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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Lolita (1962) 
It is with some embarrassment that I admit to not yet having seen the Adrian Lyne version of Vladimir Nabokov's great novel. While I am sure that his version sticks closer to Nabokov's novel, it is also hard for me to imagine that it could be as entertaining and truly unique as Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy. True, as Nabokov purists have pointed out, the film is far from the novel both in its tone and execution, and while Kubrick took huge critical hits for his direction, few took Nabokov himself — the sole writer credited with the screenwriting on the film - to task. It is obvious that Kubrick and Nabokov, faced with a novel that was all but un-filmable in 1962 (even the film's trailer asked, "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?") made the best possible Lolita they could. While nothing can compare to Nabokov's gorgeous prose — Lolita and Pale Fire may be the two most beautifully written novels of the 20th century - Kubrick and Nabokov have successfully delineated and streamlined the novel's events into a brilliant meditation on sexual obsession. Humbert Humbert here is played by James Mason — a near perfect piece of casting - a worldly intellectual who arrives in New Hampshire for a college lectureship when a book of French poetry he had translated enjoys some success. With no lodgings when he arrives, he seeks rooms in the quiet middle class community of Ramsdale, and more specifically, in the home of the widow Charlotte Haze (Shelly Winters, who was never better). At first put off by her man-chasing ("I assure you, you couldn't fine any more peace in Ramsdale," Charlotte tells Humbert) and her less than sophisticated aesthetics, Humbert is thunderstruck when he sees Charlotte's young teenage daughter Dolores a.k.a. Lolita (wonderfully played by Sue Lyon, looking at least two years older than the novel's twelve year old Lo). From that moment, Humbert's entire existence revolves around this "nymphet," and he soon is devising a plan where by getting in Charlotte's good graces he can be around Lo as much as humanly possible. (Click Here to see the clip where Humbert sees Lo for the first time.) The now domesticated Hum decides to lower himself into Charlotte's bourgeois world, complete with summer dances, cha-cha records, drive-in movies and a would-be swinging couple named the Farlows. Charlotte, however, unaware of Hum's secret passion and his and Lo's trysts (which Hum keeps under lock and key in his diary), has other plans for Lo - summer camp and then boarding school. How can Hum stay in the game? Marry Charlotte. But when Charlotte reads Hum's forbidden diary, Hum can't convince her they are notes for a novel, and she runs out into the street where she is hit and killed by a car. Hum picks Lo up at her summer camp (the novel's "Camp Q" here becomes "Camp Climax for girls"), uncertain of their future together, and not telling Lo about her mother. But something far more sinister is plotting against an unsuspecting Hum: competition in the form of eccentric writer and celebrity Claire Quilty (Peter Sellers in his second best film), a former acquaintance of Charlotte's. Donning a variety of personas — including a "normal guy" off-duty police officer attending a convention at a hotel Hum and Lo are staying at — it is a disguised Quilty who, as German psychiatrist Dr. Zemf, demands Hum let Lo take part in a school play. Humbert, in fact, doesn't have a clue about Quilty, even when the writer discharges her from a hospital where she is recovering from a bad flu, completely leaving Hum in the dark. It is only when Lo writes Hum years later, asking "dad" for money and living as Dolly Schiller, a pregnant housewife, that Lo tells Hum the ugly truth: Claire Quilty was the only guy that ever mattered. There are several remarkable scenes here. Many of the Ramsdale scenes with Charlotte bristle with the kind of knife-edged black humor one finds in the novel (where they are, perhaps, more articulate), and the film's opening scene — Humbert finding and killing Quilty (the rest of the film is in flashback) — plays nearly word for word from the novel. There are a few scenes that miss, and Humbert's sleepless night in a hotel next to a naked, sleeping Lo in the novel becomes a silly fight with a folding bed. The film's climatic encounter between Humbert and Dolly Schiller doesn't work at all, merely for the fact that Sue Lyon just didn't make it believable. She is a great Lolita but simply too young and inexperienced as an actress to pull off the scene. And one can argue that the film makes Humbert's obsession with Lolita seem like nothing more than a middle-aged perversion, while the novel explained Humbert's life-long desire to re-live a childhood sexual encounter. But, honestly, in the context of Kubrick's film, Hum's middle aged perversion actually works to the film's benefit: he's simply a flummoxed intellectual here, dumbstruck and ultimately tragically blinded by sheer lust. Apart from the obvious pleasures of seeing Mason, Sellers and Winters in peak form, there is the gorgeous black and white photography by Oswald Morris and a great score by Nelson Riddle, whose "Lolita Ya-Ya" was hip enough for the Ventures to cover way back when. Nabokov purists may grouse ad infinitum (I direct them to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of Nabokov's Despair), but this is a great film that gets better with time - one of Kubrick's very best works. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your film or video? Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.
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