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:
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.
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.
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