(posting this here until I'm able to do the blog for Shelley in The Shining!)
"Wendy, the drudge who does the work at the hotel while Jack sits at his typewriter, is a woebegone, victim role until this woman, who has been driven into hysteria, must pull herself out in order to protect her child. Though at the start Shelly Duvall seems not quite there, as if her lines were being spoken by someone else in another room, she becomes much stronger. We can feel that she's held down; she usually brings a more radiant eccentricity to her parts. But she looks more like a Modigliani than ever, and even in the role, which requires her to have tears welling in her Raggedy Ann eyes almost constantly, she has her amazing directness and her odd, flip gallantry. There's a remarkable moment when Wendy picks up her child and screams at her husband. And in what is probably the most daringly sustained series of shots Wendy, who is carrying a baseball bat in case she needs it with Jack, backs away as he moves toward her; he keeps advancing, she brandishing the bat in front of her to keep him at a distance. It's a ghoulish parody of a courtship dance, staged with hairbreadth timing (though overextended), and Duvall is superbly simple even when Wendy is palsied with terror. Yet Duvall isn't entirely convincing as a mother; she's more like a very conscientious nurse.
"The Torrances don't really seem to interest Kubrick anyway--not as individuals...."
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, June 9, 1980; Taking It All In, p. 4
