Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining improves with age

Stanley Kubrick’s films require multiple viewings to fully absorb them, and horror film The Shining is no exception.

Jack Nicholson in scene from The Shining.

Clark Gable isn’t remembered as a song-and-dance man, but there is one film that casts him as a crooner who bounces along to Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz the same year he became a superstar in Gone with the Wind (Gable, not Berlin). And that would be director Clarence Brown’s 1939 comedic drama Idiot’s Delight (Saturday, 12.10am, TCM). Robert Sherwood adapted his own play about a troupe of performers stuck in a war-torn European country. Inevitably, the movie version is much watered down from the stage production, though the supporting cast of Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn and other familiar faces keeps things entertaining.

Had he lived, Gable might have gone the improbable action hero route that has revitalised Liam Neeson’s career. Among his quieter and more intense recent films is last year’s crime thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones (Sunday, 8.30pm, Premiere Movies). Neeson plays former cop Matthew Scudder, drawn back to shady doings to solve a kidnapping in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. If the character’s name is familiar, that’s because director-screenwriter Scott Frank has here stylishly adapted Lawrence Block’s thriller. Frank, remember, also, and equally stylishly, adapted Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight for George Clooney in 1998.

A personal rule of thumb is to wait at least a decade before cementing an opinion on any Stanley Kubrick film. Each and every one of them is that premeditated, that dense, that mischievous, that it requires multiple viewings and an aggregation of years to fully absorb. Such is the case with his 1980 horror film The Shining (Monday, 10.15pm, Thriller Movies), which only improves with age. The film marks Jack Nicholson’s debut as the pop-eyed maniac that would subsequently define him, and Kubrick’s clever and malevolent use of space in the mammoth Outlook Hotel sets is a visual mindbender for the ages. There’s even a documentary devoted to the film, called Room 237, that is worth seeking out.

Yes, it’s an 1980s-drenched remake of a classic 40s film noir — specifically, director Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum — and yes, it prominently features Phil Collins’s annoying worldwide hit imaginatively named after the title, but take a look now at director Taylor Hackford’s 1984 romantic thriller Against All Odds (Tuesday, 6.50am, Romance Movies). Jeff Bridges is no Mitchum, and James Woods is certainly never mentioned in the same breath as his foil in the original, Kirk Douglas. But Rachel Ward is luminous in the black widow/femme fatale part made famous by the great Jane Greer. The single-take close-up of her over the closing credits, as Collins sings That Song, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

The Shining (MA15+) 4.5 stars

Monday, 10.15pm, Thriller Movies (409)

A Walk Among the Tombstones (MA15+) 4 stars

Sunday, 8.30pm, Premiere Movies (401)

Against All Odds (MA15+) 3.5 stars

Wednesday, 6.50am, Romance Movies (408)