Torrance is not a person looking forward, but someone already troubled. There’s no better indication than his sole moment of true enjoyment on the drive to the hotel with Wendy (Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd in a miraculous performance), when he noticeably brightens at the discussion of the Donner Party. In a cute moment of subtext, Jack rationalizes it as okay because Danny saw it “on the television”—as if cannibalism and TV were equivalent.
This character has no George Bailey worries about a “drafty old barn.” Though isolated and soon to be snowbound, the hotel is huge but well-appointed, with every need accommodated and every detail planned out. But George was better at playing the part of the dutiful and involved dad (except Christmas Eve, natch) than Jack Torrance, who obviously only feigns interest during the family’s initial tour of the hotel given by Nelson. Torrance throws out dead grins and robotic nods, punctuated by inanities like “cozy” to pretend he’s engaged. He’s only going through the motions about anything related to his family and his job. He makes them the source of all his problems and the eventual target of all his frustrations as a failed—and more damaging still, failing—writer.
Kubrick effectively sets up the monster Nicholson becomes by keeping him out of a good amount of the opening scenes. We see Duvall and Danny, without Nicholson. We see Duvall and Anne Jackson, with no Nicholson. We see Danny and Scatman Crothers, but no Nicholson. As with any thriller, the less we see of the menace, the more effective the attack.
The director explained, “Jack comes to the hotel psychologically prepared to do its murderous bidding. He doesn’t have much further to go for his anger and frustration to become completely uncontrollable.” Kubrick calls Torrance a failure as a writer and contemptuous of his wife, with hatred toward his son, such that once he is at the mercy of the hotel’s powerful evil, he “is quickly ready to fulfill his dark role.”9
The turning point of Nicholson’s portrayal of the father takes place 44 minutes into The Shining. This is when a disturbed and troubled man becomes a tortured and dangerous animal. This is the transition point, with an unsettling scene of a man who hits his head and rips his typing paper in anguish and frustration. The moment is physical, as it must be for someone whose intellect has failed him, leaving only the body to find if it can perform where the mind did not. Nicholson’s character energy takes full control of a man losing control. Hands, eyelashes, eyebrows, all in furious motion. He slaps his head, summons a fake smile, moves his brows more—motions and expressions that create the Jack Torrance we remember. Toward the end of this sequence, there’s even a little of Nicholson’s Bruce Dern riff creeping in, with a get-the-fuck-out-of-here look and a certain way of positioning his eyebrows to exude added snottiness.
Suddenly, abruptly, a ghostly Jack Torrance appears. We see a deadened man, unshaven, with a gray appearance and neglect accentuated by a black turtleneck. He appears frozen, a glimpse of the figure we see physically frozen at the film’s conclusion. His eyes are upraised and stuck, with no signs of blood circulating or any existence as a sentient being. Is he already dead, excusing his later actions as those of some uncontrollable zombie or a ghost amongst ghosts?
For a break in his go-nowhere novel, Torrance has a one-time fling with a cancerous, drooping old hag. When a beautiful, bountiful young woman emerges from her bath to embrace the father, whose wife and son are within walking distance of this scene, he lustily kisses her until he sees what she’s become or what she was all along. This can be taken as another comment on real marriage and real life (i.e., “That’s what happens when you get married!”), a foretelling of Warren Schmidt’s view of his wife, not in actual expression but in attitude and sentiment.
Torrance visits Lloyd the bartender again, adding an encounter with Grady in the lounge’s rest room. As Grady “cor-rrrects” Jack, retorting that Torrance has always been the caretaker, Nicholson reacts like an old-time western sidekick, with much eye motion and thick-tongued, statically wide-open mouth. Nicholson’s approach to the destructive arc of the character perfectly constitutes the notion of character energy. Many have accused Nicholson of overacting, but his approach is appropriately varied and entirely fitting.
Kubrick wanted Nicholson for the role from the start, calling him “one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Cagney.” The director needed the audience to believe that Torrance was a writer, even a failed one. “[Nicholson] is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and those are qualities almost impossible to act.”10
Nicholson is big, yes. He plays it big because the actor does not view insanity as a subtlety. There is no subtlety to being insane. He veers from gregarious with Lloyd to befuddlement with Grady to milquetoast with his employer to dismissive with Wendy to weirdly threatening to Danny. He catapults from the kind of husband and father who can make a move and cause a flinch and a grimace to a true physical menace—all because of a terminal case of writer’s block that’s exacerbated with a serious dose of cabin fever.
Torrance famously types page after page after page of a single line that indeed proves himself to be a dull boy. And a duller writer. Of course he has to flip out. When wife Wendy confronts him after discovering his all-too-efficient wordplay, economizing to only eight words repeated over hundreds of pages, he starts calmly in voice. Then Jack the actor imbues Jack the character with deadly sarcasm when asking what could be “done with Danny.” Oddly, and perhaps obscurely, Nicholson uses a Paul Lynde voice to push the strangeness quotient and incongruity factor beyond any sensible level—because that is insanity. He then goes from Paul Lynde to Jack to Jack tinged with some Bruce Dern. He’s not exactly soothing when he promises not to hurt Wendy, but to merely bash her brains in.
A famous film moment (or at least one of the scores of times that moment was redone at the behest of director Stanley Kubrick), shown as it happens in The Shining (1980). Jack Torrance (Nicholson) tells Wendy (Shelley Duvall, at top) that he does not want to hurt her. He is not convincing in making his case.
Nicholson centers his intense character energy in his head and body, with his hands emotive, active and alive, and his tongue expressive and physical in ways only Gene Simmons could replicate. Barry Dennen explained how Nicholson feeds that character energy through everything around him: “Jack uses all the other actors on the set. He uses the words he has to say. He uses the lighting to make you see it. And he’s really good at that.” However, Dennen believes that Nicholson will never tell you his tricks like the wise magician he is. “Jack is a master. He’s wonderful, and what he does he makes seem so simple and easy. It also comes out of a lot of experience. He’s a very experienced actor and a lot comes out of his own experience. I admire him deeply.”11
Though the atmosphere on the shoot could be quite intense, Nicholson (and against stereotype, even Kubrick) helped lighten the set when around the child actors. Danny Lloyd told me that his best memory of working with Nicholson was when “he was clowning around, with the axe, acting like an Indian one day between takes. He was a really good guy.”12
There are catchphrases everyone remembers, such as an I Love Lucy–type announcement that he’s arrived home to his honey. The iconic Tonight Show opening line is recreated with an axe swing in place of the original pantomimed golf swing. Nicholson apes Ed McMahon with a sick and twisted grin, but what most forget were the moments that made these overplayed moments so effective. To build to this climax, his methodical and purposeful axe swings calmly advance Torrance from door to door, using a quizzical and comically insane look, invoking President Richard Nixon. When Jack does Tricky Dick as the Big Bad Wolf and warns the little pigs to let him in (“by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin”), he’s referencing the unshaven 1960 debater and the drunken monster trapped in the White House with his own cabin fever and with his own enemies.
Nicholson uses his body to great effect, later adapting a strange, strid
ing limp to attack Dick Hallorann (Crothers) with an axe, and later still when pursuing Danny through the maze. Jack said, “For the limp, I don’t recall if it was [Stanley’s] idea or mine, but I thought about Charles Laughton running in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”13
Nicholson’s so-called “overacting” is in fact just right, yet not realistic. The situation and his character’s frame of mind would not work if treated as realistic, but instead must be heightened beyond normal comprehension. This was part of Kubrick’s vision for the actor.
Disappearing into the icy, snowy maze, Torrance pursues Danny, systematically devolving into a guttural, yelping, unthinking animal. Logic fails him as his son’s tracks in the snow somehow appear to suddenly stop. This man, this animal, this psychologically attuned actor reacts with maximum physicality and minimum awareness. Torrance pushes his chin out, he protrudes his lower teeth like a predatory lower creature, and he trains his eyes on his prey so that the whites of his eyes dominate like the snow itself and the eerie light of this doomed evening.
He stumbles on. The blood flow in his brain slows down at his brain freezes. He replaces words with mere grunts as he shuts down his mind and his mouth, howling incoherently. These screams become louder and less lucid as instinct replaces thought. Then, the fatal cut, the murderous edit in the film, reveals Torrance as a frozen, up-staring statue harking back to the earlier scene of the mentally frozen character in his black turtleneck. That alive man had too much in common with this dead one.
Joseph Turkel provided me with invaluable insight into the oft-noted obsessive degree of Nicholson’s preparation, this time for the freezing chase scene. “I had the dressing room next to Jack,” he recounted. “He’s recumbent on the sofa—sideways, not quite laying with his feet propped up on the coffee table.” Turkel spied a book open across the actor’s chest and asks what it is. “Jack says it’s about the effect of freezing on the human body. I say, ‘What the fuck are you reading that for?’ Jack answers, ‘Look: For the last scene, my character freezes and I want to know just how it happens.’” Over 35 years later, Turkel still marvels at this attention to reality and Nicholson’s dedication to his craft, explaining, “Anybody else would have just winged it, but not Jack. He had to get it true. That’s the kind of actor he is.” Nicholson himself provided the distinction to Turkel, saying, “I want to get it … feel it … show it … as it is.”14
Jack Torrance oversees the Overlook forevermore. His endeavor as a writer met frustration and trouble, just as George Bailey’s efforts with Bedford Falls’ Building and Loan suffered a run on its assets (even within his supposedly close-knit community of friends). Torrance took his frustrations out on his family and to Lloyd’s bar. Bailey tortured his family when the pressure became too much, then took his frustrations to Martini’s bar. They both stagger to their fates. George chooses suicide. Jack chooses murder. One act mirrors the other, with the former an introverted manifestation of the latter’s extraverted outburst.
For Jack Torrance in The Shining, it certainly is a wonderful life indeed. For George Bailey, Frank Capra and family and friends intervene to transform that “wonderful life” from Torrance’s ironic meaning to George’s literal one.
* * *
Will Randall doesn’t represent one of life’s “monsters” (like an abusive, self-destructive dad), but actually becomes one. In Mike Nichols’ Wolf, the unassuming and erudite book editor turns into a ferocious and vindictive werewolf. He’s a mind that wakes up as a body. Nicholson forms the character first, with a stiff-backed gait, a smooth and mannered disposition, and a superior and disgusted attitude about society’s cultural slide. When he semi-transforms for the first time, it’s also the first time the character has been at all physical, and so he struggles as he forms. Some aspects of the change are big and dramatic, while others are small sniffs and postures.
The most supernatural aspect of the production may well have been its inspiration. Screenwriter Jim Harrison visited the Missouri Breaks set and told Nicholson about an eerie experience he’d had in his Michigan cabin that would lead to their collaboration more than ten years later. “I rubbed my hand over my face and felt fur on it and it felt like a snout.” For his part, Jack called it “neither the most nor the least outlandish thing Jim has ever said to me.” Harrison felt he had been invaded by a spirit and turned the experience into Wolf. Jack became that oddly transformed man.15
When he threatens upstart Stewart (James Spader) for the first time, Nicholson shows much satisfaction in pursuing vengeance, with vigor and hate, against the perfectly slimy shit.
In the major transformation scene, before chasing down deer, Nicholson looks much like Ray Wise as the demonic version of Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks, using a severe upwards eye-gaze while heaving through his lower teeth (though the bushy sideburns and rough hair, unfortunately and unintentionally, make Nicholson look like an old British rocker out of place in the punk era).
Nicholson has every right to be a little playful with this role, what with romancing the younger, beautiful woman exemplar that Michelle Pfeiffer, playing Laura, represents; his delight in delivering a Hair Club for Men ad lib; and his no-hands-urinating to mark his territory against Stewart. This action foreshadows Nicholson’s liberating scene in About Schmidt in which he stands proud, masculine and defiant—hands on his hips and peeing freely as a fluid message of control.
There are a few threatening, animalistic moments as the bookworm becomes the werewolf, most meaningfully when his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) begs to come back after betraying her husband with Stewart, and he becomes frightening because it meant something to him. Upon being told of her murder, Randall is battered and ashen, as if struck to the body and staked through the mind.
The ultimate battle pits the wolf Randall has become against the predatory animal Stewart always was. Jack becomes the animal; they both do, in realistic action, makeup and a persuasive use of close shots and evocative cutting.
Director Mike Nichols ultimately saw the film as flawed, mostly due to a central shortcoming in the werewolf myth. “I realized very early in Wolf that the metaphor of vampires is very powerful, it speaks to all of us, we all know a great deal about it, but the metaphor of werewolves is not—it never has worked, never will work, because it doesn’t echo anything that happens to people.”16
* * *
Nicholson has portrayed two real-life writers in his career, one openly and the other a thinly veiled “fictionalized” version. In friend Warren Beatty’s Reds, he is playwright Eugene O’Neill, while in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn, he is Carl Bernstein substitute Mark Forman. Reds also represents the first of only two times he plays a biographical character, the second being Jimmy Hoffa. (I’m not counting The Departed’s Francis Costello, who was based on Whitey Bulger.)
Beatty is actor, producer, director and writer on the epic about John Reed and the Russian Revolution. His film is structurally interesting, melding a documentary, using interview segments of The Witnesses, plus a portrayed drama.
Beatty friend and actor Paul Sorvino, who played American Communist Party founding member Louis Fraina, told me he considers Beatty a “great director.” When I inquired as to why he doesn’t get enough credit as director, Sorvino replied, “Because he doesn’t direct enough, but he’s terrific. He’s one of the best.”17 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed, and awarded Warren Beatty the 1981 Best Director Oscar.
Nicholson starts serious and intense as O’Neill, using measured speech that’s slow and low, and holding one hand in his pocket to evoke discomfort in his first scene, over whisky with Diane Keaton (playing Louise Bryant). Nicholson knows how to play it down, using restraint effectively in a short scene upon Beatty’s return. Beatty and Keaton sit together on a sofa while Nicholson is seated on a chair across from them holding a wine glass. He declines another drink, calmly gets up, looks down, raises his eyebrows just slightly to acknowledge leaving and walks off.
Professor Rober
t M. Dowling, author of Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts and co-editor of a critical anthology on the playwright, loved Nicholson’s performance but points out that O’Neill “was a very, very shy person, especially in the summer of ’16, and not really the ‘Where’s the whisky?’ badass Nicholson portrays (unless O’Neill was extremely drunk, which of course he was often).”18
Re-watching this film so many years after its release, I was not sure what made Nicholson’s an Academy Award–winning performance. Then I absorbed his cumulative three-phase approach to the character. In the first phase, he establishes O’Neill the man in a serious, low-key vein. The second phase covers his romance with Keaton’s Louise Bryant. Here, he employs a higher register voice to signify this more uplifting situation. In their breakup scene, he employs deliberate intensity, looking great and with more confidence in a black turtleneck with gray jacket. He carries all his “Jackness,” but toned down to professional levels and in perfect distinction from Beatty’s carefully cultivated impression of confusion, clumsiness, hesitancy, vulnerability and impossible ordinariness.
“The love triangle was not overly done,” according to Professor Dowling. “O’Neill and Bryant were definitely lovers right under Reed’s nose, and by all accounts Reed was fine with it, being no poser when it came to free love.”19
In the aftermath of his loss, Nicholson’s O’Neill becomes visibly and internally older and impaired. He is more physical and broader, with greater emphasis on his words and puffiness in his eyes. He even throws in his only forehead-raise in the whole movie to strong, ironic effect.
These contrasts in delivery, attitude and appearance show why he won the Oscar. Not makeup or obvious aging affectations, but truly direct translations of inward emotions and feelings into sight and sound. The differences are more shaded than pushed, yet the impacts are dramatic.
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