your Netflix queue.

[Photograph by Annie Leibovitz]

From the collection “When The Lights Go Down,” here is Pauline Kael on Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Nicholson is an actor who knows how to play an audience; he knows how to get us to share in a character. In The Last Detail, his sweet-sadastic alternating current kept us watching him, and we followed his lowlifer’s spoor through Chinatown. Nicholson is no flower-child nice guy; he’s got that half smile–the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how close to the surface his hostility is. He’s the people’s freak of the new stars.

…Since Nicholson doesn’t score when he plays unmagnetic characters–and he must it by now–the danger in Cuckoo’s Nest is that he’ll take over: that he’ll use his boyish shark’s grin, the familiar preening, brutal one-upsmanship. He’s won the audience with his cocky freaks, and this is the big one–the bull goose loony. Nicholson can be too knowing about the audience, and the part he plays here is pure temptation. Before Kesey went to Stanford to study writing, he’d gone to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming an actor, and role-playing is built into McMurphy’s character: he’s swept up by the men’s desire for him to be their savior. Except for the red-haired-giant externals, the authority-hating hero of the book is so much of a Nicholson role that the actor may not seem to be getting a chance to do much new in it. But Nicholson doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time; he has a different look–McMurphy’s eyes are father away, muggy, veiled even from himself. The role-playing is still there, in the grandstanding that McMurphy does when he returns to the ward after shock treatment; it has to be there, or there’s no way of accounting for why he’s sacrificed. But Nicholson tones it down. As McMurphy, he doesn’t keep a piece of himself out of the character, guarding it and making the audience aware that he’s got his control center and can turn on the juice. He actually looks relaxed at times, punchy, almost helpless–you can forget it’s Nicholson. McMurphy is a tired, baffled man, and with his character more unresolved he gains depth. [Director, Milos] Forman hasn’t let the McMurphy character run away with the picture, and it’s Nicholson’s best performance.

And from the same book:

Despite his excessive dynamism (and maybe partly because of it), this satirical actor has probably gone further into the tragicomedy of hardhat macho than any other actor. He exposes cracks in the barroom-character armor and makes those cracks funny, in a low-down, grungy way. With his horny leers and his little-boy cockiness and one-upmanship, he illuminates the sources of male bravado. His whole acting style is based on the little guy coming on strong, because being a tough guy is the only ideal he’s ever aspired to. This little guy doesn’t make it, of course; Nicholson is the macho loser-hero. (In an earlier era, Nicholson would probably have played big guys.)

Here’s a selection of some of Jack’s Greatest Hits, the temper-temper blowups. They are obvious, and perhaps uninspired, highlight reel selections, yet  still damned entertaining.

Easy Rider:

Five Easy Pieces:

Carnal Knowledge:

The Last Detail:

Chinatown:

Here’s the ballgame scene in Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Shining:

Terms of Endearment:

Jack Nicholson is stuck in Cuckoo’s Nest/Shinning mode for most of Bob Rafelson’s turgid 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. His character, an ex-con in his mid-forties, was 24 in James M. Cain’s novel. Here, he feels underdeveloped and it’s hard to tell if the guy is sinister, a sap, or a heel. It is as if the actor and director never got a handle on who they wanted the character to be.

What’s compelling about Nicholson’s performance is that he doesn’t chew the scenery. He may fall back on his familiar screen persona but he’s restrained, too. Best of all, he’s generous and lets Jessica Lange dominate the movie.

The sexual charge between Nicholson and Lange is undeniable.

She is tough and it is refreshing to see a woman play a femme fatal and not look like a waif. Early on, she shoots Nicholson a look while she pours wine for her husband that’s enough to stop any man–or woman–dead in their tracks.

You can see why she’d drive a person to do crazy things. The pulp is drained out of this version (written by David Mamet, shot by Sven Nykvist)–it’s not nearly as appealing as the John Garfield original–but the electricity generated by Lange keeps you watching, and her sex scenes with Nicholson are savage and hard to forget.

For more, check out this article by Patrick McGilligan in American Film: The Postman Rings Again

Most important of all is the acting. For a black comedy to succeed, the actors must maintain constant earnestness with the comedy not coming from punch lines but from something inherent in the character himself.

When a black comedy fails, it’s almost always easy to pinpoint the culprit. But when it succeeds, it’s possible to glide right past the great performances that made it so. Jack Nicholson’s Charley Partanna in Prizzi’s Honor is just such a performance.

Partanna is gruff, almost monosyllabic. But he’s not stupid, he just knows that talking too much often leaves you overextended. He’s a competent gangster on the way up and he’s centered in that world with a heavy anchor. And as the movie unfolds, and absurd situations ripple the surface, he never strays far enough from the boat to get lost. He surprises us with literacy, curiosity, passion and ingenuity along the way, but without deviating from his solid base.

Bouncing off Jack’s steady foundation are Angelica Huston and Kathleen Turner. Irene Walker (Turner) pretends to be an outsider, but she’s busy trying to run scams on gangsters. Huston took home an Oscar for turning the screws behind Partanna’s back as Maerose Prizzi. Maerose is the one character in the movie that really seems dangerous.

I remember this movie from my childhood because of William Hickey’s strange voice. His Don Prizzi stretches words like hand-pulled noodles until the innocuous is threatening. But Jack’s Partanna isn’t just holding up the tent for these fine supporting characters.

He seems a poor match for Irene on the exterior, but his devotion, shot straight, wins her over. We’re not sure where Partanna fits in the hierarchy of the Prizzi family at first, but his intelligence and resourcefulness prove his worth.

Alex loves Jack’s line, “Marxie Heller so fuckin’ smart, how come he’s so fuckin’ dead?” Not only is it a fantastic reading, an argument ender but spat out of the side of his mouth, it’s also the start of the slow leak leads to disaster for Partanna and Irene. Partanna has killed Irene’s husband, Marxie Heller, before learning of the connection. Irene swears she was going to leave him anyway, but she has enough nice things to say about the guy to get under Partanna’s skin and cause that great line.

Partanna could never trust Irene completely. Did she come with him because she loved him or because all her other plans were turning to crap and he represented her best chance at survival? He couldn’t answer the question satisfactorily so when stab came to shoot, he hurled a knife through her throat.

The movie works because Jack is great. But Jack is great without doing a lot of the things that he’s usually great at. He’s neither hip, cool nor sarcastic. He’s a lug. And he plays the lug straight up and down the edge without ever missing a step.

At first glance, Jack Nicholson and Michelangelo Antonioni would seem a mismatched pair: Antonioni, the gloomy, solemn, European master of existential alienation and Nicholson, all Irish-American brashness and energy — the most charismatic and aggressive movie star since James Cagney. However, with Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger, the odd couple proved to be a formidable team. Though the film failed to deliver to producer Carlo Ponti’s box-office hopes in the 1970s and was initially dismissed by many critics as a minor outing for both the director and star, its stature has grown and deepened over the decades, helped by a 2005 theatrical rerelease and subsequent DVD. Over thirty five years later, it stands as an artistic high water mark for both men. However, for those who can only envision Jack Nicholson as a hyper, wild-eyed madman, The Passenger offers an opportunity to see the depth and subtlety of his work, before he became hemmed in by audience expectations.

Nicholson, the quintessential star of 1970s “New Hollywood” spent the first half of that decade on an extraordinary run of iconic roles – including Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby Dupea, Chinatown’s  J.J. Gittes, The Last Detail’s Buddusky and, of course One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s R.P. McMurphy (the part that finally landed Nicholson a Best Actor Academy Award).  Nicholson’s performance as David Locke in The Passenger stands up to his work in any of those films, while finding the actor in a far more subdued mode.

Locke is an English born, American educated journalist researching a story about guerrillas in an unnamed African desert country. After a particular hot and frustrating day in the desert, he returns to his hotel to find that he has no soap for a shower. He knocks on the door of his neighbor, looking to borrow some and finds the man lying dead.  Through flashbacks and an audio recording made by Locke, we see that the man, Robertson, was a fellow Englishman, roughly the same size and build as Locke, and with a similar hairline. Locke mysteriously and impetuously decides to switch identities with the corpse and disappear from his life, assuming the life of Robertson. While this snap decision to leave his wife and career behind, and start anew as a stranger in a strange land happens easily enough for Locke, he finds himself a pursued man – both by the producer and philandering wife he’s left behind in England and by people who want what Robertson had to sell or want him dead or arrested. It seems Robertson was not simply a travelling businessman, but an illegal arms dealer, supplying the guerrillas.

By evading the narrative of his own existence, Locke now finds himself thrust deeper into the story he was attempting to cover.  It’s a set-up that could easily be the plot of a very different sort of film, a suspense thriller made by Hitchcock, Polanski or DePalma; in Antonioni’s hands, it becomes a hypnotic, meandering investigation of identity, destiny and narrative itself. We’re never quite sure what has driven Locke to leave his life behind. Scenes of his wife back in London, and flashbacks to their life together hint that the marriage was unhappy, but his wife spearheads the search for Robertson once Locke is officially “dead.” We watch him have a frustrating time researching his story in the desert, but it’s also made clear that Locke is successful and internationally known as a writer and broadcaster.  In “Jump Cut,” Martin Walsh wrote of the film:

“At one point early in the film Nicholson points out that ‘we translate every experience into the same old codes’…Its importance for our understanding of The Passenger is of crucial significance. On one level, it helps make sense of Nicholson’s desire to cease being David Locke, to adopt a new identity, to escape the tyranny of the co-ordinates of his present existence, to re-open his life to new experiences. However, the way in which David Locke attempts to recharge his life proves fraught with unanticipated, uncontrollable dangers…”

Locke/Robertson leaves Africa for Europe, where, in Barcelona, he finds an unexpected travelling companion and lover, played by Maria Schneider (Last Tango In Paris). Together they become a couple on the lam, as Nicholson allows himself to be swept along in this new narrative he’s entered, despite its dangers. The girl follows suit, following Locke on his odd journey as if on some sort of scavenger hunt.

Locke continues along Robertson’s path, using the dead man’s datebook as his guide and talisman, until things meet their inevitable end in a dusty Spanish hotel courtyard, where all the main characters converge and Antonioni pulls off one of the most incredible shots you’ll ever see in a movie.

Looking back, it’s fascinating to watch Nicholson play this character at this point in his career. He’d played quiet, brooding characters before (e.g. Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens), but the success of Cuckoo’s Nest and relative failure of The Passenger (and of Arthur Penn’s western The Missouri Breaks, which paired Nicholson with Marlon Brando in the following year) may have pushed Nicholson into the relative safety of his more familiar screen persona, which Stanley Kubrick was soon to push to an extreme in his film of The Shining.

Hollyrock Quotables.

Let’s start with a classic:

“The site is supposed to be located on an ancient Indian Burial Ground…”

 Is The Shining a scary film? I don’t know. It certainly sticks with you and comes back to you, not always at the best of times. I think it’s because Stanley Kubrick has seared a few incredibly disturbing images onto our collective consciousness – an accomplishment that stands up just as well as if he had made a great film. Or maybe that’s the same thing.

The movie was not well received in 1980. But it would have taken a visionary critic to have foreseen the lasting impact of this film, and there is a lot to criticize even if someone had been such a visionary. Roger Ebert gave it a “Thumbs Down” initially, and then in 2006, he reconsidered and included it in his reviews of Great Movies.

To get the plot out of the way, because that is the least important thing about The Shining, Jack Torrance (a revved up Jack Nicholson) agrees to become caretaker of a haunted hotel and almost instantly loses his marbles and tries to kill his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd). Though he is pretty much off-the-deep-end after the first snowstorm, his madness is fairly directionless until a couple of experienced ghosts counsel him on the finer points of axe-wielding and wife-hacking. The breakneck speed of Jack’s descent and the ultimately useless side story of the telepathic son and chef (Scatman Crothers) are poorly draped around some of the spookiest and most indelible images from the entirety of horror-film history:

The winding mountain road.

Danny’s ever present Big Wheelish Trike.

The blood in the elevator.

The twins.

Jack’s demonic facial contortions.

Lloyd the bartender.

When I think about The Shining, I think about that tidal wave of blood, and all these disturbing images start washing over me, one after another, in a cascade of discomfort. And Kubrick is less interested, I think, in telling a good ghost story than he is in creating an endurance-testing exercise in discomfort. Every single scene in this film informs you that something is not right and, eventually, that something terrible is going to happen. Sometimes it’s the piercing music, sometimes the dialogue. Often it’s the framing of the shots composed by Kubrick and Director of Photography John Alcott. The shots are often symmetrical – can anyone remember those twins in any other way? – and impose a sense of claustrophobic control and a heightened sense of isolation. The control of the film is Kubrick’s, yes, but it’s also the evil force controlling the characters in the story.

(For those of you who are into this sort of thing, check out Steadicam Operator Garrett Brown’s amazing behind-the-scenes account of filming The Shining. It was not the first film to make use of the Steadicam, but it was the first film entirely conceived around the possible–a relative term when Stanley Kubrick is the director–uses of this technology. According to Brown, the climactic maze sequence could not have been filmed using other existing methods.)

Outside of the technological and artistic exercise of control, The Shining differs from other horror movies in the small bit of control it gives back to the audience. So many other horror films withhold the exposition or the rationale for their characters’ scary predicaments and that mystery adds to the suspense the audience feels. “What happened that night?” “Why is this guy wearing a hockey mask?” “What the fuck is going on here?!”

In The Shining we learn everything immediately. A previous caretaker went bonkers and killed his family. The place is built on an Indian Burial Ground. There is an elevator filled with blood that keeps the local carpet cleaners in the black. Hallorann the chef warns Danny about all the crazy shit he’s about to see. And the music, from the first note over the first shot of the winding mountain road, instructs us that something is already terribly wrong and that it’s only going to get worse.

Thanks to all these cues, we know exactly what is going to happen and why, and if there is ever any doubt, Danny’s steady encounters with the Doubledead Twins keeps us safely on track. Jack is going to try to kill his family, just like the other caretaker. So naturally, we wonder, “When the fuck is this going to happen?” And that’s a subtle but important distinction for the viewer. There is constant tension and loads of suspense, but there is no nagging need for any of it to make any sense.

Instead of frantically searching the film for clues about what is going on, instead of craving that typically withheld exposition, Kubrick’s audience is just waiting and watching. We’re in a much better position to absorb the nightmarish imagery he unleashes because we are less distracted. Though reactions vary widely to the film, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have near total-recall of these images.

Jack also obliges this end by losing it so very rapidly. There’s never any cause to attentive energy rooting for Jack to defeat his demons. Would it have been a better film if Jack resisted more? I think so, but that wasn’t the narrative tension Kubrick wanted to explore. Stephen King’s novel is the source material, and though I’ve never read any King, I did read that Jack’s violence towards Danny is based upon King’s fear of losing his temper and becoming violent with his own children. Whether or not that speaks to you, I want a father and husband to at least try to resist the urge to kill his family. I think you can tell this isn’t what interested Kubrick because Jack never shows any affection for his family even before he becomes possessed.

Nicholson is at times noticeably over-the-top. He jolts you from the narrative with his bombast. His demeanor in the bar scenes seems forced. And in a few exchanges with Wendy around the typewriter, he seems a verbal bazooka. In an alarmingly honest interview with Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall (below), Kubrick’s daughter Vivian gets them to open up about what a struggle this shoot was for them. Jack remembers Kubrick’s critique of some of his takes: “Yeah it’s real, but it’s not interesting.” An interview like this would never see the light of day in modern Hollywood, much less make it to special features section of the DVD.

Balancing Jack’s violent madness is Wendy’s sobbing protection of her son. Though she wields a baseball bat like a tear-gassed Felix Millan, she proves surprising effective for a puddle. I thought it was a little unfair that the ghost let Jack out of the pantry; Wendy had really earned his captivity. As hard as Kubrick must have been on Nicholson, it seems he was even tougher on Shelley. Nicholson was such a big star already that Kubrick couldn’t bully him the way he bullies Shelley in Vivian’s short film. And Shelley’s performance has a weary streak running through it, which plays well considering the circumstances, and maybe was the point of him treating her like crap.

I wonder if Kubrick was at least a bit flummoxed by how to integrate Danny’s telepathic abilities into the film. Not that he couldn’t handle the notion, just maybe that he was not that into it. As Pauline Kael noted, we waste a lot of time and energy following Hallorann from Florida, to the airplane, to the sno-cat, to the front door, to the lobby… only to see him take an axe in the chest before he even takes his coat off. It’s one of the great dead-ends in movie history. Why on earth did we waste so much time on this “Shining” when it has zero impact on the story?

Maybe, just maybe, because it helps the audience with our question of “when.” Time is not right in this film. Jack dislocated Danny’s arm five months ago, or is it three years ago? The previous caretaker killed his family in 1970, or was it 1920? By plotting this very conventional “rescue sequence” alongside the wackiness in the hotel, perhaps Kubrick is providing the audience a kind of tether to a standardly predictable film within a film. And he’s deploying the one remaining trick up his sleeve – will Danny and Wendy survive? When Hallorann goes down, the tether to the conventional ending is severed. The audience can’t really know what to expect, and thus maybe it gives the ending an extra kick of suspense. (Ebert’s 2006 review also gives an interesting read on Danny’s telepathic ability and how much credence we should give it.)

After watching The Shining, we aren’t necessarily scared, but we don’t want to go to right to sleep either. Maybe we don’t want to be alone in those places where human beings can confront their own savage, deeply-buried  instincts for murder. The Shining doesn’t ask us to be scared of Jack Torrance. After all, he’s not even Jack Torrance, is he?

When the ghosts go to work on Jack, Grady tells him, “You’ve always been the caretaker.” They’re hoping that he’ll give into the violent psychopathic urges they’ve stirred by plotting murder as the inevitable extension of his destiny. And if he worked us correctly, Kubrick has us picturing that lonely mountain drive to the hotel, facing a stark, ever-expanding solitude, and maybe even fearing the madness within ourselves.

***

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge The Simpsons, who successfully paid tribute and laid waste to The Shining in their fifth Halloween Special. The Simpsons writers pulled the loose threads of The Shining until they were left with a six-minute reduction that at once skewered and adored the original. I have to admit, I knew The Shinning by heart before I ever sat down in the dark to watch The Shining, and I’m not sure that’s what Stanley had intended (though he was a big fan, according to Michael Herr’s Vanity Fair piece).

***

And if, like me, you were frantically trying to fit in some work around the World Cup and the tennis match cum epic poem yesterday, you might have missed Cliff’s great take on Paths of Glory. Check it out today, if you get a chance.