Who wouldn’t love to see a movie where a youngish Jack Nicholson played a French soldier who, while searching for a mysterious woman, comes across a castle that’s inhabited by both Dick Miller and Boris Karloff?
In Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Terror, New Jersey-accented Jack Nicholson is the least believable 19th century French soldier ever. However, it’s still interesting to watch him before he became a cinematic icon. His performance here is rather earnest, with little of the sarcasm that would later become his trademark. Boris Karloff is, as usual, great and familiar Corman actor Dick Miller gets a much larger role than usual. Pay attention to the actress playing the mysterious woman. That’s Sandra Knight who, at the time of filming, was married to Jack Nicholson.
Reportedly, The Terror was one of those films that Corman made because he still had the sets from his much more acclaimed film version of The Raven. The script was never finished, the story was made up as filming moved alone, and no less than five directors shot different parts of this 81 minute movie. Boris Karloff’s scenes were filmed first, with the other actors performing in front of a body double during their scenes. Among the many directors who filmed bits and pieces of TheTerror: Roger Corman, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Coppola’s roommate Dennis Jakob, and even Jack Nicholson himself! (Despite this number of directors involved, Corman received the sole directorial credit.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the final film is a total mess but it does have a definite historical value.
(In typical Corman fashion, scenes from The Terror were later used in the 1968 film, Targets. In that film, Karloff plays a version of himself, an aging horror actor who watches The Terror and dismisses it as being “terrible.”)
The Shining is one of the few horror movies that still scares me.
I say this despite the fact that I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s third novel. It’s a film that I watch nearly every October and it’s a film that I’ve pretty much memorized. Whenever I watch the film, I do so with the knowledge that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, is eventually going to start talking to ghosts and he’s going to try to kill his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Whenever I watch this film, I know what Jack is going to find Room 237. I know about the blood pouring out the elevator like the Tampax commercial from Hell. I know what Danny means when he says, “Redrum….” I know about the twins and their request of “Come play with us, Danny.” And, of course, I know about the film’s famous ending.
Whenever I start watching this film, I know everything that is going to happen. And yet, as soon as I hear the booming beat of of Wendy Carlos’s theme music and I see the overhead shot of the mountain roads leading to the Overlook Hotel, I start to feel uneasy. Whenever Barry Nelson (played the hotel’s general manager) starts to blandly explain that a previous caretaker got cabin fever and chopped up his twin daughters, I smile because Nelson delivers the lines so casually. But I also get nervous because I know Charles (or is it Delbert) Grady is going to show up later.
(Incidentally, Barry Nelson never gets enough credit for his brilliant cameo as the friendly but guarded hotel manager. In Stephen King’s original novel, the character was a stereotypically unsympathetic middle manager, a martinet who existed largely to be told off. In Kubrick’s film, the manager is one of the most fascinating of the supporting characters.)
I still get nervous when I see Wendy and Danny, sitting in their disturbingly sterile Colorado home while Jack interviews for the caretaker job. Wendy smokes and Danny talks about how his imaginary friend, Tony, doesn’t want to go to the hotel. With her unwashed her and her tentative voice, Shelley Duvall is a far cry from the book’s version of Wendy. However, Duvall’s Wendy is also a far more compelling character, an abused woman who finds her strength when her son is put in danger. Duvall is the perfect choice for Wendy because she seems like someone who you might see in the parking lot of your local grocery store, trying to load the bags in her car and keep an eye on her young child at the same time. She seems real and her reactions remind us of how we would probably react if we found ourselves in the same situation. Wendy makes the mistakes that we would all probably make but she refuses to surrender to her fear.
Why does The Shining remain so powerful and so frightening, even after repeated viewings? Most of the credit has to go to Stanley Kubrick. Stephen King has been very vocal about his dislike of the film, claiming that The Shining was more Kubrick’s version than his. King has a point. Film is a director’s medium and few directors were as brilliant as Stanley Kubrick. (Along with The Shining, Kubrick also directed Paths of Glory, 2001, Barry Lyndon, Dr, Strangelove, Spartacus, Lolita, The Killing, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wife Shut, and Full Metal Jacket. Stephen King directed Maximum Overdrive.) From the minute we see the tracking shots that wind their way through the desolate mountains and the empty hallways of the Overlook, we know that we’re watching a Kubrick film. Those tracking shots also put us in the same role as the spirits in the Overlook. We’re watching and following the characters, observing and reacting to their actions without being able to interact with them. King has complained that Kubrick’s version of The Shining offers up no hope. But, honestly, what kind of hope can one have after discovering that ghosts are real and they want to kill you? Once Jack Torrance finally accepts that drink from Joe Turkel’s Lloyd and meets Phillip Stone’s Grady, there is no more room for hope. King’s book ends with the Overlook destroyed and Jack Torrance perhaps redeeming himself in his last moments. Kubrick’s film suggests that Jack Torrance never cared enough about his family to be worthy of redemption and that the evil that infected the Overlook is never going to be destroyed. In the end, not even the kindly presence of Scatman Crothers in the role of Dick Halloran can bring any real hope to the Overlook.
The Shining is unsettling because, more than being a ghost story, it’s a film about being tapped. Physically, the Torrances are trapped by the blizzard. Mentally, Jack is trapped by his addictions and his resentments. One gets the feeling that he’s deeply jealous of Danny, viewing him as someone who came along and took away all of Wendy’s attention. Wendy is trapped in a bad and abusive marriage and there’s something very poignant about the way Duvall both captures Wendy’s yearning for outside contact (like when she uses the radio to communicate with the local rangers station) and her hope that, if she’s just supportive enough, Jack will get his life together. Danny’s trapped by his psychic visions and his knowledge of what’s to come. The victims of the Overlook appear to be trapped as well. Grady’s daughters are fated to always roam the hallways, looking for someone to play with them. The Woman in 237 will always wait in her bathtub. Were these spirits evil before they died or were the twisted by the Overlook? It’s an unanswered question that sticks with you.
As I mentioned earlier, Stephen King has been very vocal about his dislike of both The Shining and its director. (King once boasted about outliving Kubrick, a comment that showed a definite lack of class on the part of America’s most commercially successful writer.) Why does King hate the Kubrick film with such a passion?
I have a theory. Both King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot, and The Shining feature a writer as the man character. In both cases, King obviously related to the main character. Ben Mears in Salem’s Lot is charming, confident, articulate, and successful. He’s a writer that everyone respects and he’s even well-known enough to have a file with the FBI. Jack Torrance, on the other hand, is a struggling writer who has a drinking problem, resents authority figures (like the hotel manager), and has issues with his father. Torrance is a much more interesting character than Ben Mears, precisely because Torrance is so flawed. (King, and I give him full credit for this, has been open about his own struggles with substance abuse and how he brought his own experiences to the character of Jack Torrance.) I’ve always suspected that, at the time that King wrote Salem’s Lot and The Shining, Ben Mears was King’s idealized version of himself while Jack Torrance, with all of his struggles and flaws, reflected how King actually felt about himself. (That the Wendy Torrance of the novel is a beautiful blonde who sticks with her husband despite his drinking problem feels like a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of King.) When Stanley Kubrick made his version of The Shining and presented Jack Torrance as essentially being a self-centered jerk who, even before arriving at the hotel, had a history of abusing his wife and son, it’s possible King took it a bit personally. Since King had poured so much of himself into Jack Torrance, it was probably difficult to see Kubrick present the character an abusive narcissist whose great novel turned out to be literally a joke. And so, Stephen King has spent the last 45 years talking about how much he hates Kubrick’s film.
King’s opinion aside, Kubrick’s The Shining is probably the most effective Stephen King adaptation ever made, precisely because Kubrick knew which parts of the book would work cinematically and which parts were best excised from the plot. As opposed to later directors who often seem intimidated by King’s fame, Kubrick was able to bring his own signature style to the story. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a masterpiece and one that I look forward to revisiting this October.
Today’s scene that I love comes from 1975’s The Passenger, a film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni was born 113 years ago today, in what was then the “Kingdom of Italy.”
In The Passenger, Jack Nicholson plays a journalist who, because he’s bored with his life, impulsively assumes the identity of a deceased American businessman. What he discovers is that the businessman was an arms dealer and that the people that the arms dealer were doing business with still expect to get their weapons. Despite the fact that he knows that it might cost him his life, Nicholson is still drawn to see just how far he can take his new existence.
The film’s enigmatic final scene, in which Nicholson goes to a hotel to wait as both the people who double-crossed and his wife search for him, is Antonioni at his best.
The scene below is, of course, from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece, The Shining.
In this scene, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) stumbles into the Overlook Hotel’s ballroom, still fuming over having been accused of abusing his son. A recovering alcoholic, Jack sits at the bar and thinks about how he would give up his soul for just one one drink. And, on cue, Lloyd (Joe Turkel) appears.
As I was watching this scene, it occurred to me that, way back in 1980, there probably was some guy named Lloyd who saw this movie in a theater and was probably totally shocked when Jack suddenly stared straight at him and said, “Hey, Lloyd.”
The brilliance of this scene is that we never actually see Lloyd materialize. We see him only after Jack has seen him. So, yes, Lloyd could be a ghost. But he could also just be a figment of Jack’s imagination. Jack very well could just be suffering from cabin fever. Of course, by the end of the movie, we learn the truth.
Everyone always talks about Jack Nicholson’s performance as Jack. Some people love it and some people hate it. (I’m in the first camp.) However, let’s take a minute to appreciate just how totally creepy Joe Turkel is in this scene. Turkel was a veteran character actor and had appeared in two previous Kubrick films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. Two years after appearing in The Shining, Turkel played what may be his best-known role, Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner. Today, incidentally, would have been Joe Turkel’s 98th birthday.
From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, here’s Jack Nicholson and Joe Turkel:
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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!
95 years ago today, Robert Evans was born in New York City. He started out working in his brother’s clothing business but a chance meeting with actress Norma Shearer led to him becoming an actor. And while Evans, by his own account, was not a particularly good actor, he did prove himself to be very skilled at playing the games of Hollywood. Evans eventually moved from acting to production, first as an executive at Paramount and then as an independent producer.
He lived a life as glamorous and tumultuous as the stars of his pictures and his memoir, The Kid Stays In The Picture, is considered to be one of the classic show biz autobiographies. He hung out with cinematic rebels like Jack Nicholson and Robert Towne and counted Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a friend. He suggested that Francis Ford Coppola should direct The Godfather and, when Paramount put pressure on Coppola to cut the film down to two hours, it was Evans who famously announced that a two-hour Godfather was nothing more than a trailer. He lost Ali MacGraw to Steve McQueen and, again by own account, he lost a lot of potentially productive years to cocaine. (The Cotton Club scandal is one of the wildest in the history of Hollywood, though it should be noted that Evans himself was never charged with any wrongdoing.) But, for all that he lost, Evans continues to gain admirers as being the epitome of the producer who was willing to take chances. For all of his flamboyance, Evans had an eye for good material and the willingness to protect his directors. In many ways, he was as important to the cinematic revolution of the 70s as the directors that he hired. When Evans passed away in 2019, it was truly the end of an era.
Here, in honor of the birth and legacy of Robert Evans, are 8 Shots from 8 Films that Evans produced, either as studio chief at Paramount or as an independent producer.
8 Shots From 8 Robert Evans Films
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, dir by Romnn Polanski, DP: William A. Fraker)
Love Story (1970, dir by Arthur Hiller, DP: Richard Kratina)
The Godfather (1972, dir by Francis Ford Coppola, Cinematography by Gordon Willis)
Chinatown (1974, dir by Roman Polanski, DP: John A. Alonzo)
Marathon Man (1976, dir by John Schlesinger, DP: Conrad Hall)
The Cotton Club (1984, dir by Francis Ford Coppola, DP: Stephen Goldblatt)
The Two Jakes (1990, dir by Jack Nicholson, DP: Vilmos Zsigmond)
Sliver (1993, dir by Phillip Noyce, DP: Vilmos Zsigmond)
1970’s RebelRousers tell the story of what happens when Paul Collier (Cameron Mitchell) arrives in a small desert town, searching for his girlfriend, Karen (Diane Ladd). Karen ran away when she discovered she was pregnant because she was scared that Paul would attempt to force her to get an abortion. While Paul talks to Karen in a cheap motel, a motorcycle gang rides into town. The members of the gang include Randolph (Harry Dean Stanton) and Bunny (Jack Nicholson), who wears striped prison pants and a stocking hat. The leader of the gang is J.J. Weston (Bruce Dern), who went to high school with Paul. They even played on the same football team but their lives have since followed differing paths. (How exactly 30ish Bruce Dern and 50ish Cameron Mitchell could have been in the same high school class is not an issue that the film chooses to explore.)
Paul reunites with Karen and swears his love for her. However, when Paul and Karen run into the motorcycle gang, Karen is kidnapped. Bunny wants to force himself on Karen but J.J. wants to set her free. J.J. challenges Bunny to a series of motorcycle games on the beach. The winner decides what happens to Karen. Meanwhile, Paul heads back to the town in search of help but discovers that almost everyone is too much of a coward to help him out. Only Miguel (Robert Dix), the leader of a rival gang is willing to step up and save the community from the Rebels!
RebelRousers was filmed in 1967 but was considered to be so bad that it was put on a shelf and forgotten about until Jack Nicholson suddenly became a star in EasyRider. RebelRousers was released on the drive-in circuit as a Jack Nicholson movie, even though Nicholson is barely in the film and he gives a pretty one-note performance as Bunny. The movie’s star is Cameron Mitchell, who usually played villains and doesn’t seem to be too invested in this film. (Mitchell has such a naturally sinister screen presence that I was actually worried about Paul finding Karen. Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd are the sole members of the cast who really stand out, with Dern taking on the type of cool rebel role that was usually played by Peter Fonda while Ladd (pregnant at the time with Laura Dern) actually manages to bring some real emotional depth to her character. The movie itself was obviously made for next to nothing and it seems like it was shot in a hurry. Everything feels like a first take or, even worse, like a rehearsal that was deemed “good enough.” The competition between Bunny and J.J. ultimately feels mostly like filler than anything else.
RebelRousers is one of the more obscure entries in Jack Nicholson’s filmography. If not for the success of EasyRider, it never would have been released at all. By the time RebelRousers did come out, Jack Nicholson was too busy establishing himself as one of the best leading men of the 70s to spend too much time looking back. Today, watching this film can make it easier to understand why Nicholson was considering dropping out of Hollywood all together before he was cast in EasyRider. That said, the film today serves as a reminder that everyone started somewhere and sometimes, the somewhere is the second feature at the grindhouse.
Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson) gets a job with the Texas border patrol and goes from scrounging in a California trailer park to living the high life in a duplex in El Paso. His wife (Valerie Perrine) is looking forward to spending all the money that he’ll be making as a border agent. But then Charlie discovers that his bigoted superior (Warren Oates!) and his partner (Harvey Keitel) are running a human smuggling ring. When the baby of a young Mexican woman (Elpidia Carrillo) is kidnapped and sold to an illegal adoption ring, Charlie is finally forced to take a stand.
The Border seems to be one of Jack Nicholson’s forgotten films and it really can’t compete with some of the other movies that Nicholson was making around the same time. Compared to films like The Shining, Terms of Endearment, and The Postman Always Rings Twice,The Border really does feel and look like a poorly paced made-for-TV movie. British director Tony Richardson doesn’t really seem to know what type of movie he wanted The Border to be or what he wanted to say about immigration. This is the type neo-Western that Sam Peckinpah could have worked wonders with but Tony Richardson just doesn’t seem to have any feel for the material.
Still, Jack Nicholson is pretty good here, playing the type of weary character that he specialized in during the pre-Batman portion of his career. I especially liked the scenes that he shared with Valerie Perrine, who gave a good performance as someone who viewed buying a waterbed as being the height of luxury. Harvey Keitel’s performance sometimes felt too familiar. He’s played a lot of similar villains but he and Nicholson act well together.
And finally, Warren Oates in this movie, bringing his rough-hewn authenticity to his role. This was the last of Oates’s films to be released before his premature death. Blue Thunder and Tough Enough were both released posthumously. Warren Oates is an actor who was only 52 when he died. Whenever I see him onscreen, I think of all the great performances he would have given if he had only made it through the 90s.
Dave (Adam Sandler), a timid man who has never gotten over being humiliated when he was a teenager, is sentenced to anger management after a slight argument on a plane is blown out of proportion by a taser-wielding shy marshal. His therapist is Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson), whose techniques only seem to exacerbate Dave’s growing anger. Among Dr. Rydell’s methods are giving Dave an unstable “anger buddy” named Chuck (John Turturro), ordering Dave to get revenge on the guy (John C. Reilly) who humiliated on his as a teenager, and also encouraging Dave to cheat on his girlfriend Linda (Maria Tomei) with a woman (Heather Graham) that they meet at bar. Dave goes from timid to angry, Dr. Rydell starts dating Linda, and the whole thing is wrapped up with a totally implausible ending.
The idea of the star of Chinatown and Five Easy Pieces co-starring in an Adam Sandler comedy sounds like it should be exhibit #1 when it comes to talking about the decline of American cinema but I’ve always liked Anger Management. Casting Jack Nicholson as the seemingly insane Dr. Rydell was an inspired choice and Nicholson gives a real performance in the film as opposed to just coasting on his already-established persona. Anger Management came out a year after Adam Sandler’s first dramatic film, Punch-Drunk Love, and, even though Anger Management is a raunchy comedy from the start to finish, Sandler’s performance actually finds the reality in Dave’s situation. Sandler plays Dave as being someone who is sincerely trying his best to get through his court-mandated anger management without losing control. Nicholson and Sandler make for a surprisingly good team.
Of course, it’s an Adam Sandler comedy so it’s not for everyone. The humor is often crude and the film’s final twist is so ridiculous that it can actually leave you feeling like you might need anger management. But Anger Management does show how Jack Nicholson improves anything that he’s involved with and it also shows that Adam Sandler can act when he feels like it. Anger Management also gave us the meme of Jack Nicholson nodding his approval, meaning the film and the performance will live forever.
First released in 1971, Carnal Knowledge is the story of two friends, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel).
Jonathan and Sandy meet in the late 40s, when they’re both assigned to be roommates at Amherst College. They’re both smart, handsome, and obviously from well-off families. They both believe that they have a wonderful future ahead of them and why shouldn’t they? World War II is over. America is the leader of the world and Jonathan and Sandy both appear to be future leaders of America. Sandy is shy and sensitive. When he meets Susan (Candice Bergen), he struggles to talk to her and when they date, he doesn’t know how far he should go with her. (When he tells Jonathan about getting a hand job from her, it’s obvious that Sandy didn’t previously realize such a thing was possible.) Jonathan, on the other hand, is confident and aggressive. He can be a braggart and he can be insensitive but there’s something undeniably attractive about someone who knows what he wants and is determined to get it. Soon, Susan finds herself torn between the two roommates, though Sandy is clueless that Jonathan is even interested in her.
Carnal Knowledge is divided into three separate parts, each taking place in a different decade and each shot in its own individual style. (The film was written by playwright Jules Feiffer and the script does very much feel like a three-act play.) As a character, Susan disappears after the first act but her relationship with Jonathan and Sandy haunts every bit of the second and third acts. By the end of the film, Sandy is no longer sensitive and Jonathan is no longer virile and one can’t help but feel that Susan, wherever she may be, is definitely better off without either one of them.
The second act is dominated by Jonathan’s relationship with Bobbie, played by Ann-Margaret. Bobbie is beautiful and heart-breakingly insecure. Her relationship with Jonathan starts with a dash of romance and then quickly becomes a trap for both of them. Jonathan is not ready (or mature enough) to settle down. Bobbie is desperate for him to marry her and willing to go to extremes to make that happen. The scenes where Jonathan and Bobbie fight are some of the most powerful in the film, with both Nicholson and Ann-Margaret giving the viewer raw and honest portrayals of two insecure people who are totally wrong for each other but also incapable of getting away from each other.
By the time the third act comes around, Jonathan has been reduced to paranoid ruminations about “ball-breakers” and can only get it up when he’s feeling like he’s the one in power. (Rita Moreno has a cameo as a very patient prostitute.) Meanwhile, middle-aged Sandy is dating an 18 year-old (Carol Kane) and clearly trying to live the free-spirited youth that he never had. Who is more pathetic? Jonathan, who bitterly realizes he’s never going to be young again, or Sandy, who is trying to deny the fact that he’s getting older?
CarnalKnowledge is a dark film and indeed, it sometimes feels like it’s a bit too dark for its own good. Even the worst people occasionally have a laugh. The script is full of sharp lines and the characters are interesting, even if they are for the most part unlikable. Still, there’s a staginess to the film’s narrative and director Mike Nichols never quite breaks free from it. That said, I still highly recommend this film. Not only is it a portrait of a culture-in-transition but it also features some wonderful performances, especially from Ann-Margaret and Jack Nicholson. (In most ways, Jonathan is definitely worse than Sandy but we still have more sympathy for Jonathan because Jack Nicholson is a considerably better actor than Art Garfunkel.) Ann-Margaret honestly portrays the heart-breaking insecurity that comes from being repeatedly told that you have nothing but your looks to offer. Meanwhile, Nicholson throws himself into playing the charismatic but immature Jonathan. We may not like Jonathan but we do, in the end, understand why he’s become the person that he has. It takes a certain amount of courage to play a character like Jonathan and, in this film, Nicholson shows every bit of that courage.
Jack Nicholson may have starred in CHINATOWN, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, and THE SHINING, but for a person born in 1973, the first movie I ever loved Jack Nicholson in was BATMAN (1989). I’ve been a fan ever since! Happy Birthday, Jack!
Through the Shattered Lens 