Lolita (1962) Review
7/10
A European professor takes a room in a New Hampshire house, marries the widow who owns it so he can stay near her daughter, and narrates all of it as though it were a love story he’s trapped inside. The 7 is for what Kubrick and James Mason achieve within an impossible constraint. The film can’t depict the crime, can’t name it, and can’t show its subject as she’s written. So it becomes a film about a man constructing an account of himself. That’s the one part of the novel that survives translation.
The three points come off for the evasions and for Peter Sellers. The film’s central subject is unspeakable in 1962, so a great deal of it is arch comedy about a professor and a landlady, and Sellers is given room to improvise at a length the picture can’t afford.
I admire this film more than I enjoy it, and I think that’s the right response to it. Mason gives me the creeps in exactly the way the novel does, and Kubrick keeps the camera cold enough that Humbert’s charm never quite wins. What drags it down for me is the arch comedy filling the space the Code left and the Sellers indulgence Kubrick allowed himself.
What the Code Removed
The Production Code and the Legion of Decency prohibited any explicit depiction of sexual activity, and the subject here’s the abuse of a child. Nabokov’s Dolores is twelve. The film raises her age, casts Sue Lyon at fourteen, and keeps the script deliberately vague about the number.
Everything after that follows from the first compromise. The abuse happens between scenes. The film cuts away, fades, implies, and lets the audience do arithmetic it would prefer not to do. Kubrick’s own later verdict was that he probably wouldn’t have attempted it had he known how severe the restrictions would be.
The cost is real, and it’s one of the things holding this at a 7 for me. The novel is a monster’s confession written in beautiful prose so that the reader catches himself being charmed and has to notice what he’s being charmed into. The film can’t stage the horror, so the charm works with much less to work against.
Nabokov wrote a screenplay and received sole credit for it, and very little of what he wrote reached the screen. Kubrick and James Harris rewrote extensively. The credit is one of the odder in film history: an author credited for an adaptation of his own novel that’s largely not his.
Kubrick also shot it in England, in black and white, partly for money and partly for distance. An American story photographed in British studios has a slight wrongness to it, and the film is better for the mismatch, since Humbert is a European moving through an America he holds in contempt.
When a constraint removes your subject, you have two options. Abandon the project, or find the part of the subject the constraint doesn’t touch and make that the whole work.
Kubrick took the second. He couldn’t show the crime so he made the film about the perpetrator’s account of it. That’s legal to depict and is the more interesting half of the novel anyway. The general form: identify what your restriction forbids. Usually it forbids depiction and not implication, and implication has its own power. What it costs you is the reader’s certainty. That’s sometimes exactly what you needed.
Mason Plays a Man Editing Himself
Noel Coward, David Niven and Rex Harrison were all approached and declined, unwilling to be seen playing the part. Mason was Kubrick’s first choice and took it. His cinematographer Oswald Morris later said Kubrick gave Mason almost no direction, since he had it worked out, while directing Sue Lyon very carefully. That division shows on screen.
What Mason does is play a man aware of exactly what he is and committed to never naming it. Humbert is courteous, cultured, wounded, and every sentence he speaks is a small piece of construction work on a version of himself he can live inside.
The performance is at its best in the small collapses. The bathtub, the hospital, the final visit to a pregnant nineteen-year-old in a poor house, where the whole edifice comes apart and what’s underneath is a middle-aged man who ruined a child’s life and would do it again.
Shelley Winters does something almost as difficult with Charlotte. She’s written as a joke, a lonely woman with pretensions, and Winters plays the loneliness straight underneath the comedy. Her death is treated as a punchline by the film and by Humbert, and Winters has made sure the audience feels the cost of that. Winters is the performance I’d send people to first. She takes a part written as a joke and makes me feel sorry for the woman the joke is about, and the film itself barely bothers to.
The Girl Is Not the Subject and the Film Knows It
Kubrick directs Sue Lyon away from anything that would make the character an object of desire, and that’s the correct and essential decision. Her Lolita is bored, bratty, funny and evasive. She chews gum, she’s rude to her mother, she wants a soda and a movie. The film gives her the behavior of an ordinary adolescent and lets Humbert’s narration keep insisting she’s something else.
That gap is the entire technique. The audience is watching a child and hearing a man describe a seductress, and every time those two things fail to match the film has made its argument without a word of editorial.
Where the film falls short is that it can’t show what this costs her. The novel is explicit about the damage and the film can only reach it at the very end, in the scene where she’s nineteen and worn out and tells him plainly what he was. That scene is the best thing in the picture and it arrives two hours late.
The gap between what he says and what the reader sees makes an unreliable narrator. Give the audience direct access to a fact, then have him characterize it wrongly, and no editorial voice is needed.
The requirement is that the shown material be neutral. The moment the images agree with the narrator, the technique inverts and you’ve endorsed him.
This is why Kubrick’s direction of Lyon is the most important decision in the film. Had she been staged as Humbert describes her, the picture would be repellent in a way the novel never is.
The Sellers Problem
Peter Sellers plays Clare Quilty, a role considerably expanded from the novel, and Kubrick gave him room to improvise across several disguises.
Sellers is doing something interesting in principle. Quilty is Humbert’s double, a man with the same appetite and none of the self-torment, and the absurdity is the point. Menace that arrives in a bathrobe doing a bad accent is more disturbing than menace that announces itself. In practice the material runs long. The opening confrontation, the hotel porch conversation, the German psychologist, all go past the point where they’re doing work. Kubrick found him funny and let him run, and the film loses its grip each time. I’d have cut every one of those scenes by half. Sellers is funny and I laugh, and then I resent laughing, because each bit drains the dread Mason spent the previous scene building. There’s also a tonal cost. Every Sellers scene pushes the picture toward farce, and the farce sits badly next to a story about a child being taken across state lines by a man who has murdered nothing yet but has planned it.
Kubrick would use Sellers far better two years later in Dr. Strangelove, where the whole film is pitched at farce and three roles give him somewhere to put the energy. Here he’s a very funny performer inside a picture that needed a much colder one.
What It Was and What Came After
It cost somewhere between one and a half and two million dollars and took around nine million. It was shot in England, in black and white, and rated so that nobody under sixteen could see it. That meant Sue Lyon couldn’t attend her own premiere. Contemporary critics were split, with a real number arguing Kubrick had capitulated to the censors and betrayed the novel. Bosley Crowther in the Times was among the unimpressed. Nabokov’s screenplay received the film’s only Academy Award nomination. The reputation has improved considerably, and I think the reappraisal is partly right and partly a reaction. The film is better than its 1962 reception and it’s still a version of Lolita with the subject sanded off, and both things can be held at once.
Adrian Lyne remade it in 1997 with far more freedom and made a worse film. That’s instructive. Permission to depict the material didn’t produce a better reading of it, because the novel’s power was never located in what it showed.
More freedom doesn’t automatically produce better work. The 1997 version could show what the 1962 version couldn’t and understood the book less well, because the difficulty was interpretive and not technical.
Constraint forces interpretation. Kubrick had to decide what the novel was about before he could decide what to keep, and that decision is visible in every frame. When a restriction lifts, the temptation is to fill the space with what was previously forbidden. That’s almost never the reason the earlier work succeeded.
Should you watch Lolita?
Yes, with the novel read first and with clear eyes about what’s been removed. I rate it a 7 because Mason’s performance and Lyon’s ordinary, gum-chewing Lolita give the film a spine the censors couldn’t touch, and the Sellers detours and the comedy padding cost it the other three points. It works entirely on the distance between what Humbert tells you and what the camera shows, and I think Kubrick understood that far better than Lyne did in 1997.
