The Shining (1980, dir by Stanley Kubrick, DP: John Alcott)
For today’s song of the day, we have the title tune to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The Shining is a classic horror film and features one of Jack Nicholson’s most iconic performances.
Enjoy the greatest road trip music ever recorded.
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 89th birthday to the legendary Jack Nicholson.
Today’s scene that I love comes from the 1970 film, Five Easy Pieces. In this Oscar-nominated film, Jack Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea. Born to a wealthy and music-obsessed family, Bobby currently works in an oil field and is alternatively angry, cynical, and idealistic. After Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-nominated turn in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces featured Nicholson playing the type of role for which he would be best-known in the 70s, the wayward rebel who must choose between being a part of society or being forever an outcast.
In this scene, Bobby and his oilfield co-worker find themselves stuck in a traffic jam. Bobby gets a chance to show off both his temper and his talent. It’s a great scene and Nicholson gives such a strong performance that it’s only later that you realize that Bobby’s anger didn’t really accomplish much.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today is Jack Nicholson’s 89th birthday!
It’s been sixteen years since Jack Nicholson last appeared in a movie, the forgettable How Do You Know. And yet, he remains a screen icon with a filmography that is a cinema lover’s dream. He’s worked with everyone from Roger Corman to Stanley Kubrick to Milos Forman to Martin Scorsese and, along the way, he’s become a symbol of a very American type of rebel. Though often associated with the counter-culture, his style has always been too aggressive and idiosyncratic for him to be a believable hippie. Instead, he’s one of the last of the beats, an outsider searching for meaning in Americana.
Happy birthday, Jack Nicholson. May you have many happy returns!
4 Shots From 4 Jack Nicholson Films
Easy Rider (1969, dir by Dennis Hopper, DP: Laszlo Kovacs)
Chinatown (1974, dir by Roman Polanski, DP: John A. Alonzo)
The Shining (1980, dirby Stanley Kubrick, DP: John Alcott)
The Departed (2006, dir by Martin Scorsese, DP: Michael Ballhaus)
The Shining (1980, dir by Stanley Kubrick)
Today would have been the 102nd birthday of character actor Philip Stone. While Stone appeared in a lot of films, he’ll probably always be best-remembered for his subtly menacing turn as the ghostly Grady in 1980’s The Shining. Here he is, having a conversation with Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and letting him know that he’s always been caretaker.
Today would have been Peter Fonda’s 86th birthday.
This scene is from Roger Corman’s 1967 film, The Trip. Corman dropped acid himself before filming Peter Fonda doing the same thing in this film. Regardless of how one views Corman’s cinematic recreation of Fonda’s experience with acid, The Trip is considered to be one of the first nuanced drug films. While it doesn’t endorse drug use, it also doesn’t descend into the hysterics of a film like Reefer Madness. Interestingly enough, the script was written by Jack Nicholson.
Here is Peter Fonda, exploring the city on LSD, in The Trip:
There are some Poverty Row westerns that even I can’t defend.
A group of bandits, disguised as Indians, attack a pioneer family. The father and the mother are killed but their twin boys survive. One wanders into the wilderness while the other stays with the remains of his family and waits for help. Years later, the town of Red Dog is thriving, with the former bandits as its leading citizens. Someone has been gunning down the former bandits. The townspeople demand that Sheriff Luke (Edmund Cobb) do something about the man that they’ve nicknamed the Rawhide Killer. First, however, Luke has to deal with Jim Briggs (William Barrymore), who has been abusing his son (Tommy Bupp). It also turns out that Jim Briggs is the Rawhide Killer and he’s looking for vengeance against those who killed his parents. Jim’s brother also lives in the town. Guess who!
The Rawhide Terror gets off to a good start with the bandit attack but it falls apart soon afterwards. I don’t know if it was just because I was watching a bad print but the sound quality was terrible and the lack of an original score really highlighted just how boring it is to watch men silently ride their horses from one side of the screen to the other. This movie was only 47 minutes long and half of it was made up of shots of people riding horses. Add some really bad acting and you’ve got a western that was bad even by the standards of a 1934 second feature.
Two men are credited with directing the film, though the production was actually supervised by Victor Adamson, the father of the notorious schlock filmmaker, Al Adamson.
For today’s scene that I love, I decided to pick from the only Rob Reiner-directed film to be nominated for Best Picture of the Year, 1992’s A Few Good Men.
This scene features great work from two legitimate film stars, Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. It’s also the type of potentially stagey scene that would have proved problematic for a lot of other directors. Rob Reiner, however, handled it perfectly.
Whenever it’s time to share this film for Horrorthon, I have a little story that I like to tell:
Enter singing.
Little Shop.…Little Shop of Horrors.…Little Shop.…Little Shop of Terrors….
When I was 19 years old, I was in a community theater production of the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Though I think I would have made the perfect Audrey, everybody always snickered whenever I sang so I ended up as a part of “the ensemble.” Being in the ensemble basically meant that I spent a lot of time dancing and showing off lots of cleavage. And you know what? The girl who did play Audrey was screechy, off-key, and annoying and after every show, all the old people in the audience always came back stage and ignored her and went straight over to me. So there.
Anyway, during rehearsals, our director thought it would be so funny if we all watched the original film. Now, I’m sorry to say, much like just about everyone else in the cast, this was my first exposure to the original and I even had to be told that the masochistic dentist patient was being played by Jack Nicholson. However, I’m also very proud to say that — out of that entire cast — I’m the only one who understood that the zero-budget film I was watching was actually better than the big spectacle we were attempting to perform on stage. Certainly, I understood the film better than that screechy little thing that was playing Audrey.
The first Little Shop of Horrors certainly isn’t scary and there’s nobody singing about somewhere that’s green (I always tear up when I hear that song, by the way). However, it is a very, very funny film with the just the right amount of a dark streak to make it perfect Halloween viewing.
So, if you have 72 minutes to kill, check out the original and the best Little Shop of Horrors….
Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), the editor-in-chief of a New York Publishing house, doesn’t get much respect, not from his wife (Kate Nelligan), not from his boss (Christopher Plummer), and certainly not from Stuart Swinton (James Spader), the sleazy executive who is plotting to steal his job and destroy his marriage. But then, one night, Will runs over a black wolf on a country road. When he tries to helps it, the wolf bites him. Soon after, Will starts to feel different whenever the moon is full.
I remember that, when Wolf came out in 1994, some people said that casting Jack Nicholson as a werewolf seemed like typecasting. Nicholson apparently understood this as well so he actually downplays his usual mannerisms for the first part of the movie and gives a convincing performance as a harried executive who is worried he’s about to lose his job. It’s only after he is bitten that Will Randall starts to come alive. Not only does he develop the predator instinct necessary to survive in New York City but he also, without fear, pursues his boss’s daughter, Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer, at her most beautiful). Typecast or not, Jack Nicholson is excellent in Wolf. Equally good is James Spader as Will’s business rival, who starts to show some predator-like aspects of his own.
Director Mike Nichols was not normally a horror director and, around the midway point, his direction falters and there are times when he just seems to be going through the motions. He gets good performances from his cast but doesn’t know how to craft a good jump scare. The best parts of the movie are when Wolf uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for petty office politics, with Will “marking” his territory while talking to Stewart and showing a renewed killer instinct. Wolf works better as a social satire than as a horror movie.
Fans of Frasier will be happy to see David Hyde Pierce in a small but key role. He delivers the film’s best line. Fans of Friends may also notice David Schwimmer in a small role. He says nothing worth remembering. Their presence, though, is a reminder of just how much American culture changed in 1994. By the end of the year, both went from small roles in Wolf to co-starring in the two of the most popular sitcoms in America.
“Tommy, can you hear me?”
That’s a question that’s asked frequently in the 1975 film, Tommy. An adaptation of the famous rock opera by the Who (though Pete Townshend apparently felt that the film’s vision was more director Ken Russell’s than anything that he had meant to say), Tommy tells the story of a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” who grows up to play a mean pinball and then become a cult leader. Why pinball? Who knows? Townshend’s the one who wrote Pinball Wizard but Ken Russell is the one who decided to have Elton John sing it while wearing giant platform shoes.
Tommy opens, like so many British films of the 70s, with the blitz. With London in ruins, Captain Walker (the almost beatifically handsome Robert Powell) leaves his wife behind as he fights for his country. When Walker is believed to be dead, Nora (Ann-Margaret) takes Tommy to a holiday camp run by Frank (Oliver Reed). Oliver Reed might not be the first person you would expect to see in a musical and it is true that he wasn’t much of a singer. However, it’s also true that he was Oliver Reed and, as such, he was impossible to look away from. Even his tuneless warbling is somehow charmingly dangerous. Nora falls for Frank but — uh oh! — Captain Walker’s not dead. When the scarred captain surprises Frank in bed with Nora, Frank hits him over the head and kills him. Young Tommy witnesses the crime and is told that he didn’t see anything and he didn’t hear anything and that he’s not going to say anything.
And so, as played by Roger Daltrey, Tommy grows up to be “deaf, dumb, and blind.” Various cures — from drugs to religion to therapy — are pursued to no avail. As the Acid Queen, Tina Turner sings and dances as if she’s stealing Tommy’s soul. As the Therapist, Jack Nicholson is all smarmy charm as he gently croons to Ann-Margaret. Eric Clapton performs in front of a statue of Marilyn Monroe. Ann-Margaret dances in a pool of beans and chocolate and rides a phallic shaped pillow. As for Tommy, he eventually becomes the Pinball Wizard and also a new age messiah. But it turns out that his new followers are just as destructive as the people who exploited him when he was younger. It’s very much a Ken Russell film, full of imagery that is shocking and occasionally campy but always memorable.
I love Tommy. It’s just so over-the-top and absurd that there’s no way you can ignore it. Ann-Margaret sings and dances as if the fate of the world depends upon it while Oliver Reed drinks and glowers with the type of dangerous charisma that makes it clear why he was apparently seriously considered as Sean Connery’s replacement in the roles of James Bond. As every scene is surreal and every line of dialogue is sung, it’s probably easy to read too much into the film. It could very well be Ken Russell’s commentary on the New Age movement and the dangers of false messiahs. It could also just be that Ken Russell enjoyed confusing people and 1975 was a year when directors could still get away with doing that. With each subsequent viewing of Tommy, I become more convinced that some of the film’s most enigmatic moments are just Russell having a bit of fun. The scenes of Tommy running underwater are so crudely put together that you can’t help but feel that Russell was having a laugh at the expense of people looking for some sort of deeper meaning in Tommy’s journey. In the end, Tommy is a true masterpiece of pop art, an explosion of style and mystery.
Tommy may seem like a strange film for me to review in October. It’s not a horror film, though it does contain elements of the genre, from the scarred face of the returned to Captain Walker to the Acid Queen sequence to a memorable side story that features a singer who looks like a junior Frankenstein. To me, though, Tommy is a great Halloween film. Halloween is about costumes and Tommy is ultimately about the costumes that people wear and the personas that they assume as they go through their lives. Oliver Reed goes from wearing the polo shirt of a holiday camp owner to the monocle of a tycoon to the drab jumpsuits of a communist cult leader. Ann-Margaret’s wardrobe is literally a character of its own. Everyone in the film is looking for meaning and identity and the ultimate message (if there is one) appears to be that the search never ends.
Through the Shattered Lens 