A Beginner’s Guide to The Shining (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Listicle)

The impossible path travelled through The Overlook Hotel by Danny (Danny Lloyd) and his Big Wheel is one of the many puzzling features of Stanley Kubrick's classic, The Shining (1980).

It’s that time of year again. The leaves are starting to change colour, everything you never wanted now comes in a “Pumpkin Spice” option, and many of us are beginning our month-long horror movie binges in honour of Hallowe’en. Maybe this is your first year participating in this ritual and you’re not sure where to start. Maybe you’re trying to impress some new friends with your carefully honed critical eye (read: ability to read Wikipedia). Or maybe, like me, you’re feeling the itch to have a horror movie night but you’re lacking the time, energy, or desire to actually get dressed and entertain people so you prefer to connect with like-minded strangers on the internet. Whatever the case, I’ve got you covered with everything you need for a satisfying critical viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1980 horror film, The Shining. 

Nothing but Vacancy: Room 237

“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon. I’m just saying that what we saw [of the moon landing] was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”

– some lunatic in Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick released his first film in five years, a horror movie based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel The Shining. At some point in the late ‘60s, Kubrick entered a phase in his career where every new project was a huge effort, drawn out over several massively hyped years, to top everything he’d done before, and everything that anyone in movies, and maybe popular culture itself, had done in that vein before. So, just as Dr. Strangelove was taken for the ultimate black comedy of the anti-nukes, antiwar era, and 2001: A Space Odyssey the ultimate sci-fi head trip, and The Shining’s immediate predecessor, Barry Lyndon, was supposed to be the most painterly, lavishly costumey costume drama of all time, The Shining arrived in theaters with the expectation that it would be the greatest horror movie ever made; anything else would be a letdown. The early returns pointed to it being a letdown.

Strange Journeys: Kafka on the Shore and Shining City

Kafka on the Shore is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel. (Photo: Takahiro Watanabe)

Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore, which I caught during its brief stop in London at the Barbican (it will perform at the Lincoln Center Festival in July), is an unconventional example of East-West translation. Frank Galati adapted Haruki Murakami’s 2002 magic-realist novel for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company seven years ago; the Ninagawa Company has returned it to the Japanese (Shunsuke Hiratsuka did the translation). If this cultural back-and-forth is a little disorienting, that effect seems perfectly appropriate to a stage version of Murakami’s haunting, dreamlike work. Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura (played in the Ninagawa production by Nino Furuhata), who is under an Oedipal curse, runs away from his father, a famous artist, and winds up working at a small private library in Takamatsu. The head librarian, a reclusive figure named Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) still lost in mourning over the long-ago death of her lover, may or may not be Kafka’s long-absent mother. (Since Murakami is working on an ambiguous, oneiric level, the question of Miss Saeki’s relationship to Kafka doesn’t have a realist answer.)

Lens Wide Open: Adam Nayman Presents The Films of Stanley Kubrick at the Miles Nadal JCC

Director Stanley Kubrick is one of the more paradoxical of major filmmakers. A photographer who became a self-taught movie maker in search of a realist style (Killer's Kiss), Kubrick would eventually become a dedicated formalist making epics (Barry Lyndon). Although he was an American director who began by shooting in real locations (The Killing), he spent most of his late career in a self-imposed hermitage in England inventing locations for his pictures (Full Metal Jacket).While Kubrick is an acclaimed auteur (2001: A Space Odyssey), his films rarely got good reviews when they were released (Eyes Wide Shut). Controversy continually followed him (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange), too. 

Given the perplexities of Kubrick's relatively small body of work, Cinema Scope and Grid Weekly film critic Adam Nayman, who has previously lectured on other controversial directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Catherine Breillat at the JCC Miles Nadal in Toronto, tonight begins a fascinating epic exploration into the long contradictory shadow that Kubrick has cast over the last half-century of American film-making. The Kubrick series is being held every Monday night until June 25th from 7-9pm. Adam and I recently had the opportunity to talk about the series and why he believes that Stanley Kubrick's work still continues to matter thirteen years after his death.

Shining On: Celebrating John Lennon's 70th Birthday

It was the most perfectly hallucinogenic day of my life. I had been more stoned on previous occasions – it was the 1960s, after all – thanks to a variety of experiments with consciousness. In early April of 1969, however, magic mushrooms and a certain song transformed my world while tripping in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And we all shine on/ like the moon and the stars and the sun...,” John Lennon was singing in the headphones covering my ears. I had ingested two little brown, wrinkled pieces of fungus that rendered the music extraordinary. The lyrics were speaking to me; I suspected they might contain the most important message of the 20th century: “Instant karma’s gonna get you/ Gonna knock you off your feet/ Better recognize your brother/ In everyone you meet...” Although I easily could have continued listening to Lennon again and again, my three similarly wasted friends persuaded me to accompany them on a walk. Outside, everything looked even more beautiful than could reasonably be expected. I smiled at every stranger we passed and they all appeared to smile back.

The Landscapes of Film: Interview with Peter Greenaway (1986)

Today would have been Critics at Large co-founder David Churchill's 56th birthday. Earlier this week, I was trying to think of a way to commemorate it in our post today. While his wife, Rose, supplied me with a box of published and unpublished work to consider, I felt the need for something else. But what? So without a solution in mind, I put it to the back of my mind and took to my storage closet the other night to find some book I needed for some other matter. While hunting for this lost hardcover, however, I came across a file in a box which contained a transcribed and unpublished interview with film director Peter Greenaway that David had done back in 1986 when the director was in Toronto for a presentation of his work. Seeing the typewritten series of sheets, where corrections consisted of pencil slashes across words and scribbled insertions, it took me back to a whole other era of writing and editing. But it also brought me back to the moment when David gave it to me to read which was shortly after he did his transcription. 

We had been friends for about two years at that point and already feeling each other out on our favourite films, directors we liked and didn't, and gleefully and teasingly putting each other's views to the test. We were still a year away from doing reviews together on the radio. But he already knew that I was no fan of Peter Greenaway's pictures (which to that point included The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts) because I found them to be obsessively formal and the abstract exercises of a patrician; or perhaps, to put it more succinctly, Greenaway was the art historian as beach bully who (to paraphrase critic Terrence Rafferty) kicked art in our faces. So I think David wanted to prove otherwise when he gave me this interview to read. Perhaps he also wished to justify a sensibility that spoke deeply to him at the time. (David was also a huge fan of Alain Renais who had an enormous impact on Greenaway's work.) We had already had our arguments over Stanley Kubrick's later films like The Shining which David would attend whenever it was being revived. "Whenever I feel depressed, I go to see The Shining," he would often say about a film that could send me into fits of depression. I never got an answer out of him as to why it cheered him so (but had he lived, as he intended, to review Rm 237, a documentary about viewers' obsessions with The Shining, I might have gotten my answer). Anyway, I never did get around to reading his interview with Peter Greenaway which I'm sure he saw as a shortcoming of mine. Maybe he wanted me to find it the other night if you believe in interventions from the other side. But as I was reading and editing it today, I could hear his voice threading through this conversation as I could imagine him also grinning somewhere in satisfaction that he finally found a way to get my attention. I can say that after devouring the discussion, I still haven't changed my mind about Peter Greenaway and his films. But neither have I about David's value as a dear friend and great critic. And we all miss him in the pages of Critics at Large.

Kevin Courrier,
Editor-in-Chief.


dc: As much as you are a filmmaker, you've also been called an enumerator, a cataloger and a classification theorist. How do all these things comprise what you do in films like A Zed and Two Noughts and The Draughtsman's Contract?

pg: All forms of art and human activity are desperate attempts of man to comprehend chaos by cataloging it in some way. Perhaps the supreme image is the map, that extraordinary artifact that's told you where you've been, tells you where you are, and tells you where you're going – all in one plane. Language, of course, is a supreme cataloging device which organizes our thoughts and ideas and puts them into some coherent form. So you could say that all human activity falls along this pattern. It's all a process of cataloging, collating and organizing random data that is forever falling on our ears in order that we can utilize and reuse it. So to actually do that in terms of art is no particularly original thing, but I just find it fascinating. Look at the concepts of the invisible line that runs around the world that indicates the equator. By dividing up the planet into convenient sections in order to comprehend the chaos of time is all part of the same desperate attempt to organize the material.

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

dc: How did your early years influence your tendency in your pictures to enumerate and catalog things?

pg: My father has considerable interest in ornithology, so that is why I use that influence as a focus in my films. Though I don't know that much about ornithology, my own particular interest in natural history focused in on the collection of British insects. I have a large collection that I recently gave up on because I feel today like it's big game hunting on a smaller scale. As the beetles I collected got rarer and rarer I began to feel like I was plundering. But it was still an area that fascinated me. That is, the careful cataloging where, for instance, I could discern 98 different species of the lady bug which each one is very minutely different from the next.

So Bad It's Good?: Cruise Into Terror (1978)

Last year, on February 6^th, I wrote a brief piece on the wretched TV movie called Cruise Into Terror. Two days before, I’d inaugurated an on-again, off-again series (mostly off) called Mini Masterpieces in Mediocre Movies. The purpose was to look at one sequence in a specific film and examine why it worked and the rest didn’t. The film I did on that occasion was James Cameron’s mediocre The Abyss. During the writing, I added a sidebar on Cruise Into Terror because its last line – “That there is a devil, there is no doubt, but is he trying to get into us or is he trying to get out” – had stuck with me (in the piece, I said it was the only good thing about the film). During the editing of The Abyss post, the sidebar was just not working out, so I removed it and planned to run it as a standalone. It was so short, we decided to title it David's Mini-Masterpiece Addendum and it ran two days later.

Over the last year, this little bitty post has become one of our most popular pieces (and hopefully not because it’s so fast to read – we timed it; it takes less than 30 seconds). Often in the top 10, it returned again this past week to top five status. So, it was decided I had to see this thing again and determine why my short post was so popular. I thought I had it on video tape, but when I went through my boxed tapes (yes, I own a functioning VCR that I still use) I couldn’t find it. My colleague, Kevin Courrier, told me the whole film, in 10 minute chunks, was posted on Youtube. So, that’s how I watched it.

Stephen King X 2: The Outsider and Castle Rock

Author Stephen King.

Stephen King turned 70 almost a year ago but this most prolific of authors hasn’t slowed down one iota. In fact, he has two books out this year from Scribner, The Outsider, currently in bookstores, and Elevation, a short novel due out in October. He’s also maintained a high quality of output in recent years, from his Mr. Mercedes horror/mystery trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) to the sensational and incredibly visceral science-fiction novel Under the Dome, as well as his touching, thoughtful time travel tale 11/22/63 and Revival, his chilling examination of life after death.

The Outsider is quasi-police procedural and part horror, set in a fictional Oklahoma town called Flint City, and beginning with the arrest of respected teacher and beloved baseball coach Terry Maitland for the heinous rape and murderer of an eleven-year-old boy. Police detective Ralph Anderson is so sure of Maitland’s guilt that he arrests him publicly at a game; after all, he has eyewitnesses to Maitland’s picking up the boy and DNA evidence, too. And yet . . . how can Maitland also be seen on video asking writer Harlen Coben a question at a writer’s conference he was attending at the same time far away from the murder scene, and how can his fingerprints be on a book he looked at in the conference hotel gift shop?

Unlikely Musicals: Girl from the North Country and Allelujah!

Kimber Sprawl and Sydney James Harcourt in Girl from the North Country. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The mood of sorrow in Conor McPherson’s beautiful new play Girl from the North Country, reaching down as deep as the deepest well, is both aching and piercing, and when you walk out of the Public Theatre at the end (where it’s about to end its sold-out run) it hobbles you: my step was slower, my mind a little befogged, and I had the impression that I was carrying something heavy and unresolvable with me. Yet the evening is often joyous. The seventeen-member ensemble, each performing at capacity, sings the Bob Dylan songs in Simon Hale’s exquisite arrangements – there are twenty in all – with brio and with full hearts. The music decorates the air and makes the show swing, even when it comments on lost love, even when the narrative context of the lyrics turns them ironic. And though the overarching theme is loneliness, the music also imbues what we see on the stage with an unmistakable feeling of community, in the sense of a common humanity. I found myself thinking of Our Town – with Robert Joy, as the narrator, Dr. Walker, almost taking on the role of the omniscient Stage Manager in the last minutes – and of Spoon River Anthology, as well as of Pennies from Heaven, because of the Depression-era setting and because Girl from the North Country is a Brechtian jukebox musical.

The Playboy of the Western World and The Apple Cart: Flying High at the Shaw

Marla McLean and Qasim Khan in The Playboy of the Western World. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In the preface to his 1907 masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, the Irish playwright John Millington Synge writes, “On the stage one must have reality and one must have joy . . . In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple . . .” This dictum explains the play’s unusual style and texture, realism folded in with folk-fable imagination and humor and language so musical that it sings in your ears even when you’re just reading the text. Synge claims that he owes both the wildness of the narrative and the richness of the vernacular to his close attention to the way rural working-class Irish people speak (or did around the turn of the twentieth century).

A Master and a Hack

The Weir, directed by Josie Rourke

The supernatural is alive in the work of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson. Ghosts appear in Shining City and in his movie Eclipse; in The Seafarer a man plays poker against the devil. But these pieces don’t feel like folk fables, because stylistically McPherson is a realist. In The Weir, which was recently revived in a fine production at London’s Donmar Warehouse (it closed to make room for McPherson’s latest, The Night Alive), ghosts are only spoken of, but by the end of the evening they’re so close you can almost hear them breathing. The play is set in a bar in rural Ireland (County Leitrim, to be exact) where four middle-aged pals, including the proprietor, Brendan (Peter McDonald), entertain a newcomer, Valerie (Dervla Kirwan), who has just moved into a house in the area. She’s attractive, evidently single, more sophisticated than the women they know, and the men fall over themselves trying to impress her – especially the sportiest of them, Finbar (Risteárd Cooper), who owns the local hotel and appears to be the richest man in the town. Somehow the conversation turns to local ghost stories. Jack (Brian Cox) tells the first one, about a knocking spirit that was driven away by a priest’s exhortations; legend has it that the house had been built on a “fairy road.” Only after Jack finishes his tale does it occur to the men (the fourth, shy, awkward Jim, is played by Ardal O’Hanlon) that the haunted house they’ve been describing is the one Valerie has moved into, and they’re ashamed and embarrassed about any discomfort they might have caused her. But she doesn’t seem unnerved, and the stories continue.

Where is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy on the 'Best of the Decade' lists?

Since I stepped away from regular criticism more than 20 years ago, I freely admit that my ability to see more 'challenging' films has declined (made more difficult by the fact I live outside of Toronto now and these films never make it to either my local cinema or DVD shop). So it would be unfair and dishonest to address the shortcomings (or strengths) of TIFF Cinematheque's Best of the Decade List since I've only seen a small handful of the pictures. Besides, my cohort Shlomo has already done a fine job eviscerating it, so what's the point of repeating?

I'll only make one comment before I get to the point of my piece: a major work of art that is missing from the List. Critics or curators who make lists that refuse to even acknowledge commercial cinema are as ridiculous and narrow-minded as people who only go to the movies so they can 'check their brains at the door' and think flicks like Transformer 2: Revenge of the Fallen, or The Dark Knight, are The. Best. Movies. Ever. There is no difference. On one hand, the James Quandts of the world will turn up their noses at anything that might be considered 'commercial,' while the others would run screaming from the theatre at the first sign of a subtitle. Me? I can get just as jonesed by a cinematic essay by Chris Marker, such as Sans Soleil or La Jetée, as I can by zombie flicks like Shaun of the Dead or 28 Weeks Later.

Icke/Sophocles

From Left: Jordan Scowen, Olivia Reis, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, James Wilbraham, Anne Reid and Bhasker Patel in Oedipus. (Photo: J. Cervantes.)

Robert Icke’s Oedipus, newly transplanted to Broadway from the West End, is, like his 2015 Oresteia, a modern version of a classic work that has resonated through time since the Greeks birthed tragedy. These are the weightiest cornerstones of the genre: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only complete trilogy we have from among the theatrical constructions the ancient Greek playwrights submitted to the City Dionysia festival in Athens, invented dramatic cause and effect, while Sophocles’ Oedipus, which moves backwards and forwards in time without ever altering the setting, is a marvel of dramatic structure that no one has ever surpassed. Aristotle used it as his model for tragic dramaturgy in the Poetics. The ancient Greek world was a treasure trove of firsts – the Poetics pioneered theatrical criticism.

Where Anything is Possible: A Trip to Green Gables

L.M. Montgomery Museum (Photo by author)

Thirty years ago, my wife and I drove to Prince Edward Island with our two year old son. We took the Wood Island Ferry, stayed in a lovely B&B just outside of Charlottetown and saw very little of the tourist traps that are everywhere nowadays. I recall driving to Cavendish Beach and parking very close to the sand, no charge, and a short walk over the dunes to the ocean. On the way back to the car I lost my pen knife in the sand. Every time I have heard of someone visiting PEI since then I’ve suggested that they check out Cavendish to find my knife. Last week my wife and I drove to PEI again. No ferry this time, we crossed at the Confederation Bridge, a marvellous 10 minute drive across the Northumberland Strait. We stayed in a cottage on the Northumberland Strait near Bedeque. Over a couple of days, we saw every imaginable place that Lucy Maud Montgomery lived, worked, taught or remembered in her book[s] about little Anne Shirley. It was a real Green Gables vacation.

Spooky Action at a Distance: Timeless and Frequency

Peyton List stars in Frequency, new this season on The CW.

This television season, joining a crowded time-travel-themed field already occupied by Doctor Who, Legends of Tomorrow, 12 Monkeys and The Flash (which is owning its time travel elements even more deeply in its current third season), are ABC’s adaptation of the 1979 film Time after Time and Fox’s Adam Pally-helmed sci-fi/comedy Making History, NBC’s Timeless and The CW’s Frequency. We’ll have to wait until early in 2017 for the first two, but last week the first episodes of Timeless and Frequency premiered. With only one episode apiece having aired, both are entertaining additions to the genre, but Frequency is off to the much more promising start.

Neglected Gem # 108: The Clock (1945)

Robert Walker and Judy Garland in Vincente Minnelli's The Clock (1945)

When it was released in 1945, The Clock was a moderate box-office success. But most people wouldn’t recognize the title today unless they’ve happened across it on Turner Classic Movies, where it’s a perennial. The plot is simple. Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker), a soldier on a forty-eight-hour leave in New York before departing for the front falls in love with Alice Maybery (Judy Garland), a secretary he encounters by chance in Penn Station – she trips over his foot at the bottom of an escalator and loses her heel. Drawn to her immediately, he asks her to show him the sights of the city; surprising herself, she agrees, and they spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum. He asks her to meet him that night, and they spend the entire evening together, into the small hours of the morning, when they are befriended by a milkman and wind up making his deliveries for him when he gets hurt. By now Alice and Joe are deeply in love. They decide to get married before he returns to camp, but obtaining a license and getting to the justice of the peace by the end of business hours present challenges they almost fail to overcome. They do overcome them, however, and spend their wedding night in a hotel before Joe has to leave Alice. That’s the entire story.

The Clock gave Garland her first non-musical role, and it was the first non-musical project for its director, Vincente Minnelli, whom she requested as a replacement when the original director, Fred Zinnemann, didn’t work out. Both star and director had just come off Meet Me in St. Louis, an unqualified triumph, and they married as soon as The Clock wrapped; their feelings for each other surely leaked into the picture, which is one of Hollywood’s loveliest romantic dramas. No one ever shot Garland as exquisitely as Minnelli – or lit her like George Folsey, the cinematographer on both movies. (Minnelli directed her in only one subsequent film, The Pirate, and he was behind the camera for her numbers in Ziegfeld Follies and Till the Clouds Roll By as well.)

Comedies: The Chinese Room, How the Other Half Loves, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

Sue Jean Kim, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Carson Elrod in The Chinese Room. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The Chinese Room by the Irish playwright Michael West, at Williamstown’s Nikos stage, is a sci-fi comedy with serious overtones. Brían F. O’Byrne plays Frank, an inventor of artificial intelligence who discovers that his partner is closing him out of the company they founded together and phasing out some of his creations, “humanoids” like Susannah (Sue Jean Kim), of which Frank keeps the prototype in his house. To preserve the memory that his wife Lily (Laila Robins) is rapidly losing, Frank has transferred it to Susannah. But the combination of Lily’s confusion (she doesn’t remember that she’s at home, and most of the time she doesn’t know who Frank is), the tensions in their marriage that are now being channeled through Susannah’s persona, the bugs in the humanoid model (Susannah keeps faltering and having to be rebooted), and the demands of his little boy, Zack (Elliot Trainor), now exacerbated by his removal from his own company, have turned Frank’s life into chaos. The emissary from Frank’s partner, who arrives to collect the passkey to the system, is a robot known as Daniel (Carson Elrod), and his insistent presence – he’s been programmed not to leave Frank’s house without the item he was sent to retrieve – adds to the mix.

Klimt Revealed: 150 Anniversary Exhibition in New York City

"Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," Gustav Klimt, 1907. Oil, silver, and gold on canvas.

It quite literally was a dark and stormy afternoon when I slipped recently into New York’s Neue Galerie, seeking shelter from a sudden summer downpour. I had never before ventured through the ornate doors of this tiny museum devoted to German and Austrian art, even though I had walked past the former 19th century mansion where the Neue Galerie is housed – close by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – countless times. I was again heading to the Met this past July when the clouds burst open, making me change my plans. I am glad that I did.

On show was the Gustav Klimt 150th Anniversary exhibition (until Monday, Aug. 27), the only large-scale tribute to the Viennese painter, born July 14, 1862, in North America. In Austria, tributes to the Symbolist painter known as one of the founders of the Vienna Secession movement, a uniquely Austrian interpretation of art nouveau, are more pronounced. There, several internationally acclaimed museums, among them the Albertina, the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches, the Leopold and the Wien Museum, continue to honour the painter with various exhibitions highlighting different aspects of Klimt’s artistic legacy. The Neue Galerie show is smaller, if not more intimate than these others, showcasing just 12 items in a multi-media show that includes the cufflinks made for the artist by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffman in 1906. 

I am not a Klimt expert, just a fan. Without intending to trivialize my interest in his work, for my wedding invitation – 17 years ago – I had used Klimt’s famous painting, entitled The Kiss, as the cover art. As a result, for years afterwards, well-intentioned friends sent me all sorts of Klimt memorabilia, thinking me Klimt-obsessed. (I had really just liked the image of lovers entwined in a sinewy embrace.) I now have in my possession a barely-used mug as well as stationary embossed with a reproduction of The Kiss. Like many artistic geniuses whose work has captured the popular imagination, Klimt has permeated the culture but with some of his work having the undesired effect of appearing as kitsch. With this exhibition before me, I all at once had an opportunity to judge for myself what all the fuss was about. What was Klimt’s enduring allure? 

Eight Arms to Hold You: The Criterion Collection Celebrates the Fiftieth Anniversary of A Hard Day's Night

"The first rock and roll movies had little or nothing to do with rock and roll music, and everything to do with the rock and roll ethos," wrote Greil Marcus in his assessment of the genre. That ethos he describes was present in many Fifties pictures where adolescents were no longer accepting the proscribed values of the status quo. You could see it in Marlon Brando's defiance in The Wild One (1953), where when asked about what he was rebelling against, he replied, "Whaddya got?" You could recognize it in the painfully vulnerable James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), as he attempts to wake up his incognizant parents to the misunderstood youth they were alienating. The distilled essence of what would soon become rock 'n' roll was weaved into the fabric of those movies. According to Marcus, though, its power wasn't fully comprehended until Bill Haley & the Comets drove home the combined sociological screeds of The Wild One and Rebel in The Blackboard Jungle (1955), with its opening blast of "Rock Around the Clock."

After that, aspiring rock artists started lining up to see their possible future on the silver screen; and John Lennon began thinking that maybe this was a cool job. The Beatles were first turned on by The Girl Can't Help It (1956), which featured Little Richard in the opening credits singing the title song. The plot was largely superfluous, but significantly, it was about how the music business was run by the mob (giving a whole new meaning to the word hitmen). Besides grooving to Little Richard, Gene Vincent, the Platters and Eddie Cochran, youngsters also swooned as the buxom bombshell Jayne Mansfield strutting by in her tight clothes, clutching milk bottles to her heaving breasts. In 1956, having been one of those kids first stunned by Brando, Elvis Presley stepped onto the screen in the Civil War drama Love Me Tender, where two brothers fight over politics and the love of Debra Paget. His elegiac ballad, "Love Me Tender," which maybe planted the early seeds for McCartney's eventual "Yesterday." But it was his role as the violent rockabilly singer Vince Everett in 1957's Jailhouse Rock where the rock ethos fused effortlessly with the music. From there, just as the rock movie began, it seemed almost over. Except for the tabloid chic of High School Confidential (1958), which delved pruriently into a teen dope ring, it was the sanitized Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies and Elvis's decline in Hollywood.

42nd Street: Tapping Their Way to Glory

Carina-Kay Louchey and Max von Essen lead the cast of 42nd Street in the "Lullaby of Broadway" number. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

You know you’re in for a bright evening when, immediately after Adam Souza and the band finish the overture for the Goodspeed Opera House’s production of 42nd Street the curtain rises just high enough to reveal the legs and fervently tapping feet of a dozen or so expert chorus girls and boys. The opening was the inspiration of the show’s original director-choreographer, Gower Champion, and if the dancers are skilled, a mood of impending joy descends on the audience at the outset. In this case, the dancers are marvelous, and the show that follows in their wake is a first-rate entertainment.