Humbert Humbert (James Mason) enters a mansion, stepping over wine bottles discarded in the aftermath of a party. He searches for someone, Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), who appears from under a sheet. Quilty is a vapid, erratic drunk who mumbles on for what seems like an eternity. Humbert pulls a gun and after Quilty lumbers upstairs and tries to hide behind the painting of a young woman, is shot.
Moving back 4 years, Humbert narrates his story with an impeccable Continental accent. He’s been appointed a college lectureship on French poetry, and has chosen to spend the summer in a New Hampshire resort town. He inspects a room boarded by Charlotte Haze (Shelly Winters), a wealthy widow who wears a leopard skin belt and blabbers all kinds of cheap intellectualism in an effort to impress the professor.
Before Humbert can flee, Charlotte takes him to her garden. Here we get our first glimpse of Charlotte’s teenage daughter, Dolores Haze, otherwise known as “Lolita†(Sue Lyon) sunbathing in a skimpy two-piece bikini and a feathered hat. Humbert is mesmerized with the underage girl and quickly reconsiders the offer on the room.
Charlotte is all over Humbert, oblivious to his bumbling attraction to her daughter. Lolita is a playful brat, aware she has some effect on men, but too carefree to develop an agenda with it. Mom gets fed up with her daughter’s insolence and sends her away to Camp Climax For Girls. This sends Humbert into a funk, but he accepts a marriage proposal from Charlotte so he can figure out a way to have Lolita.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick and adapted by Vladimir Nobokov from his 1955 novel, producer James B. Harris purchased the film rights for $150,000, a large sum for a book at the time. Calder Willingham took a pass at adapting it, coming up with an ending where Humbert and Lolita got married. Nobokov was credited with the script and received an Academy Award nomination, though little of what he provided was used by Kubrick and Harris.
The only money they could raise for their controversial film adaptation had to be spent in England. Impressed with the degree of technical expertise and facilities he found, Kubrick settled there, and ended up shooting all of his subsequent films in the U.K., even his Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket.
With a score by big band arranger Nelson Riddle, the movie swoons and sways and is never at a loss to impress, at least technically. Watching Lolita, I was continually impressed by how fluid and beautiful the filmmaking was, while at the same time, enduring a movie that at 152 minutes, comes off as both constrained and bloated.
Instead of being allowed to explore the erotic relationship between Humbert and Lolita, Kubrick employs some clever innuendo in the early go. A moment where James Mason haplessly gazes up from a book at Lolita twirling a hula hoop around her waist made me laugh. That kind of wicked absurdity is what the movie needed more of. But instead of finely tuned black humor, it just gets self-indulgent.
Kubrick lets Peter Sellers do too much – applying disguises and funny accents – and while Sellers is interesting, he’s never especially funny. Lolita has been bestowed “ahead of its time” status, but I never got the feeling Kubrick was really comfortable with the material. Remade under much turmoil in 1997 by Adrian Lyne with Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, Dominique Swain and Frank Langella in the cast.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Benoit Moreau // Apr 26, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Despite the mentionned weaknesses, this film is a masterpiece. James Mason gives a powerful performance.
2 Mike Peterson // May 3, 2009 at 9:59 am
The author is Vladimir NABOKOV
3 Andy Y // Apr 29, 2010 at 10:32 pm
I’ve seen both the Kubrick and the Lyne versions of the film and prefer Kubrick. Unlike the reviewer, I felt Kubrick had such a grasp of the story and subject matter that his film evokes a sense of discomfort in his audience rather than the opposite. Lolita is the text book example of a molested child acting out. By the time Humbert came along, it was strongly implied that Lolita had been abused by her father as well as Clare Quilty, so there was no loss of innocence during their affair. The exploration of Humbert’s guilt and paranoia are brilliant and Lolita’s growing indifference toward her possessive sugar daddy only added to the drama of Humbert’s desperation.
The ultimate theme of this film was one man’s obsession with forbidden fruit and a girls desire to escape to a normal life after an abnormal childhood.
The Lyne film was an example of a director not quite comfortable with the material. Often he would titillate the audience and then his morality would fire up and he’d try to show the behavior as exploitative and or morally reprehensible. He desperately tried to turn the story into a pedophile’s obsession with an innocent, but lasciviously couldn’t resist filming Dominique Swain having sex in near graphic detail with Jeremy Irons. He wanted the teen sex, but felt guilty about it essentially.
I got the distinct impression Adrian Lyne was very uncomfortable with the subject matter and thus it affected the clarity of the narrative of the film. I felt that the message of this version of the film was “pedophilia is bad” without anything to make it stand out… No shit!
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