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Lolita

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Devoted as I am to Vladimir Nabokov's novel of Lolita, and as much good as there was in Adrian Lyne's more accurate interpretation of it, I must confess that Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film version functions better than either as social commentary. Nabokov's novel was radically subjective - not a thing happened unfiltered by its hero's own vision. Transliterated as it was by Adrien Lyne, the result was claustrophobic. Kubrick's film, by contrast, invited us to stand outside and look in at the strange behavior of mid-20th century America's "progressive" middle-class. That was the right approach. By not asking us to relate to an obvious pedophile, or any of the other characters, Kubrick allowed us to fully absorb the ethical and emotional consequences of their interactions.

The oddly named Humbert Humbert (James Mason in, perhaps, his finest performance), comes to America from some unspecified European country. Looking for lodging, he crosses paths with Dolores "Lolita" Haze (Sue Lyon), and her mother Charlotte (brilliantly played by Shelley Winters). What follows is a black comedy swirling giddily around a host of sexual taboos - pedophilia chief among them, as Humbert finds himself sexually obsessed with the teen-aged Lolita. Had this been a TV-movie of the week, Lolita would have been the saintly victim of the villainous Humbert. Instead, Kubrick and Nabokov's Lolita is a precocious manipulator - awakening to her sexual identity and the strange power she can exert over members of the opposite sex. The difference, of course, is that she is a child and doesn't know any better; Humbert is an adult and damn well should.

So, for that matter, should Clare Quilty, Humbert's rival for the attentions of the young nymphet. Quilty, though sicker than Humbert, is a farcical character, played brilliantly by Peter Sellers - the Robin Williams of his day. The edgy, blackly comedic tone is no better exemplified than in the scenes he and Humbert have together. It becomes obvious as the film progresses that, in some twisted way, Humbert actually loves Lolita, while Quilty sees her more as the object of a fetish.

By the end, Humbert is reduced to a broken shell of a man, and it does not really matter if we approve of his behavior or not: he is still sympathetic, as much a victim of his own demons as Lolita herself, or her hapless mother. Without lifting a finger to "redeem" him, Kubrick forces us to come to terms with Humbert's humanity, as well as his perversion.

Compare that to sanctimonious pap like American Beauty, a film that nearly demands that we "understand" its main character, even daring suggest that disapproving of his infatuation with a teenaged girl is akin to the homophobic excesses of his sadistic, one-dimensional ex-Marine neighbor (apparently ugly stereotypes are perfectly OK when applied to conservatives). Add to this a few patently absurd, over-the-top plot developments and Kubrick's Lolita begins looking better and better.

Many have suggested that, had Kubrick made Lolita in a more permissive atmosphere, a different (therefore "better") film would have resulted. I doubt it. At the end of the day, Kubrick's Lolita is more about foolish, pathetic, self-destructive behavior, than pushing the limits of what salacious content we are allowed to see on-screen. It is about how obsession and hypocrisy can crush a person. It is about how very funny we are as a species, with our propensity destroy each other and ourselves for the pettiest, most absurd of reasons.

As much as I appreciate a new release of this classic film, I am at a loss to understand why they would give it a widescreen treatment and not enhance it for widescreen televisions. All of the two-disc special editions in the new Kubrick boxed set are enhanced, and yet this one (not part of the set, but released at the same time) is not. If you're a Lolita fan you should stick with the original 1:33 version. This one will only frustrate you.

This is the third DVD release of Kubrick's masterpiece, and it is still not given an anamorphic transfer. How can this happen in 2007, considering Warner's reputation as a studio that cares and the classic status of the film? Incredible. And not a trace of any new extras or bonuses except the trailer we've seen before. A huge boo to Warner! Words fail.

First, I would like to correct some mistakes read on these reviews : Lolita was shot before Strangelove, not after ! It is as masterful as Kubrick other movies. Sue Lyon is perfect in the role, and Nabokov has not been put apart by Kubrick. He wrote the screenplay, Kubrick filmed it (the way he wanted, it's his film), and it is to be said that Nabokov liked the film (unlike Stephen King who hated Shining). The character of Peter Sellers will be an unforgettable memory for all viewers, and I believe he's even funnier and brillant that in Strangelove. Besides, unlike 2001 (with compression problems, impossible to watch!), Lolita is the best master and image quality of the Kubrick DVD Collection. I would give a big A for the image which is simply perfect. This DVD could easily be selected as a Criterion edition. Buy it, you won't regret it. it's full of wit, subversive, humor, slapstick (in the hotel room), disguise, perversity, immorality and brillant acting (Shelley Winter is so perfect that we all want to kill her !). A MUST !

This is a long film (152 minutes) and actually two-films-in-one. The first focuses on Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his involvement with his landlady, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), as well as on his strong physical attraction to her teenage daughter Lolita (Sue Lyon). The second and (in my opinion) much less effective segment continues the plot but without Charlotte. Winters brings so much energy to her role as a sexually frustrated widow whose cultural pretensions are both hilarious and pathetic but never endearing. When she is no longer on screen, the plot sags. Mason's performance is consistently first-rate but Lyon's body makes promises her acting skills cannot keep. When she and Mason are required to sustain the narrative, the results are often disappointing. As for the character Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), I really don't know what quite to make of him. Presumably he represents corruption in various forms and is viewed by Humbert is an unworthy, indeed despicable rival for Lolita's attention. For whatever reasons, Sellers seems to be going through the motions. The supporting players are OK. None stands out.

Lolita was directed by Stanley Kubrick and is essentially based on Vladimir Nabakov's controversial novel in which the nymphet is 12 (not 15) and therefore her relationship with Humbert is (or was in 1955) all-the-more shocking. Because of its truly effective social satire, I would rate the first segment more than Five Stars if I could but rate the second segment (at best) Three Stars, hence the rating which appears above.

If ever the statement that the movie is not as good as the book is true, it applies to Kubrick's "Lolita". I really like the movie on its own, but it bears little resemblance to the novel (my favorite) other than young girl/old man, the names, and the broadest structure of the story.

Problem areas:

1. Age - by Humbert's definition, a nymphet is between 9 and 14 years old. Sue Lyon was too old, and looked even older. Mason was about 10 years too old as well, and not really the "glamour man" Lo would be attracted to (as in the book).
2. Disregard for the content of the novel - by ignoring the screenplay written by the original author and making up other scenes that were not part of the book, it makes one wonder what story was being told.
3. Location - in the novel, Humbert and Lolita travel 27,000 miles in the course of a couple years, and geography plays a substantial part in the book. Filming in England provides little geography and motel-hopping lifestyle that was so prevalent in the novel.
4. The same three things in both versions of the movie bother me, as I feel it robs Humbert of some nuance to his character:
A. No mention of his pre-Lolita first wife, Valeria. He was not always just into nymphets.
B. No mention of his post-Lolita second wife, Rita, (and taping a goodbye note to her navel so she would find it as he goes off to track down Lo).
C. The last page-and-a-half from the book was left out. This is possibly the most moving passage of the novel - when Humbert offers his apology for all his nastiness, and his admonition to Lolita, and the revelation that neither Lolita nor Humbert are alive as we read the book, and his pathetic summation..."I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." It ties everything together and completes the circle.

Strengths:

1. Acting - this was good by the 4 prime characters - Lolita (Sue Lyon), Humbert (James Mason), Charlotte (Shelley Winters) and Quilty (Peter Sellers).
2. Cinematography - nicely filmed, in black-and-white.

This is a good movie - but it certainly is not Nabokov's "Lolita".

After reading the comments here, I find myself coming to the (for me) unusual position of defending Stanley Kubrick, whom I feel has to be one of the world's most overrated directors. It's somehow perfectly fitting that *Lolita*, perhaps his very best movie along with *2001*, appears not to be very highly regarded (and *2001* isn't all that well-liked either), while technically perfect but morally void exercises in sadism and misogyny like *Clockwork Orange* and *The Shining* are praised to the skies by this director's fans. But that really comes as no surprise, since the major gripe about *Lolita* seems to be that Sue Lyons isn't YOUNG enough! I guess all the would-be Alexes out there wanted a 12-year-old (Lolita's age in the novel) to get all kissy-face with James Mason. Or failing that, the critics seem to prefer what Adrian Lyne accomplished in his numbingly literal-minded remake: an older teenager that has simulated sex with Humbert. At any rate, criticisms that Kubrick's movie is too "coy" fall beside the mark when compared to Lyne's film, which ALSO "cops out" with the casting of Dominique Swain, who was obviously not twelve during the shoot. The fact is, no audience, whether 40 years ago or today, wants to see a movie that features a pre-adolescent engaged in sexual activity. This works in terms of Nabobov's novel, but would be disgusting in a movie. The miracle is that Kubrick got so much of the novel into his film (and past the censors!). Let's face it, much of the credit goes to Nabokov himself: he wrote the screenplay. I've read the novel, and I can tell you that Kubrick's *Lolita* doesn't vary all that wildly from the original. The essential thing that Nabokov and Kubrick alter is the focus on Humbert's intense passion for his "nymphet" to a focus on the hypocrisy, with regards to sexual matters, of society at large. I.e., *Lolita* the book is about one sick man; *Lolita* the movie is about one sick society. And Humbert the perfect hypocrite perfectly fits into the hypocritical milieu of suburban America. It's telling that Humbert goes as far as he does with his nubile "step-daughter" without attracting attention from anyone . . . except for fellow-pervert Quilty. (It takes one to know one.) But the great thing is that movie isn't as serious-minded as all that. There are many laughs along the way, in particular the Quilty monologues by Peter Sellers, which, while seeming at first to be of doubtful relevance, eventually emerge as commentary on the film's action. Quilty is Humbert's sick conscience, and Humbert can't get away from him. And that's lucky for us. Finally, it can't be stressed enough that *Lolita* boasts of career highs -- and I mean the highest of high watermarks -- for no less than Sellers, James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon . . . and, I daresay, Stanley Kubrick. [DVD note: I have a copy of a Remastered Digital edition, purchased elsewhere, that Amazon doesn't appear to carry. So, you know, keep your peepers peeled.]

Kubrick may not have faithfully rendered his source material, but the story of an obsessive male falling for a woman who is far too young to fulfill his expectations is engrossing nonetheless. I was surprised to see how closely the track of this doomed relationship follows the scenario of that between alcoholic adults. This film is interesting when taken as a cautionary tale about the inevitabilities of any relationship between two immature people, blurred boundaries, selfishness, infidelities, lies and all.

LOLITA is well-made in some ways, frustrating in others. The shock value is largely gone today, since the film contains very little beyond innuendo. We know precisely what happens and when, of course, but it's all done in a very 50s-repressed filmic style. James Mason's Humbert Humbert is a neurotic when we first meet him, and whatever elements of his past have set him up to fall for Lolita at first sight are never really explained. We meet Lolita in the only lascivious shot of the movie, sunbathing in her back yard. Sue Lyons plays a younger teenager (a couple years older than the Lolita of the novel, actually) with a very accurate child-woman-like combination of boredom, pouting, self-absorption, giggling and see-sawing between moods. Shelley Winters is annoyingly right as the needy, pitiable mother, and Peter Sellers is good in a rare serious role as Lyon's other elder love interest who has no ethical compunction about interfering with Humbert's pursuit of Lolita.

Had Mason simply rented the room from the mother in order to dally with the underage girl, the story would not be nearly as disturbing, though perhaps just as controversial. But it takes a nasty turn when it becomes clear that Humbert is willing to marry the mother, whom he despises, in order to stay close to Lolita in hopes of a seduction. The fact that Humbert keeps a diary of his feelings only adds to our distaste for him -- this is not a man with whom the male audience can easily identify. His laughter while reading a love declaration from the mother says it all beautifully. Humbert is too sad, dissipated and cynical to be sympathetic. If his soul isn't already lost, he loses it by marrying the mother.

On the other hand, Humbert is second only to Lolita herself in our sympathies in this crowd. The mother is so unlikable that we are tempted to laugh and cheer aloud when she dies unexpectedly, and Peter Sellers' Quilty is such a jerk that we can't certainly root for him. So we are left to ponder the predicament of Humbert, and witness his foreordained demise.

Every beat with Lolita seems authentic to me. She is the troubled schoolgirl allowing herself to be flattered by older men, learning it is easier to tell them what they want to hear regardless of the truth, but never committing in her heart and doing exactly as she pleases in their absence. She cries like the little girl she still is when Humbert finally tells her that her mother has died. And she finally seeks a saner refuge with a boy her own age and opts for the decidedly less risky life of a wife and mother herself, still treating Humbert a little bit like a dad or a rich uncle.

The truest thing in the movie for me is the sequence in which Humbert visits Lolita, pregnant and married. The whole scene is a triumph and in a way the lesson of the movie summed up. Lolita survives and remains largely ignorant of the destruction she has inadvertantly been a party to as a child and the pain she continues to give poor, lost Humbert by never falling in love with him. She seems, in fact, the most grown up and the best armored of all the characters in this movie, but knowing what we know about the toll older men often take on underage girls, probably isn't as bullet-proof as she appears.

Readers and movie-goers often come to this story looking for titilllation and, I would imagine, go away either missing the point entirely or, hopefully, having learned something about the stupidity, the hopelessness, and the inevitable disappointment of pursuing a liason with an immature partner, innocent or not.

It is of considerable import that at the end of the story, Quilty is shot dead and Humbert dies an old man's death of heart failure in prison -- both men roundly humiliated -- while Lolita, who was always the master of her own fate, really, has grown up and charted a simple but appropriate life for herself with someone her age.

The advertising line for LOLITA, when it was first unleashed in the middle of 1962, was "How did they ever make a film out of LOLITA?" Obviously, "they"--meaning maverick director Stanley Kubrick and his partner producer James B. Harris--had to proceed with a lot of caution, giving the salaciousness of the Vladimir Nabokov novel they were adapting to the screen (with the author's help). For some, of course, the finished film didn't seem to go far enough in depicting the novel's story of a forbidden love between a craggy, middle-aged man named Humbert Humbert and the ever seductive teen Dolores "Lolita" Haze, and they've instead taken to Adrian Lyne's 1998 remake. But this is way the game was played with Hollywood censors in the early 1960s, even as the world at large, and Tinsletown in particular, was beginning to undergo a lot of changes, particulary in terms of sexual morals.

Even with those restrictions in place, however, and despite its length (153 minutes), LOLITA still has an undeniable power in its depiction of the relationship between Humbert (James Mason) and Lolita (Sue Lyon). Because of all the censorship restrictions in place at the time, Kubrick could not delve as deeply into the erotic nature of the relationship as the novel did; but the need to imply really helped the film to a great deal, because any sharp viewer or audience member could get the gist of what's going on between Mason and Lyon, and imagine a lot of racier things in their minds. This and Sellers' supreme turn as the pedophiliac writer Clare Quilty (involving impersonations and convincing American and German accents) push this unconventional romantic drama into the terrain of black comedy, while still putting the film into the area of a 'PG-13' rating in terms of content, whereas Lyne's remake doesn't let anyone think for themselves and shows it all in graphic detail.

A lot of second-unit footage of New England aside, Kubrick had to make LOLITA in England just to get financing to begin with; and from that point on, he never made another film in America again. Then of course, both he and Harris still had to jump through all those censorship hoops to get the film shown at all. Nevertheless, Kubrick still got very solid performances by Mason (known to many Americans as the heavy in Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST), Sellers, and the late Shelley Winters, in a truly fascinating off-kilter performance as Lolita's mother. And while many have complained over the decades that Lyon was too old to play Lolita, her combination of seductiveness and teen brattiness is quite right for the character, whose name in the decades to come would be synonymous with any firtatious girl having relationships with men twice or three times as old as she is. The very first scene of her, sunning herself out on the lawn in a bikini and sunglasses, has to count as something of an iconic shot for its time.

What doesn't seem to have been discussed much with respect to LOLITA is the music score here. Aside from the main title theme composed by Bob Harris, the brother of the producer, the music, even the admittedly chintzy "Lolita Ya-Ya", is by the late Nelson Riddle, remembered for his work with Frank Sinatra in the 1950s and with Linda Ronstadt during the last three years of his life. It accurately captures the feeling of the film's forbidden love story, sometimes with a slight amount of menace a la Bernard Herrmann (ironically, Herrmann was the first one chosen by Kubrick to do the score, but Herrmann balked at having to use Bob Harris' theme within it, which paved the way for Riddle to step in). The exquisite black-and-white cinematography of Oswald Morris puts the finishing touches on this film.

As with Kubrick's very last film EYES WIDE SHUT, LOLITA is a frequently misunderstood film about the psychology of sexual seduction; and as with many of Kubrick's films, one needs to see LOLITA more than a few times to really understand fully the true impact. That aside, and apart from whatever flaws there are in it, LOLITA remains a fascinating film from a time when things were changing with shocking speed in the world, particularly with respect to the cinema.

What I'll never understand is why people expect to see a word for word recreation of a book whenever it is interpreted by a filmmaker.If you know Kubrick at all,you know he only tried to realize only one artistic vision-his own.
The tongue-in-cheek/double-entendre sense of humor of this film is brilliant.Like when James Mason is tapping on a stuffed beaver with a tennis racquet.Or when he and Lolita discuss the words "mid-section" from an Edgar Allen Poe poem.It's hard to believe this film is 40 years old because it's attitude and sense of humor is so modern and hip.
Sure,Kubrick's interpretation of Nabokov's masterpiece isn't a word for word recreation.But,it's like when a musician covers a famous song.Who wants to hear him or her do it note for note?