The book shows Jack slowly unraveling.
I don't know about slowly unraveling -- he'd already unraveled before the novel began. He'd broken Danny's arm, been very lucky to avoid killing someone while driving drunk, and got fired from teaching at a prestigious school for beating up a student (who admittedly had vandalized his car). But King makes it very clear that Jack is trying to re-ravel. The Overlook is Jack's chance to get his life back on track -- and Jack knows it. He wants to succeed, not just for himself but also for the family that he very clearly loves.
The movie also pretty much wipes out Danny's part of the story. We don't get any sense of his fear outside the events in Room 237. Also, one scene with the tricycle would have given a nice Danny's-eye view of the place. Twice, a bit much.
And Wendy in the book is a caring wife and mother who a little too often puts two and two together and not unreasonably comes up with five. In the movie, I at least was happy when she took a swing at Jack. Because at least she stopped sniveling.
See, when I'm thinking about
The Shining
I can't get any further than "Oh my god so creepy eep!"
Childhood trauma is pretty powerful that way.
I will say that at no point anywhere in the film did I think any of the family members were even slightly sane. Beginning included.
Abel Gance is interesting. If only his films weren't so damn long.
Not one of Hitchcock's prouder moments, by a long stretch, but you've got Laughton camping it up and Robert Newton as the good guy in a pirate movie. Hitchcock knew he was coming to America by this point, so he just plowed through it and got out of England.
While not my least favorite (which would probably be
Under Capricorn
or
The Paradine Case
maybe), it has always seemed to be the least "Hitchcock".
Under Capricorn
I like it for the use of long takes (I'm a sucker for Style), but storywise it's mighty tedious. And making Ingrid Bergman tedious takes some doing.
The end of the theatrical version of The Shining was so disappointing compared to the book as well. A nice creepy visual, but meh. The book, as is so often the case, was so much better.
Although the guy who played the butler was kind of perfectly cast.
Although the guy who played the butler was kind of perfectly cast.
Heh, he also played Alex's father in Clockwork Orange.
I think I'm with Frank on The Shining. At least, I think Frank is saying what I say about The Shining. I thought the movie was much more clever than the book. Kubrick scrapped the idea of the Overlook as your standard-issue Stephen King bad place that wants you to kill, kill, kill (and, on that note, has anyone watched Garth Merengi's Dark Place on Adult Swim?) in favor of the quieter horror of the world unraveling around a frustrated domestic bully. I'm not a huge Kubrick fan, but I've long thought The Shining to be a good example of filming the truly unsetting core of some turgid source material.
I always felt that the book suffered from too much of King's standard occult-menace-ambushes-helpless-protagonist-every-five-minutes trope. While I liked the idea of it being the hotel itself that was menacing rather than a particular ghost within it, it seemed like every time Danny so much as looked at a piece of carpet lint some traumatic psychic episode occurred, and the stuff with the hedges was really just far too overt and fairy tale-magical.
