The Stanley Kubrick movie Clint Eastwood hated with a passion: “It was just a giant failure”
Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood were both operating at the top of their game during the same period in cinema history, but it would be an understatement to say their approaches couldn’t have been more different.
The former was a meticulous perfectionist who favoured technological innovation, groundbreaking artistry, and lengthy shoots that wouldn’t conclude until the filmmaker was sure his vision would be realised onscreen just as he imagined it.
The actor and director, meanwhile, shot to fame as the star of gun-toting genre films. When he moved behind the camera, he wasted little time in developing a reputation for an unfussy, economical style in which one or two takes were all that was required to capture the essence of any given scene.
Between the 1960s and early 1980s, Kubrick and Eastwood were comfortably ensconced as having reached the summit of their respective professions, even if they achieved it through very different means. The auteur had Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon, whereas the latter had the Dollars trilogy, Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and orangutan adventure Every Which Way but Loose.
Eastwood may have made his feature debut in Revenge of the Creature, but he wasn’t a big horror fan. As it turned out, he wasn’t exactly thrilled with Kubrick’s self-aggrandising marketing of his own descent into psychological chills after he lambasted The Shining as a terrible movie he had no time for.
In an interview with Paul Nelson, Eastwood fired a shot at The Shining by relating it to one of his own pictures, which wasn’t intended as a compliment. “I was joking the other day because Kubrick had put that byline on the movie poster: ‘A masterpiece of modern horror,'” he said. “Even some of the execs at the studio said, ‘Stanley, maybe you better wait and let some reviewer stick the byline on the film because it might be considered a little forward of you to do it.”
Eastwood’s home studio, Warner Bros, distributed the Stephen King adaptation, so he would have been well aware of the conversations happening behind closed doors. The star remarked that he ignored the advice and “he just went ahead and did it,” which gave him a mischievous idea. “We were talking about ads for Any Which Way You Can. I said, ‘Well, maybe we should call it ‘a masterpiece in modern comedy and adventure.'”
His issues with The Shining didn’t end there, though, after Eastwood suggested one of the greatest horror films of all time wasn’t scary in the slightest. Not only that, but he claimed that if it had been made by a directorial newcomer and not Kubrick, “They would have bombed it right out of the building.”
“It was just a giant failure,” the harsh appraisal continued. “The greatest example in the picture is that there just wasn’t anything at all terrifying about it.” What about the scene where where Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance murders Scatman Crothers’ Dick Hallorann with an axe? Nope, Eastwood called it “dead as a dick.”
In his defence, Eastwood wasn’t the only person who despised The Shining, and it did earn two Razzie nominations, making it the only Kubrick film to do so. Obviously, there’s no shortage of folks who’ll disagree, but he’s entitled to his opinion.
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