What occurs when a magnet for controversy depolarizes with age? Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita nonetheless attracts loads of evaluation, admiration and disgust, within the classroom and past. However regardless of the pedigree of the beloved film-maker Stanley Kubrick, the primary movie adaptation of Lolita – launched 60 years in the past this week – is arguably extra of a curio lately, pressured to excise or elide a few of the e book’s thorniest components for the sake of being allowed to exist in any respect.
The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita film being made near-contemporaneously with the novel was labored into the advert marketing campaign, a few of its posters adorned with a cheeky query: “How did they ever make a film of Lolita?” Good query, comparatively easy reply: by ageing up the title character barely, and counting on innuendos and implications to maintain essentially the most specific materials offscreen. Within the movie, middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) turns into sexually obsessive about 14-year-old Lolita (Sue Lyons), the daughter of his landlady-turned-wife Charlotte (Shelley Winters). If this sounds singularly disagreeable to observe, Lolita is even youthful within the e book, whereas much less attentive trendy viewers much less versed in Hollywood innuendo might conceivably come away from the film unsure if Humbert ever acts on his predatory urges. (Not the entire alterations are confined to production-code-era morality. A 1997 movie model was extra sexually specific, whereas nonetheless making an attempt to take care of some safeguards: Lolita remained 14, fairly than 12, and was performed by Dominique Swain, who was older than Lyons on the time of filming. That film additionally supposedly value $60m, an impossible-seeming determine for this materials in 2022.)
To be clear, Humbert does prey on his stepdaughter, offscreen, and Lolita refers to their trysts with a blithe tartness. But rewatching Lolitatoday, in a world that's step by step turning into extra attuned to sexual abuse and phrases like “grooming” (an grownup gaining a youthful particular person’s belief with a purpose to ultimately draw them into an abusive or in any other case inappropriate sexual relationship), it’s not the film’s degree of permissiveness that jumps out. Although it retains a lot of Lolita’s ache offscreen, it doesn’t precisely use her barely raised age to excuse Humbert’s fixation, nor does it really feel like a powder-keg provocation forward of its time. Kubrick prefers to flirt with dangerous style by recasting sections of the film as a darkish comedy – appearing as some extent of distinction that make its sadder moments all of the starker.
Early on, Humbert’s repeatedly annoyed pursuit of Lolita performs nearly like a deadpan sitcom farce: Humbert’s quasi-fatherly (and really jealous) suggestion that Lolita not be allowed to consort with boys outcomes, a lot to his horror, in her being despatched away to an all-girl summer time camp (“Camp Climax for women – please drive rigorously,” winks an indication). Eager to nonetheless be there when Lolita returns, he agrees to marry Charlotte, just for her to counsel prolonging their marital bliss by sending Lolita off to boarding college. Winters performs this materials broadly and memorably, with Kubrick inviting the viewers to be vexed together with Humbert by this uncouth caricature of a girl.
However when Charlotte discovers Humbert’s journal, the rawnesss that emerges from Winters is startling. The pure loneliness of the character echoes throughout the display, chopping by the film’s sly intimations. This appears key to the film’s effectiveness inside its confines. Whether or not pressured or impressed by the challenges of adaptation, Kubrick opens one thing up on movie: whereas the novel unfolds from Humbert’s unreliable viewpoint, the film reveals us each much less – much less of Humbert, by necessity – and extra, within the vividness of Charlotte’s desperation, elation and despair. Even the deliberately opaque Lolita has the same second: Kubrick cuts from a scene the place she sips soda pop and devours potato chips with amusing ravenousness to the sound of her howling in agony as she processes her mom’s premature loss of life.
Not the entire makes an attempt to share the highlight are so concise. Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), a mirror of Humbert who pursues Lolita throughout quite a lot of weird machinations, together with disguises suiting the chameleonic comedian abilities of the actor who performs him, has more room right here. The amusing outlandishness wears skinny as Kubrick repeatedly lets Sellers run free; his one-on-one scenes with Mason appear to stretch on ceaselessly, a filibuster of shtick.
Nonetheless, there is a bonus to those scenes, and the way they contribute to the jarring, uncommon tone of Lolita. It appears practically inconceivable for the film to face totally by itself; the novel has an excessive amount of cultural significance and finding out the book-movie variations can flip right into a rabbit gap even with out truly studying Nabokov. So it’s all of the extra spectacular that it additionally manages to really feel, on reflection, like Kubrick constructing an exit ramp out of his early Hollywood work. The very first scene has Quilty introducing himself with a Spartacus joke, an impertinent reference to Kubrick’s earlier movie; Sellers attending to play Quilty in his most well-liked number of disguises additionally foreshadows his follow-up collaboration with Kubrick, the one-of-a-kind doomsday comedy Dr Strangelove that adopted simply two years later.
Is Quilty, who mocks Humbert’s self-presentation of propriety whereas sharing (and later appearing upon) his abusive impulses, the determine in Lolita who winds up most fascinating Kubrick? That will surely match the picture of a controlling male director making a film in regards to the sexual abuse of a lady whose final viewpoint stays indirect. It’s additionally in step with the film’s willingness to bind tragic abuse and darkish comedy collectively. However perhaps the performances of Sellers, Winters and Lyon additionally serve to guard the film in opposition to the inevitable censorship, regrowing new thorns on this impossible-seeming materials. Sixty years on, Lolita: The Film stays a curio – one with the unusual, unnerving energy of a half-repressed reminiscence.
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