When last we left them, Jack is advancing toward Wendy, who is walking backwards away from him the whole time, clutching Danny's baseball bat. The whole time, Jack is going well past a "6" on the Richter scale, going on a filibuster about "responsibility" about looking after the hotel, and of his potential future reputation if he'd failed at it. At one point, Wendy confusedly asks him what he's talking about...many people wonder the same thing, since she seems to be doing most of everything around there!
Pretty intense scene here. Even though there are a few cut-aways, it's great how the scene plays out as one continuous shot, still at eye-level the whole time. No cuts here; then again, there would have been no possible way to shorten this scene without it being noticeable.
On a side note, a chunk of this scene appeared in the 1984 horror-movie compilation Terror In The Aisles, although I remember that the background music was different, as if Stanley Kubrick had sent them a print of this scene without the original Penderecki background score.
Jack is pushing her toward the grand staircase, and up they go, slow and steady, while Jack himself tries to get Wendy to hand him the bat. He makes a grab for it. She "gives" it to him, alright!
And then she has the un-envious task of dragging him unconscious from there and through the kitchen, while he groggily seems to wake up, and trying to figure out what's going on. The shot where Wendy is having trouble opening the pantry door has always looked a little unflattering. It also happens in the book, but she's so frazzled by what she'd been through and what had been going on that she simply had forgotten to pull out the little pin that unlatches the lock, but this shot has always made Wendy not look terribly bright.
She lugs him in, just as he's trying to get up, runs out the door, and then bolts it shut. Jack tries to get up to kick it open or something, but he discovers that he's twisted his right ankle a pretty good one in that fall down the stairs. He cradles his ankle, falling against some stacked boxes, and a few fall down on top of him, adding insult to injury.
When I first saw this, I think I had to run off to the bathroom, because when I came back in, I found the "looking up from below" shot of Jack rather puzzling. I thought Wendy had locked him into some sort of bunker in the floor of the place, but when the camera cut to Wendy in hysterics next to the knife-rack, the door that Jack is behind is in a normal spot there in the wall.
Funny how Jack tries to put on a "oh, poor me!" type of voice when he whines that he's feeling dizzy and needs a doctor, and we see him pause and for Wendy to open the door right away. When she doesn't, he really pours it on when he whines, "Honey!...Don't leave me in here!".
Wendy is about to set forth on the tentative plans she's made to get Danny out of the hotel, and perhaps bring back some help for Jack...but he thinks otherwise.
Great shot and scene of Wendy pushing the door open into the accumulated snow outside, running across the backyard of the place, knife in hand, and into the garage.You can just feel the cold of the outside, and of the increasingly desolate situation that she and Danny are now in. And also the sheer panic when she discovers what Jack had severed beneath the SnowCat's hood.
4pm
Very haunting shot of the Overlook, almost buried to the rooftop in snow. Something about those exterior shots of the hotel every time there's a title card showing what day it is, it gets a little farther away each time, and now it's practically disappearing here.
Jack's catching some Z's on a makeshift sort of mattress in one corner of the pantry, with a small banquet of crackers, peanuts, cookies, and a mammoth jar of peanut butter next to him. There's a knock at the door, and as Jack is woken up by it, you just know he feels like absolute crap now.
"It's Grady, Mr, Torrance...Delbert Grady".
Something about Grady's voice really sets the tone for this scene and conversation. He sounds wary, disappointed and foreboding all at once, like a very stern judge who is about to pronounce a pretty heavy sentence. It's also great how we only hear him and not see him, making you wonder if he's really there on the other side at all, if we're hearing him in Jack's mind, or if he's some sort of floating specter there in the pantry. And all the while, we hear the uneven, whining howl of the winds outside.
What's also interesting is that almost all of Grady's lines are the same as in Stephen King's novel, especially in this scene. I think Kubrick must have really found Grady's character quite interesting, as well as menacing.
"I can see you can hardly have taken care of the 'business'...we discussed", he warily says.
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