Dear readers!

For me, it's something of an event when I manage to post twice in a month. The two most recent posts have been in various states of preparation for a number of months, and I hustled myself to finally post them and have done.

I think of myself as an essayist whose main medium is the weblog and who likes to use film as a springboard to talk about whatever subject moves me. But I do have a full-time job which pays little, gets less respect, and which I often find mentally and physically taxing. That and my constant diddling and overworking what I write means I don't post very often, though I am always on my own case to do more. I also have a touch of depressive illness or disthymia and that has an effect on my productivity as well.

If some of you have read my stuff here, have liked it and would like to read more, I imagine it can get rather frustrating to deal with months of silence before something comes up on the blog. It frustrates me as well, because it is a melancholy thing to see a seemingly abandoned website, and its air of ambitious ideas gone nowhere.

Now while I don't write for applause, I would like to keep any readers I have managed to get, and strongly urge those of you who don't use an RSS feed aggregator to start using one, so you don't have to constantly click back here, see nothing new, and then give up, thinking that I have stopped posting, because in spite of not posting often, I don't intend to stop posting. For those of you who don't consider yourselves web-savvy computer geeks, a feed aggregator monitors websites with frequently-updated content, letting you know if there is anything new on the websites you follow so you do not have to keep clicking your browser back. It's great to manage all the websites you follow, and for those like mine that tend to be inactive a lot, it also frees you from the frustrating experience of having to click back over and over before finding new content.

RSS feeds are not a new thing by any means, and as said, I was a little intimidated at first by all the talk about feeds and such, but take a little time to Google and learn about it, and I think you'll find that it'll be worth your while. Just to get you started, if you are a Windows user, you might want to try Newzie, a free standalone client (though there are lots of other freeware feedreaders out there), and if you like podcasts, as I do, you might also want to check out Newzie's sister client Ziepod, a client that allows you to manage and download all the podcasts you follow, though, again, there are many podcast aggregators you might want to try out.

This way, if there is something new here at Plastic Exploding, you'll know about it without having to make extra effort. Meanwhile, I'll try my best to post more often. Is it a deal?

For those of you who observe the end-of-year holidays, I hope you have a great holiday season.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

The title of this period political drama comes from the customary signoff of pioneering broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965). Murrow began his career in the mid thirties as "director of talks and education" at the Blue radio network of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which at the time had, strictly speaking, no news department, and in response to events in prewar and wartime Europe, built an effective, prestigious and influential news-gathering organization. He later went on to be the first broadcast journalist to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) on a special edition of CBS television's investigative news program See It Now on March 9, 1954.

The program, "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy," pointed out McCarthy's inaccuracies and points of contention from a wide variety of McCarthy's printed, audio-recorded and filmed remarks and speeches: it relayed his remark on the Democratic Party's "twenty years of treason," his inaccurate labeling of the American Civil Liberties Union as "a front for... the Communist Party," and his abusive treatment of witnesses such as World War II hero Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, whose intelligence he compared to that of a "five-year old child," and who he said was "not fit to wear that uniform." The dapper, chain-smoking Murrow, whose credibility with the listening and viewing public had been solidified through years of on-the-ground reports from Blitz-era London and the battlefields of Europe and Korea, concluded with a statement about the differences between dissent and disloyalty, between accusation and conviction, and the importance in American history and to American principles played by writing, speaking, associating, and defending unpopular causes.

Murrow was not the first journalist to criticize McCarthy -- New York Times columnist Joseph Alsop and political cartoonist "Herblock" were among those who scrutinized, in print, McCarthy's grandstanding, cockiness, bullying, his assumptions of guilt by accusation and by association, and his attempts to silence his critics -- but as a broadcast journalist, he was the critic with the widest reach, and the response to "A Report On Senator Joseph McCarthy" was huge as phone calls and telegrams -- most of them positive -- flooded the network. McCarthy's downfall came in December of that year with his "condemnation" by the Senate (a censure in all but name), but Murrow did not single-handedly turn the tide against McCarthy. McCarthy's methods had increasingly alienated many of his fellow Republicans, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, with its famous public chiding of McCarthy by Army counsel Joseph Nye Welch ("... Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? ... "), also contributed to the precipitous decline of McCarthy's public support and political power. But at a time when McCarthy was virtually unchallengeable without risk of being branded a Red sympathizer, Murrow's vigorous defense of the right to disagree with him gave many ordinary Americans a sense of liberation from a reign of terror, and the broadcast of "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy" remains an important moment in the history of American politics and media.

Good Night, and Good Luck is not a film so much about McCarthy as it is about the program that did so much to discredit McCarthy. More to the point, it is about news and the ethical problems of reporting the news, and it focuses mainly on the newsrooms at CBS where the program was created.

As the film begins, Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly (co-producer, director and co-writer George Clooney) discuss an item in the newspaper about a man in the Midwest named Milo Radulovich, who is threatened with separation from the Air Force due to the alleged political activities of some of his relatives, allegation he is not able to answer due to their secrecy and due to the secrecy of his accusers. While the Radulovich piece is not about McCarthy as such, it is manifestly a story about McCarthyism, and See It Now's report brings the broadcaster to the attention of McCarthy's office, who cook up a dossier of innuendo about Murrow's own supposed subversive leanings and activities which is leaked to Murrow-Friendly staffer Joe Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr.), forcing their hands to make a more frontal assault on McCarthy before he destroys the network. This they do despite the warning of CBS head William Paley (Frank Langella) that Murrow is departing from the established form of "presenting both sides." The story is book-ended by Murrow's speech before the Radio and Television News Directors of America in October 1958 in which he warned of television's emphasis on commercialism and entertainment at the expense of information and the public interest.

One of Good Night's central devices is the use of archival footage within the context of the narrative: the actors playing Murrow, Friendly, Paley and staff inhabit the same story-world as the actual protagonists of the events the film concerns: Milo Radulovich, his sister and lawyer, Joe McCarthy and his assistant Roy Cohn and others are all represented on newsfilm that has been preserved from the time. It is by no means uncommon to see historical footage being used as exposition -- President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam war footage or anti-war protests, for instance, to establish that a film is set in the sixties -- but I cannot think of a film in which actual historical figures, many long dead, are used in such close proximity to actors doing a dramatic re-enactment of history. Screenwriters Clooney and Grant Heslov scrupulously researched their story, basing the dialogues of the film on accounts of actual conversations and exchanges of memos or telegrams, and overall they did justice to the substance and truth of the events portrayed. Nevertheless, it does serve as a subtle reminder that this is a film of the age of Photoshop, one in which media can be used to serve many purposes, only some of which might be truthful. It would be just as easy to do a movie in the same style that is more "spun" and less truthful to accepted historical accounts but still convinces because it appears truthful, in the way all media appears, on first glance, to be truthful.

This is an ethical qualm I have not seen expressed in reviews of this film, and I am a little surprised that it has not been brought up by others. But the double-edged way that historical footage is used in this film can be considered to be noted in the film when we see Strathairn-as-Murrow interviewing entertainer Liberace (represented by actual footage) on his other program on CBS television, Person To Person: in an age before satellite feeds, interviews over long distances could not be done live; therefore a film of the interviewee, giving answers to scripted questions, was shot beforehand and the host went through the motions of posing the questions and chatting while reading from cue-cards. This obvious artifice is shown in the film, and it is difficult determine if the set-up was meant to fool the audience or merely considered a convention and understood as such. It does suggest that Clooney and Heslov gave some thought about their postmodern use of narrative-blending in a film that is otherwise in straightforwardly-done, comprehensible style.

While Murrow and Friendly tangle with military brass, network executives, McCarthy's office and finally McCarthy himself, we also see the discussions of Joe Wershba and his wife Shirley (Patricia Clarkson), who, in order to keep their jobs with the network are keeping their marriage a secret from their employers: At the beginning of the film, Joe has received his copy of the new loyalty oath which all members of the staff must sign; both these factors, the secret marriage and the loyalty oath, serve to put you in the repressive atmosphere. In part, the conversations are a concession on the part of the outspokenly liberal Clooney and Heslov to the conservative beliefs of Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Joe, and he poses to Shirley the nagging ethical questions as to whether what they are doing is right or proper. Meanwhile the newsroom prepares for scrutiny as staffers who have any ties that may attract notice come clean, leading to Murrow's famous comment that "the fear is right here in this room."

The Wershbas provide one Greek-chorus-like counterpoint to the film; another is the singing of Dianne Reeves, whose rendition of standards such as "I've Got My Eyes On You" and "How High The Moon" provide a different, mood-centered counterpoint for the events of the film (the latter is particularly effective for the other subplot of the film, concerning troubled Murrow colleague Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), a journalist whose recent divorce and unremitting Red-baiting attacks from Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian results in his suicide). The soundtrack CD of the film, which I happened to find recently, is, incidentally, a treat for fans of fifties-style small-group jazz.

Ed Murrow never wavered from his conviction that the broadcast media had a responsibility to educate and inform that took precedence over its powers to amuse and divert.. He resigned from CBS in 1961 for a position as director of the United States Information Agency (which gives the official US government position abroad, and parent of the Voice of America broadcast service) under President Kennedy. Illness forced Murrow to resign from the USIA in 1964, and he died in Pawling, New York on April 27 1965.

I viewed Good Night, and Good Luck on a letterboxed 2006 DVD release from Warner Home Video, which also includes a commentary track by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, a making-of documentary which includes appearance by the real-life Wershbas, Milo Radulovich and Edward R. Murrow's son Casey Murrow.

See it now: An excerpt from Murrow's March 9, 1954 broadcast, with his famous concluding remarks on dissent and disloyalty.

And while we are talking about McCarthy, let's learn about the actual, little-known history of the Communist Party itself, in a little side article I like to call:

About the Communist movement in the United States

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was founded in 1919 by members of the Socialist Party who were impatient with that party's moderate, reformist stance and who were galvanized by the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which resulted in the first national government to be founded explicitly on socialist ideals (although whether and how it lived up to those ideals is another discussion entirely). The party, modeled after the Bolsheviks and adopting Leninist principles, was one of many similar organizations forming throughout the world in response to events in Russia and soon joined the Communist International, an international organization of Marxist-Leninist parties intended to coordinate efforts in what was then expected to be an imminent global revolution.

After a first decade of intensive government persecution and factional conflict, the party became one of the most dynamic and visible organizations on the American left in the 1930s and 40s. American Communists were instrumental in labor organizing as well as prominent and consistent opponents of segregation and racism. The party's attraction to artists and intellectuals led to an influence on American cultural life and thought that went far beyond the party's numbers and political clout.

But on the other hand, their dependence on the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) for nearly all their policy cues led them through a succession of contradictory positions. They opposed working within the mainstream labor movement and then supported it; they opposed FDR and the New Deal and then supported them. They opposed working with other organizations on the left and then called for a "United Front" against fascism, after which they went virtually silent on the issue of fascism with the signing of the non-aggression pact between Hitler's Germany and the USSR, advocating a "peace platform," which changed to a pro-war platform when Germany broke the pact and invaded the USSR. And as documents in former Soviet archives confirm, the party did indeed recruit certain of its members to gather intelligence which ended up in the hands of the Soviet government, doing this through a parallel secret party apparatus which was, in part, a relic of the early party's illegal existence at the height of anti-radical government activity in the 1920s.

Part of the rationale for the CPUSA's close relationship with the Soviet Union can be found in the long-standing socialist tradition of internationalism and in the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, whereby in theory, individual members within the party, and individual parties within the International, had a voice in shaping policy, but policies once adopted were to be strictly adhered to, just as troops in the field are expected to carry out orders and not subject them to additional debate. In practice, since the International was sponsored and largely administered by the CPSU leadership, the world's Communist parties increasingly became appendages of the CPSU and became apologists for Soviet domestic policy and instruments of Soviet foreign policy, and this became especially pronounced with the accession of Josef Stalin to the leadership of the CPSU after Lenin's death. This continued in a less open fashion after Stalin's public dissolution of the Communist International in 1943.

After the end of the Second World War, a wave of back-to-normalcy and conservatism turned the US government's sights on the Soviet Union and on radical activity in the United States, including but not limited to the activities of the CPUSA. Congressional investigations, prosecutions of party leaders under the Smith Act, infiltration of the party by informants, blacklists, loyalty oaths, and, for a time, the outlawing of the CPUSA under the Communist Control Act, devastated the party. Further blows to the party came with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin.

The CPUSA attempted to recover in the sixties as the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements gathered momentum, but the party was largely written off by the sixties New Left as irrelevant or even dangerous in view of the USSR's increasingly hegemonic role in global politics, their new role as a new set of "bad guys" to be struggled against. The party finally severed its ties with the Soviet Union in the late eighties over the political and economic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, and further soul-searching and readjustment came with the fall of the Soviet Union and the satellite regimes of the East Bloc.

The CPUSA continues to soldier on with an active membership of about 2500 and without patronage from foreign capitals. The party never regained the influence of its heyday, and today very much follows rather than leads what remains of the American left with its "me-too" positions on every progressive issue from unemployment to war, from racial and gender equality to LGBT rights, from health care to the environment, while promulgating its vision of "Bill of Rights socialism" and its view of the capitalist causes of the problems facing the world today.

By most estimates, over a million Americans have, at one time or another, been members of the Communist Party. The majority of these American Communists were not engaged in cloak-and-dagger machinations but in peaceful and constitutionally-protected political activity. The Cold War anti-communist crusade demonstrated what could happen to anyone who stepped outside the boundaries of mainstream politics, and in so doing effectively marginalized dissent in the US without resorting to open and violent repression. It also institutionalized red-baiting as a permanent factor in American political discourse: even today, a generation after Communism ceased to be a factor in world politics, branding one's opponent a "communist" or "socialist" continues to be an effective weapon in the dirty game of American electoral politics and in reining in the limits of what is thinkable. The legacies of Murrow and McCarthy, the one who insisted on dissent as the foundation and the test of American freedom and the other who rode to political power on innuendo and fear, continue their mutual combat today.

Lolita (1962)

After European émigré writer and academic Humbert Humbert (James Mason) confronts depraved, hedonistic playwright and screenwriter Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) in his rambling, disordered house and shoots him to death, we see the events leading to the murder unfold in flashback. Humbert, four years earlier, stops in the suburban New Hampshire community of Ramsdale for the summer before taking up a teaching appointment in Ohio, and lodges in the house of widow Charlotte Haze (Shelly Winters). Charlotte is immediately smitten by Humbert's old-world charm, but he is captivated by Charlotte's teenage daughter Dolores, nicknamed Lolita (Sue Lyon). Humbert deflects Charlotte's advances until he can figure out a way to stay close to Lolita, and decides to allow Charlotte to believe that her feelings for Humbert are reciprocated. He agrees to marry Charlotte while Lolita is off at summer camp, but his plans are threatened when Charlotte discovers his true feelings. As he puzzles out how to deal with this, fate intervenes and Charlotte is hit and killed by a car. Humbert collects Lolita from camp and the two embark on a cross-country motor trip, in the course of which Lolita initiates their physical relationship. As they wander, Humbert begins to suspect that they are being followed by a mysterious man, unknown to him, but apparently uncannily aware of the nature of Humbert's feelings for Lolita. They settle in Ohio at the end of the summer as Humbert begins his new job and enrolls Lolita in school, but he is frightened by another encounter with the man and they once more take to the road, with the man in pursuit. Lolita is suddenly taken ill and is admitted to a hospital, then vanishes before Humbert can check her out. She remains missing until three years later, when a letter arrives from her, now married, pregnant and in need of money. Traveling to see her, he learns what has become of her and learns from her the identity of the man who took her away from him and how their subsequent relationship ended.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was first published in 1955 and rapidly became the decade's most controversial bestseller, and one which finally gave its author a measure of financial independence. Nabokov (1899-1977) was born in St. Petersburg to an affluent, socially prominent and cultivated family descended from minor Russian nobility who fled Russia with the Bolshevik revolution and eventually settled in Berlin via the Crimea, France, and Britain, where Nabokov attended Cambridge. In Berlin Nabokov acquired a reputation among Russian exile literary circles as a poet and novelist, and with the outbreak of World War II, settled with his wife and son in the United States, where he began to work as a university lecturer and to write in English. Lolita was his third English-language novel, and after initial hostility from critics who found the book's narrative of a middle-aged man's obsession with a young girl unpalatable, and a reputation among readers as a "dirty" literary work in the vein of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the book was eventually hailed as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, full of linguistic and literary puzzles, allusions, wry observations on American culture, dark humor and tragedy. The book's title became a common expression for a sexually precocious young girl, or alternately a young girl who is the focus of middle-aged men's infatuation, and the book also gave the language the word "nymphet," a term of Nabokov's coinage meaning a girl on the cusp between childhood and pubescence.

In bringing Lolita to the screen, director Stanley Kubrick had more to deal with than the novel's mostly undeserved reputation as an "erotic" novel (it is better described as a novel with erotic elements, mostly in the opening chapters of the book) and the shocking premise. The book, and the screenplay Nabokov wrote a couple of years after the book's appearance (a screenplay that Kubrick found mostly unusable and rewrote with producer James B. Harris, though Nabokov was credited as sole screenwriter), did not assume the moral simplicity that was enshrined in the Hollywood film industry's Production Code. The novel and screenplay dealt not only with a sexual relationship between a mature man and a young girl, but also with the sexuality of young people and sexuality outside of marriage, striking more or less at the heart of the Code, which existed, in part, to validate current standards of morality. Most Americans were increasingly aware that a gap existed between how sexuality and gender were discussed in popular entertainment and how they played out in personal experience. Chances are, most of these same Americans were probably not yet willing to demand that that gap be addressed in the media, and certainly, institutions like the Production Code, local censor boards and watchdog groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency were still sufficient factors in how the media addressed those issues.

One thing that Kubrick did was bring the Clare Quilty character and subplot into the foreground of the story: he altered the order of scenes so that Quilty's murder begins the film and the subsequent events lead up to it. He found the Quilty character and his role as Humbert's double one of the book's most fascinating themes, and emphasizing this aspect of the story also served to retain the interest of the audience after the question of Humbert and Lolita's relationship is answered. He also omitted just about all of Humbert's backstory -- his lifelong attraction to nymphets and the formative sexual experience with a childhood sweetheart underlying it -- as well as the more unpleasant aspects of his personality, He also raised Lolita's age from twelve to fourteen -- the minimum age that the censors would accept for a girl who is sexually active, and cast a fourteen year-old girl who looked more mature than her age.

He also toned down the eroticism of the novel and turned up its dark, ironic humor and sardonic observations on American sexual hypocrisy. Charlotte Haze is a lonely and sexually frustrated woman whose protested fidelity to the memory of her spouse does not prevent her from having an afternoon fling with Clare Quilty after a speaking engagement with her women's club (an encounter of which Quilty recalls only having met Lolita beforehand), any more than it prevents her pursuit of Humbert. Charlotte's neighbors, the Farlows, reveal themselves, through code-words like "broad-minded," to be enthusiastic suburban swingers: they even send their daughter, Lolita's best friend Mona, off to summer camp every year to facilitate their spouse-swapping. Charlotte, in order to pursue Humbert without interference from Lolita -- whom she seems to regard less as a daughter than as a rival -- packs her off to this camp as well, which is called Camp Climax, and is where Lolita has her first sexual encounter with a boy. Lolita starts off her seduction of Humbert (rather than the other way around) by playfully confessing her summer-camp experience to Humbert. Quilty has a conversation in the lobby with the sniggering night desk clerk, Mr. Swine, who comes across something like a pimp or pander. And Lolita herself plays Humbert against Quilty, whom she finds attractive for his sophistication and his artistic accomplishments, in other words for much the same star-struck reasons her mother was attracted to him and carries on an affair with him after leaving Humbert, only leaving when Quilty demands she participate in his depraved lifestyle, including appearing in the pornographic "art films" which are his hobby. The most orthodox relationship in the book and the film is only seen at the end, when Humbert encounters Lolita for the last time, pregnant and married to Dick (Gary Cockrell), an earnest but struggling laborer who knows nothing about her past. What is astounding is that all this lurid Peyton Place soap-opera is expressed quite indirectly, though the viewer never mistakes what is meant. The best innuendo in the film must be in the early scene of prospective lodger Humbert being taken through the house by Charlotte, and being thoroughly unimpressed by her inane chatter about her fine art reproductions and her prize-winning cherry pies until he begins to politely beg off, when she desperately tries to hook him with a view of the back garden, where he sees Lolita for the first time and immediately agrees to move in. When asked what was the decisive factor, he improvises the answer "Your cherry pies!"

Neither the novel nor the film offer much insight into the character of Lolita: the novel is mainly concerned with Humbert's dysfunctions and mental instability, his rationalizations and his attempts to recapture his own past, while the film focuses on the dark humor of the situations and gives a detached, ironic picture of human relationships divorced from sentiment. Lolita's character is more humanized in the film because of the nature of the medium, but Lolita's own feelings are not given center stage in either book or film: she is not so much a person as a way things happen, as well as a prize the possession of which is contested by the film's adult protagonists. The storyline of Lolita is a parody of a love story, and is not meant to be a cautionary tale about messing with minors. Lolita's lack of a point of view has been extensively considered by critics of the book and the film, and has also been considered in various other adaptations of the book and in derivative works such as the 1995 novel Lo's Diary. Iranian writer Azar Nafisi also wrote in her memoir Reading Lolita In Teheran about teaching Western literature, including Nabokov's book, in a women's reading circle in the Islamic republic and draws parallels between Humbert and Lolita's relationship and life in Iran.

Lolita was the first film made after Kubrick, in search of greater creative freedom, relocated to the UK. Some rear-projection, connecting and establishing footage was shot in the US, mainly on streets and roads, with the balance of the film being made on British soundstages, using mostly Canadian and American actors based in the UK. There are some trademark Kubrick visual flourishes, such as the backwards tracking shot, but the shooting style of the film remains mostly in the traditional Hollywood mode.rather than the classic wide-angle style associated with Kubrick's later films. He would return to the theme of sexual obsession in his last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Further notes:

• Even with the film's attempts to make Charlotte Haze unlikable, Shelly Winters (1920-2006), who began as a chorus girl and developed into an actress whose loud, brash public image belied a subtle and sensitive talent, gives a performance as sympathetic as her character is unattractive. My own familiarity with her work is sketchy, and so my experience of her is rather eclectic: I liked her in Mambo and Night Of The Hunter (both 1955), and in a film adaptation of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963).

• Like Richard Burton, James Mason (1909-1984) was known as a "classy" British actor who starred in some great films and some real turkeys. In addition to some fine moments, such as that opposite Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954) and North By Northwest (1959), he also appeared in Mandingo (1975) and The Boys From Brazil (1978).

• Working initially in his parents' stage comedy act and serving in the Royal Air Force in World War II as a camp entertainer, Peter Sellers (1925-1980) came to prominence in the fifties as a writer-performer on the long-running BBC radio series The Goon Show and in a number of British films, At times, Lolita seems more than a little indulgent of his prodigious gift for creating and inhabiting characters -- much of his dialogue seems ad-libbed or at least very freely interpreted -- but his performance as Clare Quilty is creepy and funny and furnished much of the comic aspect of this black comedy. Sellers bettered this performance when he worked again for Kubrick in 1964, playing three separate roles in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; the same year, he also created his most memorable character, Inspector Clouseau, in The Pink Panther. He continued to work through the sixties and seventies -- including a number of Pink Panther sequels -- before giving the performance of his career in the 1979 Jerzy Kosinski adaptation Being There.

• Sue Lyon (b. 1946) had done modeling work and appeared on television (The Loretta Young Show, Dennis The Menace) before appearing in Lolita, which appears to have been the moment that defined her career and her image; she appears forever destined to be associated with the heart-shaped-glasses-and-lollipop image of the film's poster (the glasses and lollipop don't appear in the film, by the way). The film netted a number of nominations in different categories for the Academy Awards, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Venice Film Festival, but Lyon was the only one to actually win an award -- a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. Though she continued to work on and off in films and television until 1980, her major film roles came in the years immediately following Lolita (Night of the Iguana, 1964, 7 Women, 1966, and The Flim-Flam Man, 1967). Along with ups and downs in her acting career came also a number of personal setbacks and difficulties, including marriages and divorces, some physical injuries and difficulties with manic-depressive illness. Retired from acting, she shuns interviews and the limelight generally.

• The pop tune playing on Lolita's transistor radio when she and Humbert first meet was composed by Nelson Riddle and was meant to parody what most people thought of teenage-oriented pop music at the time -- childish, vapid and kitschy, with nonsensical lyrics. Nevertheless, under the title "Lolita Ya Ya" and released under Sue Lyon's name, it became a hit single, and a cover version by instrumental surf-guitar group The Ventures also became a popular and much anthologized tune. The novel and its eponymous character has also been worked into popular songs by the Police, Katy Perry, Celine Dion, Marilyn Manson, and others.

• After the success of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov relocated with his wife to Montreux in Switzerland, where he lived and wrote for the rest of his life. Some of his works from this final period include Pale Fire, Ada, and Look At The Harlequins!

• Nabokov's novel was brought to the big screen again in 1997, with Humbert being playd by Jeremy Irons and Lolita by Dominique Swain. While truer to the book than Kubrick's, the film lacked the comic bite of the original, opting to play it straight. The film's release was delayed due to the subject matter and the film more or less flopped at the box office. The novel has also been adapted to the stage many times and has also inspired derivative literary works and parodies.

I viewed Stanley Kubrick's Lolita on Warner Home Video's 2007 DVD package, which includes theatrical trailer, English and French soundtracks, subtitles, and a list of awards and award nominations.