Lolita

1961

Humbert Humbert (James Mason), professor of French literature, rents a room in the house of widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) whose daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon), attracts him irresistibly. He weds the mother to get closer to the girl, but when Charlotte learns the truth, she kills herself. Humbert then hits the road with his protégée, who becomes his mistress. But, from ruses to lies, the adolescent fools him up to the day she disappears. Five years later, he finally hears from Lolita, married and pregnant. Humbert then discovers that another man, Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), was sharing the girl's favours at the same time. Lolita refuses to leave with the professor, who will end up killing Quilty.

The film begins and ends with the murder scene: Kubrick, as he explains, has thereby shifted the main interest of the novel – which can be summed up by the question "Will Humbert get Lolita into bed?" – by having him kill Quilty, "without explanation at the beginning, then throughout the film the audience would wonder what Quilty was up to" (1).

To adapt the reputedly inadaptable novel by Nabokov (co-script writer), Kubrick used cunning in order to avoid censorship. Since any allusion to paedophilia on the silver screen was taboo at the time, it was necessary to keep silent about the obsessions of a man for a young girl, a "nymphet". Their relationship is thus shown discreetly, and the heroine is now aged 14 rather than 12 as in the novel.

These concessions were going to fuel the principal critical attacks against Lolita when the film came out in France, on 14 November 1962 (in the United States: the previous 12 June). Reviews were predominantly negative, accusing it of "fraud" (Arts) or finding it "discreetly saucy" (Télérama) in relation to the original novel.

(1) Stanley Kubrick quoted by Gene D. Phillips, "Lolita", in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Alison Castle (ed.), (Köln, London, [etc.], Taschen, 2005), p. 332.