The Shining (Movie)

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    Stream Shelley Duvall’s Greatest Performances: ‘The Shining,’ ‘Popeye’ and More

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    In “The Shining,” “Popeye” and more, her unusual presence jumps off the screen. That’s true even in small roles in “Annie Hall” and “Time Bandits.”Shelley Duvall, who died on Thursday at 75, had one of the most thrilling and complicated careers in modern cinema history. Discovered by the director Robert Altman, who became her greatest collaborator, Duvall fell into acting almost by accident. But her screen presence was so beguiling and irresistible that she became one of the defining stars of the 1970s and ’80s.Her layered and detailed performances in the likes of “3 Women” and “The Shining” made her a celebrated star. And yet she never fit easily into Hollywood, remaining always decidedly herself. In later life, Duvall retreated from acting and the public eye, but left behind a remarkable and diverse body of work. Here’s where you can stream some of her best.1970‘Brewster McCloud’Buy or rent on most major platforms.Duvall in her first onscreen role, as an optimistic tour guide in “Brewster McCloud.”MGMWhen Duvall was discovered by Robert Altman and the actor and casting director Bert Remsen, in Houston, she had no intention of becoming a performer. “I wanted to be a great scientist, not an actress. Madame Curie was my heroine,” she once told Roger Ebert. But Altman and Remsen had other plans, putting her in their strange delight of a movie about a boy, played by Bud Cort, who lives in the Houston Astrodome and wants to build wings to fly. Once she appears onscreen as the tour guide Suzanne, it’s clear she is one of the most unusual presences ever to grace the screen. With her oversize eyelashes, a staple of her personal style that highlighted her features, she’s intriguingly cheerful as she chirps away about diarrhea. Her optimism seduces Cort’s Brewster, and with him the audience, even if she turns out to be fickle.1971‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’Stream on Tubi; buy or rent on most major platforms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shelley Duvall, Star of ‘The Shining’ and ‘Nashville,’ Dies at 75

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      Her lithesome features and quirky screen presence made her a popular figure in 1970s movies, particularly Robert Altman’s.Shelley Duvall, whose lithesome features and quirky screen personality made her one of the biggest film stars of the 1970s and early ’80s, appearing in a string of movies by the director Robert Altman and, perhaps most memorably, opposite Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” died on Thursday at her home in Blanco, Texas. She was 75.A family spokesman said the cause was complications of diabetes.Ms. Duvall wasn’t planning on a film career when she met Mr. Altman while he was filming “Brewster McCloud” (1970); she had thrown a party to sell her husband’s artwork, and members of his film crew were in attendance. Taken with her, they introduced her to Mr. Altman, a director with his own reputation for oddball movies and offbeat casting. He immediately asked her to join the cast, despite her lack of training.Ms. Duvall with Bud Cort in Mr. Altman’s “Brewster McCloud” (1970), her first film. She wasn’t planning on a film career when she met Mr. Altman, but he cast her despite her lack of training.Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, via Everett CollectionShe said yes — and went on to appear in an unbroken string of five more Altman movies: “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), “Thieves Like Us” (1974), “Nashville” (1975), “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976) and “3 Women” (1977). She also starred as Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Mr. Altman’s “Popeye” (1980).“I thought: boy, if it’s this easy, why doesn’t everybody act?” Ms. Duval told The New York Times in April.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘The Shining,’ Shelley Duvall Was a Perfect Gothic Heroine

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      Her performance was perhaps misunderstood at the time, just as the narrative surrounding her life would be later.If Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” was a twist on the centuries-old Gothic horror genre, there was no one better suited to play a modern Gothic heroine than Shelley Duvall. Duvall, who died Thursday at 75, was in her late 20s when she shot the role of Wendy Torrance, put-upon wife of blocked writer Jack (Jack Nicholson). The pair have holed up with their young son in the Overlook Hotel, working as winter caretakers.But something evil is afoot. The Overlook is less hotel than haunted house, saddled with the weight of inexplicable and violent history. Wendy is virtually trapped there, a small woman often alone in a rambling, dangerous building full of secrets. It might be more accurate to call the Overlook a monster, one that pushes its monstrousness onto its inhabitants. And it is Wendy, not Jack, who successfully resists in the end.The Gothic heroine, the woman trapped in the menacing haunted home, must exhibit courage in the face of danger, remaining resolute while also being susceptible to the evil that lurks around every corner. Without that tension, we wouldn’t be kept in suspense. In the film, Duvall is waifish, eyes wide, hair flat and scraggly, and it’s hard not to believe she’s going to die. Her only objective is to save her son, Danny, from his father, who — we learn early on — previously broke Danny’s arm in an alcoholic rage. This evil she is fighting is malevolent and abusive and real, a threat she has seen in action before, only now it carries an ax.The Wendy of Kubrick’s 1980 movie is a different kind of woman than the Wendy of Stephen King’s earlier novel — she’s more vulnerable, more frightened. King complained that the movie’s version was “basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.” Duvall was cited as a weak point in many of the film’s mixed reviews and nominated for a Razzie for worst actress.Yet her work in “The Shining” has grown in critical esteem in recent years; today it can feel as if detractors simply weren’t expecting how unsettling it would be to witness her performance of abject terror. There’s a strangeness to it: Her eyes are both huge and heavy-lidded, her mouth equally able to draw into a rosebud or spread wide for a shriek. Throughout the film, her affect is almost that of a china doll, terrified of being shattered. She appears afraid to breathe, barely able to speak.Duvall’s work in the film has grown in critical esteem in recent years. Warner Bros. Inc, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Kubrick by Kubrick’ Review: Stanley Plays Himself

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      A primer on the filmmaker’s career and interests won’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives, but it does pierce some of the mystique.The director Stanley Kubrick gave so few interviews that hearing his voice is always a little jarring. It’s less deep than you might imagine from late-career photographs, which make him look like a woolly elder statesman of the cinema, or from seeing his movies, which raise dark questions about human nature. Kubrick’s accent contains traces of his Bronx upbringing, even though he lived in Britain for more than 30 years. And his conversational manner is much more casual, more affable, than his reputation as a hermetic perfectionist would suggest.What that voice has to say, and how it says it, is the main point of interest in “Kubrick by Kubrick,” a primer on the filmmaker’s career and interests built around interviews that he gave over many years to the critic Michel Ciment, who is credited as an artistic adviser on the documentary. The director, Gregory Monro, interweaves excerpts from the men’s conversations with scenes from Kubrick’s movies and archival commentary from actors and critics.Monro also riffs on Kubrick’s own imagery, making it appear that an old clip of Ciment on a talk show, for instance, is showing on the plugless TV from “The Shining,” and that the TV set is sitting in the bedroom from the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Most of Kubrick’s 13 features have been analyzed exhaustively already, and “Kubrick by Kubrick” doesn’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives. Still, it is interesting to hear Kubrick express ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom. He doesn’t sound all that terrified of a computer like HAL 9000. “I can’t think of any reason why it’s a frightening prospect, because intelligence seems to me to be something which is good,” Kubrick is heard saying in the documentary. “And so I can’t see how your ultra-intelligent machine is going to be any worse than a man.”Other choice tidbits include Kubrick’s comparison of the work of a film director to the precision Napoleon applied to military strategy. (Kubrick had famously labored to make a Napoleon biopic, and elements of his preparation found their way into “Barry Lyndon.”) According to Kubrick, the great cinematographer Russell Metty, with whom he worked on “Spartacus,” could not understand why Kubrick, who started as a photographer for Look magazine, spent so much time composing shots, as opposed to leaving that task to the cameraman.Some of Kubrick’s insights echo differently today, as when he says, apropos of “Full Metal Jacket” and the Vietnam War, “I don’t think you’re going to get Americans to fight a war again unless they think it really means something to them.” (The director died in 1999.) Leonard Rosenman, who conducted the music on “Barry Lyndon,” remembers how demanding Kubrick could be, and wanting “to throw him through the window” for making him do 105 takes at one point even though “take two was perfect.”While no great contribution to the vast library of Kubrickiana, this documentary pierces some of the mystique behind the man. For fans, that will be enough.Kubrick by KubrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Joe Turkel, the Spectral Bartender in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 94

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      Also memorably seen in “Blade Runner,” he was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.Joe Turkel, a gaunt-faced yeoman character actor who appeared in scores of movies but is best known for two of his final performances — as Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining” and Dr. Eldon Tyrell in “Blade Runner” — died on June 27 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 94.His son Craig Turkel said the death, at a hospital, was caused by liver failure.Mr. Turkel (pronounced ter-KELL) was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.In movies like “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957) and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), he held his own alongside leading men like Ronald Reagan and Steve McQueen. It was often up to Mr. Turkel to provide a subtle but unmistakable plot pivot, using his steely onscreen demeanor and perfectly delivered lines to shift a film’s entire mood.Nowhere was that more true than in the three movies he made for Stanley Kubrick, with whom he formed something of a mutual admiration society. Both men, who were about the same age, had grown up as working-class secular Jews in New York. Both were huge baseball fanatics. And both were perfectionists about their work.Mr. Turkel had a small role in “The Killing,” Mr. Kubrick’s 1956 film about a racetrack robbery, and then returned a year later as a condemned soldier in “Paths of Glory.” In both films, he contrasted a stony stillness with sudden explosions of manic action to convey meaning far beyond his few brief lines.He went on to become a prolific television actor, with roles on popular shows like “Bonanza,” “Ironside” and “Fantasy Island.”He returned to Mr. Kubrick’s service in 1980 for “The Shining,” an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The story revolves around an author, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who is hired as the winter caretaker of the secluded, otherwise empty Overlook Hotel and moves there with his family.Under the influence of malevolent supernatural forces, Jack slowly goes crazy. At one point he enters the hotel’s bar, where he finds Lloyd, played by Mr. Turkel. Jack asks for a bourbon, and Lloyd pours him a shot of Jack Daniel’s.Mr. Nicholson dominates their conversation, but it is Mr. Turkel’s ominously stoic presence that shifts the film into a darker register.“In dress and demeanor, he’s the prototypical old-school hotel barman,” Mr. Turkel told The Toronto Star in 2014. “He obviously takes pride in his work and the corruption he enables; most bartenders are stylish and a little bit evil. Poor Lloyd doesn’t know the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey, though.”Joseph Turkel was born on July 15, 1927, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin Turkel, was a tailor, and his mother, Gazella (Goldfisher) Turkel, was a homemaker and part-time opera singer.Along with his son Craig, Mr. Turkel is survived by another son, Robert; his brother, David; and two grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Cacciatore) Turkel, died before him.He joined the U.S. merchant marine in 1944 and the Army in 1946. After receiving an honorable discharge, he briefly returned to New York for acting classes before heading to Hollywood in 1947.His first credited role was in “City Across the River” (1949), a film about a program for juvenile delinquents that also featured a young Tony Curtis.His work on “The Shining” brought him to the attention of Ridley Scott, who was casting “Blade Runner,” his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”He was cast as Dr. Tyrell, the brilliant but haughty founder of a company that produces robots so perfect that they blur the line between human and machine — an uncanniness that leads to Dr. Tyrell’s bloody demise at the hands of one of his creations.Although “Blade Runner” has become one of the most critically acclaimed science fiction films in history, it was originally a box-office dud. Mr. Turkel, having grown tired of grinding through auditions after decades in Hollywood, decided to retire; aside from a few more small TV and film roles, he never acted again.Instead he tried his hand at screenplays (although none of them were produced), became a regular on the fan-convention circuit and wrote a memoir, “The Miseries of Success,” which remains unpublished.“I’ve done some great films,” he told an interviewer for Blade Zone, a “Blade Runner” fan site, in 1999. “I know other actors that have done brilliant films. They still have to go out and audition and meet the producer, director, and please these people no matter what they’ve done. Of course the great big stars don’t do that. But there are great quality actors that do that and they find it demeaning.”Still, he added, “I’ve had a hell of a career.” More