POPEYE 1980

“The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”  Annie - The Broadway Musical (1977)

“I am what I am an’ tha’s all that I am.”  Popeye - The Movie Musical (1980)

The eccentric, rebellious spirit that characterizes much of what I love about ‘70s movies is a trait I associate with the decade’s turbulent, smash-the-idols mindset that challenged societal norms through movements like the Sexual Revolution, Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and the fight for LGBTQ Rights. As anyone who lived through that decade can tell you, the ‘70s were A LOT. So, it’s also no surprise—considering the Vietnam War, Nixon, Watergate, the Energy Crisis, and a struggling economy—that another defining characteristic of ‘70s films is their pervasive sense of pessimism, disillusionment, and cynicism.

The 1970s: When No One Went to the Movies for a Good Time

But even pressure cookers have their limits, and by mid-decade, after years of near-unrelenting sturm and drang, a kind of mass battle fatigue had begun to set in. The result: like trauma survivors reverting to age-regression as a coping mechanism, the nation’s moviegoers started turning away from post-Watergate nihilism and began flocking (in precedent-setting droves) to reassuring, old-fashioned, almost juvenile entertainments like Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), Grease (1978), Superman: The Movie (1979), and the unabashedly hopeful, “look to the skies” optimism of Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

The overwhelming dominance of these films at the box office ushered in the age of the blockbuster, the revival of the movie musical, and signaled the end of the New Hollywood reign of director-as-self-indulgent-auteur (Heaven’s Gate was detonated in November 1980). By decade’s end, it was confirmed: uplift and escapism were in, reflection and navel-gazing were out. 

Some were quick to label this sociocultural shift an avoidance tactic—a deliberate retreat into the past to escape the instability of the present and the uncertainty of the future. But it’s clear, at least on some level, that it was also an act of retrieval. A retracing of our steps to find out where, on the ‘70s road to America shedding its illusions about itself, we’d also lost the capacity for hope, optimism, and trust.

To discover, as David Bowie sang in his 1975 song, "Young Americans": “Where have all Papa’s heroes gone?”

We Could Be Heroes

This late-decade surge of pop-cultural positivity found an anthem and hero in the 1977 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Annie. Based on the 1924 Harold Gray comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, the show and its signature song “Tomorrow” – an unironic paean to optimism – caught the eyes and ears of Paramount producer Robert Evans, who, ever on the lookout for another anticipating-the-zeitgeist hit like 1971's Love Story, had hoped to make it into a film, but was beaten to the punch by Ray Stark at Columbia Pictures (and we all know how that turned out). 

Undeterred, Evans raided Paramount’s vaults and in no time announced plans to mount a live-action movie musical around cartoonist E.C. Segar’s 1929 comic strip character Popeye the Sailor (Man). A rather canny choice on Evans’ part, for not only did Popeye have global familiarity and name recognition, but in Popeye’s catchline: “I yam what I yam (an’ tha’s all I yam),” Evans had landed upon the perfect ideological hook—individualism, self-acceptance, and being true to oneself—upon which to anchor the entire film (and to inspire, he hoped, a suitably “Tomorrow”-like optimistic musical anthem).

Popeye and King Blozo in E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater comic strip

Preproduction on Evans’ passion project got promisingly underway with the usual revolving door of actors (Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Gilda Radner, Jason Robards [for Poopdeck Pappy]) and directors (Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Louis Malle) considered. 

But industry eyebrows were raised to the snapping point when it was learned that one of Hollywood’s most notoriously hands-on, old-school movie producers had selected as the creative team for his broad-appeal, family musical comedy based on a comic strip, not one but THREE of the industry’s most notoriously rebellious, independent-minded, and artistically temperamental substance abusers: Jules Feiffer (Screenplay), Harry Nilsson (musical score), and Robert Altman (director). 

Poised to be Paramount's big holiday season release of 1980, Popeye arrived—over budget, behind schedule, and amid reams of negative press about its troubled production—on Friday, December 12, 1980, at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. 

Robin Williams as Popeye the Sailor Man

Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl

Wesley Ivan Hurt as Swee'pea

Paul L. Smith as Bluto

Paul Dooley as J. Wellington Wimpy

Ray Walston as Poopdeck Pappy

As was my wont back then, on Popeye’s opening day, I was among the first to arrive in the long line of keyed-up ticketholders that serpentined down Hollywood Boulevard from the Chinese Theater forecourt. The overall atmosphere felt like being at an “event," and the early bird section I was in seemed to be made up entirely of Robin Williams/Mork and Mindy fans who were completely unaware of Robert Altman but were eager as all get-out to see Williams in his film debut. 

In fact, for fear of instigating a real-life reenactment of the last scene from The Day of The Locust, I found myself lying to my line-mates—the strangers one bonds with while waiting in a movie line for two hours—that I, too, was a fan of Williams (I wasn’t…at least not back then) and loved Mork and Mindy (a show I seriously could not stand).

Popeye and his Pappy
Mork meets My Favorite Martian 

However, as a fan of Robert Altman since my high school days, everything about Popeye represented such a departure for the director that I was practically chomping at the bit with anticipation, wondering what the “strange bedfellows” partnership of Altman & Evans would yield. By reputation, Evans seemed to be precisely the kind of profits-driven producer Altman had railed against his entire career, yet it was also clear that from a professional standpoint, Altman was in no position to stand on principle. As Altman’s third release of 1980 (Quintet was a flop, H.E.A.L.T.H was shelved after a brief L.A. run), Popeye represented #3 in a three-strikes-you’re-out comeback bid for Altman’s return to the kind of mainstream success that had eluded him since Nashville (1975).

Duvall's letter-perfect Olive Oyl deserved an Oscar nomination,
but Popeye was overlooked entirely at Awards Season.

Popeye was Shelley Duvall's 7th collaboration with Robert Altman. May of 1980 saw the release of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, marking her first major role in a film by another director (she had a brief but amusing part as a Rolling Stone reporter in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, 1977).

Donald Moffat as The Tax Man

As an end-of-the-year release, Popeye, through no fault of its own, arrived shouldering all the anxieties of the industry’s disappointments of the previous months. The summer of 1980 had seen a spate of expensive musicals flop stupendously (Can’t Stop the Music, Xanadu, The Apple), indicating that, despite Grease's success, the movie musical might not truly be “back” after all; the boxoffice underperformance of the comic-book-based Flash Gordon (playing next-door to Popeye in the Chinese Theater’s add-on twin cinemas) had producers biting their nails; and just three weeks earlier, the megaton detonation of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had symbolically signaled the end of the New Hollywood era of directors as free-rein auteurs. 

And we haven't even gotten to Popeye's own issues yet. As mentioned earlier, Popeye's release was dogged by negative press. Most of it focused on the film's troubled production history: filmed in Malta on an initial budget of $12 million, reports of inclement weather, stormy personalities (Altman, Feiffer, and Nilsson clashed throughout), and technical problems, led to rumors of Popeye running over schedule and hemorrhaging money like bilge water; its final cost, more than twice the original budget. 

But a good deal more press coverage was reserved for the grossly inopportune timing of Popeye's publicity-hound producer (Evans, of course) being charged with cocaine possession and trafficking just months before his family-friendly Disney-Paramount co-venture was set to hit theaters. 

I, for one, wasn’t worried about all the bad press. In fact, if I’m being honest, the very real possibility that Popeye could turn out to be an epic disaster factored positively in my opening day excitement. As a longtime aficionado of Cinema de Merde I ignobly admit that rarer and more exciting than being among the first to see a future movie classic is the opportunity to be one of the first to see a genuine, history-making stinker…a bomb on the scale of something that provides “I was there!” stories to dine out on for decades to come. 

Popeye, like Superman: The Movie (1979)—Warner’s comic-book-to-screen hit whose success Paramount aspired to emulate—is an origin story. It introduces the mononymous seafaring loner (prolonged solitude accounting for his habit of talking to himself in muttered, sarcastic asides) as a storm blows him into the seaside shantytown of Sweethaven, where he hopes to find his long-lost Pappy. 

As Altman described it, his Popeye is the story of a human sailor who shipwrecks in a cartoon town and finds himself in a kind of two-dimensional limbo. The longer he stays amongst these eccentric cartoon characters, the more he begins to resemble them. In finally finding a place where he belongs, the sailor gradually transforms until "He becomes the Popeye of the cartoon.” In the film’s finale, after vanquishing Sweethaven’s dictator, gaining self-acceptance ("I am what I am"), and discovering the joys of family—both found and biological—the heroic, spinach-loving Popeye of the 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons is born. Hence, the introduction and sole appearance of Samuel Lerner’s iconic “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” theme song.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Well, blow me down…

I’ll be darned if Robert Altman didn’t go and make the most charming, sweet-natured movie of his career. Quirky and whimsical, Popeye bears the stamp of Altman's influence in ways both beneficial (he's a wonderful ensemble director) and detrimental (the film is almost recklessly singular in its vision). However, as a true collaborative work of many talented individuals, both in front of and behind the cameras (production design: Wolf Kroeger, costumes: Scott Bushnell, cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno), what is achieved with Popeye—at least in terms of faithful visual representation—is nothing short of dazzling. The characters are brought to life in a colorful (if not always vivid) manner, effectively crafting a cohesive, fully realized, live-action cartoon world that's true to the visual and tonal spirit of the original E.C. Segar comics.

So, why didn’t I like it more? 

Bluto sees red when Olive shows up late to their 
 engagement party with another man...and a baby!

A movie this good-natured and with its heart in the right place is difficult to thoroughly dislike; yet, I can’t say I entirely fell in love with Popeye, either. Instead, my feelings align with this quote from LA Times critic Charles Champlin: “[Popeye] … is a film that is rarely uninteresting but seldom entirely satisfying, except when young Wesley [Swee’pea] is beaming his radiant innocence on all about him or when Shelley Duvall is being Olive Oyl to absolute high-voiced perfection.”    

The Toughs
Actor Dennis Franz is visible 2nd from the right.
The other Toughs are members of Popeye's production crew 

I can only guess that the audience I watched it with felt something similar because the response throughout the evening was attentive but mild. The film's biggest laugh came from a growling fox fur, and the most vocal reactions happened every time there was a close-up of Swee'pea.

Absolutely nothing is lacking in the film’s production values or anything related to the visual transfer of the Popeye comic world to the screen, which is part of the problem. In focusing so heavily on getting the neo-realist, material aspects of Popeye right, I think Altman & Co. missed the boat by not investing at least as much meticulous attention to figuring out how to make us care about these characters.

The world created is so richly textured, the look of the characters so striking in their eccentricity, I couldn’t help feeling they all deserved a better story, better music, and certainly better jokes than the ones they’re given.

A sure bet for Popeye's all-around crowd pleaser was literal nepo-baby

(the director's grandson) Wesley Ivan Hurt 

"Keep A-Goin' " (the title of one of Haven Hamilton's songs in Nashville) is the name of one of the horses considered when Wimpy takes the "clairvoyink orphink" Swee'pea to bet on the races

As a comedy, Popeye’s gently absurdist tone elicited more smiles than outright laughs from me. And as a musical, I thought it had some truly sublime moments—I adore Olive’s “He Needs Me” and Popeye singing “Swee’pea’s Lullaby”—but I remember waiting for the magic to kick in. It never really did.

I’m grateful Popeye never succumbed to the kind of deadening, forced exuberance and “bigger is better” bombast that sounds the death knell for so many big-budget movie musicals. But what’s served up in its stead (a lot of inert slapstick and surprisingly joyless, curiously earth-bound circus tumbling) is bewildering. It’s not like the world of Popeye didn’t offer Altman plenty to work with…even with that consciously crackpot musical score of Nilsson's.

The Walfleur Sisters
Played by the a cappella quartet The Steinettes, who appeared in Altman's H.E.A.L.T.H.

It has been said of Altman that his dedication to his creative vision tends to make him a director who can be indifferent to the audience’s experience and enjoyment. Aspects of Popeye bear this out. For instance, conceptually speaking, it’s all well and good to decide, since they’re simple townsfolk, no one in Sweethaven should know how to sing or dance. But since it was SOMEBODY’s idea to make Popeye a musical, didn’t it occur to anyone to consider what the audience is being asked to sit through? The concept proves far more fanciful than the reality when parts of Popeye inspire the same squirmy discomfort as those scenes of tone-deaf Sueleen Gay singing in Nashville.

Olive and the Oyls
Olive's Miss Bossypants posture clearly shows the family’s power dynamics.

And why wasn’t all of this more fun? One reason musicals ARE musicals is their potential for emotional transcendence. A musical can be as small, subtle, and offbeat as it wants to be…but that shouldn't mean it can't also be a little joyous and magical. Though “Swee’pea’s Lullaby” always gives me waterworks (which I credit to Robin Williams' endearing performance), it's the rare musical that fails to provide me with at least one good “goosebump moment.” 

There's enough that Popeye does right for me to see it as a triumph of adaptation (and if you’ve seen the live-action versions of The Flintstones, The Cat in the Hat, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you know how truly dreadful Popeye could have been), but it's more a movie I'm fond of than a movie I love. 

As much as I still feel Popeye never quite gelled into the movie it had the potential to be, with each passing year, I become more appreciative of its uniqueness and eccentricity. Especially when taking into account it was made at a time when the film industry was starting to embrace the kind of cookie-cutter mediocrity that guaranteed blockbuster multiplex weekends.

It turns out there was real wisdom in Evans’ gamble on Feiffer, Altman, and Nilsson, and in his belief that a movie emphasizing the virtues of individuality should be created by artists who embody those qualities. Altman is a risk-taker, and in his way, a humanist visionary who fought to do right by Popeye by doing it HIS way. 

It's in this way that Popeye feels very much a product of the post-‘70s zeitgeist of optimism and hope. And as an adult-friendly flick geared towards kids, I love that it champions self-acceptance and the nobility of heroism rather than—like the blockbuster Grease—the triumph of conformity and the safety of buckling to peer pressure. 

Spinach Power Couple

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall are the ideal Popeye and Olive. Both are cute as a button and impossibly young here, and since their deaths, their effortless chemistry has taken on a nostalgic poignance. Williams subdued is my kind of Williams, and his Popeye is appealingly naïve and decent. Duvall, doing wonders with her voice, gawky grace, and extravagant eyelids, gives Olive Oyl a comic-lyrical beauty resulting in her being the very best thing in the film. I don’t think Popeye would have worked at all without Duvall in, as Altman put it, “The role she was born to play.”

Although the character of Poopdeck Pappy doesn't make a lot of sense--he's a redeemed villain whose villainy served him no real purpose--Ray Walston is perfect, and this is one of my favorite scenes

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Popeye shares several amusing similarities with Robert Altman’s revisionist Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Both are set in small, makeshift settlements built specifically for the films. Both tell stories about loners whose fates are tied to an indifferent town. Shelley Duvall appears in “McCabe,” as does Robert Fortier (Edgar in 3 Women ), who plays the town drunk we see dancing on the ice. In Popeye, Fortier wears the exact same costume in his role as Sweethaven's drunk, Barnacle Bill.

The church in "McCabe" inspired Sweethaven's house of worship, while, in Popeye's wittiest allusion, a woman in an opium haze can be seen staring at a ceramic vase in the "House of ill repukes" that Popeye enters to save Swee'pea.

And both Popeye and "McCabe" are subtle anti-fascism parables. Citing a lyric from the Sweethaven anthem " We're people from the sea, free from democracy," Altman stated: “The thing we're doing in 'Popeye' is showing a microcosm of an oppressed society. The people of Sweethaven are not what they are, they are what people tell them to be.” As one journalist noted, until Popeye stands up to the tax man, the citizens of Sweethaven are happily oblivious to their entrapment and oppression. 

Sounds familiar.

BONUS MATERIAL

THINGS DON'T ALWAYS GO BETTER WITH COKE

The above wheatpaste poster ad for WHITE HORSE hair cream is likely an in-joke added by one of Popeye's craftspersons, poking fun at (or paying homage to) the abundant drug use during filming on Popeye's remote Malta location. In speaking of the shoot, Robin Williams claimed, "We were on everything but rollerskates." While Robert Altman conceded, "There was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drugs going around. Everybody was shipping stuff in."

I won't go into it here, but you're interested in knowing more, just Google: Popeye 1980 Cocaine—the internet is seriously flooded with info about the Maltese Snowstorm.

Clip from "Popeye" - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2025

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR 1976

Bernice Bobs Her Hair, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s satirically comic, finely-observed 1920 short story about feminine identity in the emergent jazz age, can be read in less time than it takes to watch this exceptional made-for-TV short film adaptation directed by Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, Crossing Delancey). A movie clocking in at a little over 48 minutes, Bernice Bobs Her Hair is a disarmingly witty little film that offers more food for thought, first-rate performances, snappy dialogue, and keen period detail than most films three times the length and ten times the budget.

Shelley Duvall as Bernice

Veronica Cartwright as Marjorie

Bud Cort as Warren

Dennis Christopher as Charley Paulson

Mark La Mura as Carpenter

Mark Newkirk as G. Reece Stoddard

The moneyed idleness of finishing school girls and prep school boys on summer holiday in Connecticut is a ritualized flurry of status-defining social activities which have about them the contradictory quality of simultaneously relieving and heightening boredom. The time is 1919; the very brink of flaming youth, flappers, jazz, and silent movie vamps. While the conventions of mannered society are stringently observed by young and old alike, those teens fumbling most uneasily on the verge of adulthood can’t resist exercising their newfound independence through small acts of social rebellion.

Among the debutante set, this means engaging in (and trying to navigate one’s way through) behaviors that walk a tightrope between popularity-enhancing daring and ostracized-by-one’s-peer-group scandalousness.

It’s August, and all-around “fun” girl and social hub Marjorie Harvey (Veronica Cartwright) is having her summer fairly ruined by visiting cousin Bernice (Shelley Duvall). In contrast to the well-liked Marjorie who has mastered and understands the seemingly endless little gambits and ploys a girl must practice in order to convey availability through the highly contrived appearance of unavailability, Bernice is dull to the point of distraction. A well-heeled socialite from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Bernice nevertheless suffers from shyness and an overabundance of the kind of genteel femininity that was swiftly becoming passé in the pre-flapper era of the early '20s.

"Bernice, girls our age divide into two groups: there's the ones like me who like to have a good time, then there's the ones like you who just love to sit around and criticize us for it!"

An eye-opening conversation overheard by Bernice (“I didn't mean to listen…at first”) between Marjorie and her mother (Polly Holliday) compels the visiting cousin to grudgingly allow herself to be taken under Marjorie’s wing for a thorough personality overhaul. What follows is a cross between Pygmalion, the third act of Grease, and the “Popular” number from Wicked as Marjorie coaches Bernice in all the finer points of being a sought-after modern woman. As the summer progresses Marjorie proves herself a master educator… but does Bernice perhaps learn her lessons all too well?

So, you think you can dance?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The distancing effect of Bernice Bobs Her Hair’s period setting works to the film’s advantage, allowing for a kind of clear-eyed, dispassionate assessment of laughable social mores not always possible (or welcomed) when the lens of satire is trained on contemporary fads and trends. Additionally, the notion that one’s parents and grandparents might have been plagued by the same adolescent insecurities and pressures to conform that we’ve experienced provides both a historical perspective and a reinforcement of the cyclical nature of human behavior.

When Bernice Bobs Her Hair first aired in 1976 as part of the PBS The American Short Story anthology series, the film was viewed through the prism of mid-'70s second-wave feminism (those years when the initial strides of Women’s Lib began to take root, culturally). With films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), The Stepford Wives (1975), and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) reflecting the evolving cultural prominence of women in the 70s, the duplicitous, restrictive, male-centric behavior of the young women at the center of Fitzgerald’s story appeared foolish, outmoded, and as unlikely for a comeback as the bustle.

Well, here we are in the year 2012, and the litany of silly “how to get a man interested” rules and stringent feminine “dos” and “don’ts” at the center of Bernice Bobs Her Hair (each presuming some innate female inadequacy) look positively dignified in light of the tyranny of reality shows like “The Bachelor” and how-to-catch-and-keep-a-man books like “The Rules.”

You'll be Popular...Just Not Quite as Popular as Me
Marjorie (Veronica Cartwright) and Roberta (Lane Binkley) prepare for the Country Club dance

PERFORMANCES

As earlier posts will attest, I am thoroughly besotted with Shelley Duvall. Here, as she did so artfully in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Duvall brings an oddball stamp of pluck and silent self-regard to characters who, as written, would otherwise be pitiable or pathetic. Duvall’s Bernice may be socially withdrawn and ill-at-ease around members of the opposite sex, but it’s clear she holds an opinion of herself more solidly defined than that of her rather superficial cousin. Bernice’s willingness to undergo a personality makeover is born more of a kind of misdirected introspection (there’s a scene wherein she more or less encounters herself in male form—the reserved and judgmental ministry student, Draycott Deyo) than poor self-esteem.

Duvall's transformation from wallflower to man-trap is a delight 

I don’t believe there exists on film an uninteresting Veronica Cartwright performance. Splendid in Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as the vain and spoiled socialite of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Cartwright displays a comic timing and command of expression and inflection that lends bite to her scenes of bitchiness and real humanity to those moments that reveal the coward behind the monster. Her scenes with Duvall are marvelously engaging in their chemistry.

The character of Yale undergrad Warren McIntyre is sketchily drawn in Fitzgerald’s story, but as embodied by baby-faced Bud Cort (the victim of Shelly Duvall’s betrayal in Altman’s Brewster McCloud, but better known for Harold & Maude), Warren is a mass of post-adolescent agitation and self-seriousness. Wearing the expression of one perpetually amazed by the depth of his own emotions, Cort mines pure comic gold in fleshing out an otherwise stock Ivy League character.

Unburdening himself to Bernice, Warren longs to reveal his true self by becoming a writer. Albeit under the deliciously loony pseudonym of Charlotte Van Heusen.
"I don't want anyone to know it's me. I'm in too much pain."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Someone once said that it’s the responsibility and privilege of the young to blaze new trails and challenge social convention, for in nonconformity lies progress. What’s fascinating to ponder is how significant a role hair and hairstyles have played in the shattering of social conventions throughout history.

As was the style of the day, the socialites in Bernice Bobs Her Hair sport mountainous piles of hair. The numerous scenes of women fussing and tending to their hair dramatize the dichotomy posed by the narrative. Long tresses may be a badge of femininity and old-world gentility, but their need for constant care inhibits female mobility and freedom. With its minimal upkeep requirements, the short bob haircut was liberation personified and branded the ideal symbol for the modern woman. Alas, its lack of social precedence and too-close association with the morally suspicious silent-screen “vampires” also branded the haircut as immodest and instantly scandalous (aka, rebellious).

Braiding is a motif repeated so often in Bernice Bobs Her Hair that the ritual begins to take on the weight of metaphor - the braids come to resemble ropes tying the women to constrictive notions of femininity.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of my favorite exchanges in the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story didn’t make it to the film.

Marjorie’s mother is trying to make sense of the fuss Marjorie is making over Bernice not fitting in with her social crowd. From where Marjorie’s mother sits, there’s not much to be gained in the shallow approval of people who scarcely seem interested in you in the first place.

Mrs. Harvey: “What’s a little cheap popularity?”

Marjorie: “It’s everything when you’re eighteen!”

And so it is. The world of an eighteen-year-old will undoubtedly expand, but for that brief moment in time (which can feel like an eternity) when one’s entire universe is inhabited exclusively by immediate family and the kids you go to school with, the petty concerns of popularity and peer acceptance can take on the importance of world-turning events.
There's no way to watch Bernice Bobs Her Hair without acknowledging, time and time again, how little has changed in the realm of human interaction since 1920. 
Bernice: "My philosophy is that you have to either amuse people, feed 'em, or shock 'em!"

Those words, written in 1920, could literally be Lady Gaga's mantra.

A World on the Verge of Change

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

THE SHINING 1980

In 1980, if you were of R-rated moviegoing age and among those who first got a glimpse of that unforgettably chilling, minimalist classic of a theatrical teaser trailer for The Shining; there was no way in hell you weren't going to see the movie. (1980 Teaser Trailer for The Shining on YouTube)

If I remember correctly, I first saw the trailer at Hollywood’s Mann’s Chinese Theater as early as December of 1979 or January of 1980 (The Shining was released in May 1980 to kick off the Memorial Day weekend). Then, as now, the average movie trailer hewed to the familiar pattern of sensory bombardment combined with the suspense-killing, full disclosure of each and every plot point that might have rendered the film even remotely intriguing (the term, “spoilers” didn't exist). The trailer for The Shining deviated so significantly from the prevailing standard that when first appeared that famous static shot of the twin elevator doors, accompanied by that eerily intensifying discordant music, the theater became so still you could practically feel the collective pupils of the eyes in the audience dilate all at once.

In 1980 Stephen King was not the household name he is today so the floating title, “The Shining” drew little response. It was only when Stanley Kubrick’s name was revealed that the crowd joined together in what can best be described as an aggregate, apex-of-the-rollercoaster, intake of air. At the same time—as nothing had yet happened onscreen beyond the music growing increasingly agitated and ominous— a pervasive air of, WTF? mushroomed throughout the theater like a vapor.

And then, the slow-motion torrent of blood began to spew forth from the elevator shaft. Oh…My…God. All at once the thudding soundtrack was drowned out by a consolidated, rising-tide of “Whoooooa!” from the audience that lasted until the now-bloodstained screen once again displayed the film's title. A second or two of stunned silence was followed by applause, animated chatter, and delighted giggles of the sort usually associated with a children's birthday party after a magician has pulled off a particularly startling bit of trickery. On the strength of this one remarkably classy, 90-second trailer, coupled with the anomaly of an Oscar-nominated director of Kubrick’s stature venturing into the realm of horror, over the course of the next few months The Shining became the movie to see. 

When the Saul Bass-designed poster for The Shining began appearing all over Los Angeles, the film immediately jumped several points on my personal "Cool-o-meter" (I took this pic in April of 1980 on The Sunset Strip in front of the famous Whisky a Go Go during its short-lived punk phase)

I was especially hopeful about The Shining, inasmuch as I have always loved a good scare at the movies but had grown increasingly dismayed by 70s horror films’ over-reliance on gore and their tendency to think of shock cuts as viable substitutes for suspense and atmosphere. Considering both Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975) to be, if not exactly masterpieces, then certainly masterful, I sincerely believed that Kubrick’s The Shining had the potential to be the Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist of the '80s.

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance

Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance

Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance

Scatman Crothers as Dick Hallorann

Barry Nelson as Stuart Ullman

If ever you want to get both the best experience of a movie, yet at the same time the least reliable impression of how that film will actually perform at the boxoffice, go see it on opening day. I attended an evening show of The Shining when it opened on May 23, 1980 at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  The turnout was amazing. The crowds stretched around the block, past the parking lot, and into the nearby residential neighborhood. All of us waiting in line (some as long as three hours) were geared up for the scare of our lives, positive we were going to be among the first to see the big blockbuster hit of the summer. Fanning the flames was an enormous blow-up of Newsweek magazine’s rave review of The Shining (“The Ultimate Horror Movie!”) displayed in the theater’s forecourt. When the ushers came to release the velvet rope, I’m sure our faces had about them the look of vague genuflection, as though we were being granted a supreme privilege rather than just being allowed to see a movie we’d just paid for.

Original Ending
I was lucky enough to have seen The Shining before Kubrick mandated the excising of the scene that takes place after Jack freezes to death in the maze, but before the final shot of the photograph in the Overlook Hotel lobby. The deleted scene, which adds another layer of "What??!!?" onto an already maddeningly enigmatic conclusion, had a suspiciously solicitous Stuart Ullman (the hotel manager) visiting Wendy and Danny in a hospital where Wendy is recovering from shock. Wendy is interested in hearing if any evidence had been found at the hotel of all that she had recounted to the authorities. Ullman informs her that while the bodies of her husband and Hallorann had been recovered, there was no evidence in the hotel of any of what she had reported as having seen or occurred there. 
He insists that she must have suffered some kind of breakdown and that it was all in her mind. After this, I seem to recall his making an offer for Wendy and Danny to move in with him, and (this was the kicker) before he leaves and out of Wendy's view, he hands Danny the yellow tennis ball that had earlier materialized out of that mysterious room 237.
Personally, I LOVED this ending and preferred it to the one which now stands, but I seem to be alone on that score. I went to see The Shining again the weekend after its opening and the scene had already been deleted.

There’s a point at which one’s expectations for a movie can be so high that, on first viewing, you’re not responding to the film so much as reacting to whether or not the film has met or dashed your hopes. Such was the case for me on first seeing The Shining. So keen was I on The Shining being the epic horror film the pedigree of its cast and director augured, that when it proved itself (only) to be an intelligent, superbly well-made, largely effective horror thriller, I was disappointed. 

And from the feel of things, so was the opening night audience. The electric tension that greeted the film’s early scenes over time gave way to a funny kind of mistrustful hesitancy in not knowing how to respond to the minimum horror and maximum attention to visual style. Let down by the film’s lack of cover-your-eyes scares, the eager-to-be-entertained audience instead zeroed in on the burlesque of Jack Nicholson’s performance. As Nicholson trotted out the entirety of his even-then overfamiliar arsenal of arched eyebrows, Cheshire cat grins, and baroque overplaying, the audience assuaged its sense of letdown by losing itself in the film's mood-killing, dubiously intentional black comedy.

It's very difficult for an actor to convincingly portray drunkenness or insanity without resorting to overacting and cliche. In The Shining, Jack Nicholson has the dual challenge of playing an alcoholic driven to madness (as Nicholson plays it, it's a pretty short trip). 

Taking their cue from an actor who didn’t appear to be taking things seriously himself, the audience started to find everything Nicholson did funny. Even when he wasn’t trying to be. The Shining began to pick up and find its rhythm by the latter third, but by then the audience had already been lost. The crowd leaving the theater that night was a considerably more subdued and bewildered one than had entered. By the end of the 3-day Memorial Day Weekend, word of mouth had more or less undermined all the good the trailer and the film’s sizable advertising budget had done, and The Shining limped along for the rest of the summer, a modest success, eclipsed at the boxoffice—proportionately by budget—by that other summer horror film release of 1980 (God help us), Friday the 13^th.
Ultimately, time, cable TV, home video, and the overall decline in the quality of horror films over the years, has allowed for a more clear-eyed, fair-handed assessment of The Shining’s virtues. Today it is widely regarded as a minor classic and one of Kubrick's most highly regarded films. Me, I like it a little more every time I see it, finding it easier to appreciate what Kubrick was trying to do when I no longer filter it through what I wanted him to do.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps a little too removed a director to engage me emotionally in the way necessary for me to be made to feel real fear (the way Roman Polanski can), but there is something ideally chilling in the setup of a vaguely dysfunctional family holed up for an entire winter in an isolated hotel that may or may not be haunted. Where Kubrick really excels is in creating indelible images (the elevator scene alone qualifies the film for classic status), developing tension, and establishing a world wherein events proceed on a collision course of horror that feels devilishly preordained, yet the particulars of what is real and why it’s all happening are open to any number of interpretations. Letting his meticulously evoked intermingling of the paranormal and the supernatural propel the plot, The Shining is almost willful in its ambiguity. (And don’t let anyone convince you that there is a single “right” way to interpret The Shining. Part of the film's brilliance - and no small part of its frustration to many - is how well it supports many different, perfectly valid interpretations.)

The Torrances: One big, happy family.

PERFORMANCES

Jack Nicholson has been a star for so long that it’s easy to forget that in the years following his 1975 Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, many thought that Nicholson had fallen victim to the dreaded “Oscar Curse” (later dubbed The F. Murray Abraham Syndrome)— a downward-trajectory jinx that befalls the careers of many Academy Award winners. Jack Nicholson’s hammy and/or ineffectual turns in the late 70s flops The Missouri Breaks, The Last Tycoon & Goin' South, played like dry-runs for his over-the-top performance in The Shining, and critics were less than kind. Until just recently, I’ve always felt that Nicholson single-handedly ruined The Shining and that Kubrick afforded him far too much leeway (as he did Peter Sellers in Lolita). Even today I can’t say that I’m fully persuaded by Nicholson in the role, but I’ve since warmed up to his particular acting “choices” for his portrayal of Jack Torrance. The common complaint that Nicholson's Jack Torrance looks plenty crazy before he's even driven insane in The Shining echo a similar grievance leveled at the choice of actor John Cassavetes for the husband in Rosemary's Baby. To critics in 1968, Cassavetes looked guilty of something before his character even did anything.

On the flip side of my feelings about Jack Nicholson is my affection for the popularly-unpopular choice of actress Shelley Duvall. I think she is terrific in The Shining and any emotional engagement I have in the film at all is attributable to her pitch-perfect performance. Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but I’ve liked Duvall in everything I’ve seen her in…especially her Oscar-worthy work in Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977).  

The casting of actress Shelley Duvall in the role of Wendy Torrance rates high on the list of controversial Kubrick choices. Even her co-star weighed in on the decision: 

“I said, ‘Shelley Duvall?! What’s the idea, Stanley?’ And he says, ‘Well, you gotta have somebody in that part that maybe the audience would also like to kill a little bit!’”

Interview with Jack Nicholson by Nev Pierce for Empire Magazine 

If critics didn't appreciate Duvall in The Shining, they more than made up for it with the raves she garnered later that year playing the part she was born to play: Olive Oyl in Robert Altman's Popeye (1980)  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

  The Overlook Hotel as envisioned by Kubrick and his team is one creepily spectacular location for a horror film.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As opposed to what I enjoy most about good horror films, The Shining never hits me where I live in terms of tapping into some deep-seated fear and giving it a face. The single scene that accomplishes this is the brilliant "All work and no play" reveal of Jack Torrance's insanity (which hit me with the same jolt that the Scrabble anagram sequence in Rosemary's Baby did). What I think The Shining has that keeps me returning to it and what has caused it to consistently rise in my estimation, is that it's terribly smart and thoughtful in its construction. There are worse things you can say about a horror movie than that it is one of ideas. 

The Shining has perhaps more head than heart, but its predetermination has an intrigue and attraction all its own. Whether it feels like a treatise on the eternal nature of evil, a dramatization of domestic violence, or just a vision of a family going mad together, it makes me want to watch every corner of the frame, listen to every detail of dialog, literally scour the film from start to finish in hopes of uncovering the "key" to what it all signifies. In the end, The Shining may not have much to say about the many questions it proposes, but a movie that provokes thought, any kind of thought, is always a step in the right direction.

Promotional postcard for the truly atrocious 1997 TV miniseries -The Shining.
 The Stanley Kubrick film began to look a lot better in people's eyes after author Stephen King tried his hand at adapting his own novel. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012