Weekend Watch: Requiem for a reluctant scream queen

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of “The Shining” is clearly Jack Nicholson’s movie. The part of Jack Torrance seems tailor-made for Nicholson, allowing him to take his crowd-pleasing, devilish charm and turn it into something much darker. In fact, this is why Stephen King famously disliked Nicholson in the role. A less charismatic actor would have made the character’s transformation more shocking; with Jack you could see that murderous breakdown coming from a mile away.

What’s often forgotten in such discussions is how much the movie is really a two-hander. Think of the scene when Jack smashes through the locked bathroom door to get to his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny. What first comes to mind is probably the iconic image of Nicholson’s leering face pressed up against the jagged hole he’s just made: “Heeere’s Johnny!” But it’s Shelley Duvall as Wendy, cowering in the corner and shrieking at each at axe blow, pathetically wielding a knife as if to ward off the inevitable, who really sells the horror.

It’s easy enough, especially for an actor of Nicholson’s talent and temperament, to play a madman. How much harder is it to demonstrate, in take after take, under hot lights and surrounded by crew, plausible fear of that madman?

Duvall, who died yesterday at 75, was frank about the difficulty of the shoot. “After a while, your body rebels,” she told the Hollywood Reporter’s Seth Abramovitch in 2021:

It says: “Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.” And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, “Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.” And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, “I don’t know how you do it.”

But she did do it, and she ended up creating one of the rawest and most disturbing depictions of sheer, desperate terror and despair ever committed to celluloid.

Steven Spielberg is a fan, noting to author Lee Unkrich that it’s Wendy’s realistic psychological and physical frailty that makes “The Shining” so gripping: “All the suspense for me is, will Wendy be strong enough to stand up to Jack and save her son? And that’s why Shelley Duvall’s performance is, I think, equal to Jack Nicholson’s.”