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Lolita
Kubrick's controversial and deeply ironic black comedy stars James Mason as a middle aged professor obsessed with a precociously sexual minor. Adapted by Nabokov from his own novel
In filming a book derided at the time as paedophiliac pornography, Kubrick put both his artistic and commercial reputation on the line, but the result is a sophisticated and moving tragi-comedy riddled with queasy wit. Urbane intellectual Humbert Humbert (James Mason) arrives in New Hampshire and marries his highly-strung landlady Charlotte (Shelley Winters) in order to spend more time with her fifteen-year old daughter Lolita (Sue Lyon). When Charlotte dies, Humbert's relationship with Lolita takes on a disturbingly adult dimension. Lurking in the background, though, is the strange and oddly ubiquitous playwright Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), the subject of Lolita's own unhealthy obsession. Astonishingly polished performances and Kubrick's typically meticulous attention to detail lend the movie an artfully mocking air. Humbert is cruel, repressed and deeply delusional, but in his devotion to Lolita, Mason locates a deep-seated tenderness. Sue Lyon makes her debut here, and although the film would prove the high point in a career trajectory aimed squarely at the ground, her portrayal of Lolita is giddyingly ambiguous. Manipulative, selfish and self-consciously sexy, but also needy and naïve, the inappropriateness of Humbert's feelings for her doesn't lessen their strength. The film also mines a deep seam of dark, arch comedy. As Quilty, Sellers appears in a variety of guises, and his inspired characterisations - drunken writer, rambling cop, German shrink - match anything in Dr. Strangelove. Nabokov's script gets away with some extraordinary innuendos. "Whenever you touch me," Charlotte tells Humbert "I go limp as a noodle." "Yes," he says, "I'm familiar with that feeling." Kubrick would later return to the theme of sexual obsession in Eyes Wide Shut but Lolita, with its acute mix of pathos and comedy, and Mason's mellifluous delivery of Nabokov's sparkling lines, remains the definitive depiction of tragic transgression. |
