Wednesday Minute
No. 164 | September 22, 2010

On a First-Name Basis

Our theme this week
Film titles that are first names of women

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Laura (1944)
Tuesday         —   Gilda (1946)

Lolita (1962)

Lolita is a woman’s name, though in the movie Lolita is hardly a woman.  She’s fourteen years old (in the book, just twelve), and controversially, the object of affection for middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert.  The original source, of course, is the book by Vladimir Nabokov.  Lolita has been ranked among the great novels of the twentieth century by groups ranging from the Modern Library to Time magazine.  It’s a classic of literature, and also a popular favorite.

Two film adaptations have been made, Stanley Kubrick’s in 1962, and Adrian Lyne’s in 1997.  Neither is completely successful in bringing Nabokov’s story to the screen, or on its own terms.  Kubrick’s added challenge was fighting the censors at a time when the Production Code was still in effect.  (If you want a peek into what it was like in 1962, see the story next to Andrew Sarris’s review in the Village Voice.  The New York Board of Regents had gone to the State Supreme Court to try to censor the film The Connection, claiming it was “obscene” for using the word shit eleven times.  You sure you want to make a movie about a pedophile?  Okay, Stanley.)  For Kubrick’s film, as you can imagine, the material was toned down.  Lyne could get away with more.  But the bigger difference between the two is that Kubrick treats the story as a darkly comic tale, and Lyne as more of a romance.  (It’s been too many years since I read the book, so better not to comment on how they compare with the Nabokov version.)

Kubrick’s film begins near the end of the story, an odd scene involving a vengeful Humbert Humbert (James Mason, in his fifties at the time) and a drunk Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers, the man of many disguises, warming up for Dr. Strangelove), with the professor finally killing his nemesis.  Then, in flashback, we get the rest of the story:  Humbert’s arrival in Ramsdale for a summer stay, finding a room to rent with the widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), falling for her daughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon, the “discovery” of the day), who is affectionately known as Lolita and beginning to enjoy the attractions of men. 

Winters is wonderful, but she is doomed (you knew that already if you’d seen her as Alice Tripp or Willa Harper).  Once the mother is out of the picture, Humbert has his way with Lolita.  They go on a road trip, publicly as father and daughter, privately as lovers, then arrive at Beardsley College, where Humbert had taken a teaching position.  Eventually their relationship raises suspicions.  Humbert flees with Lolita, but before long she leaves him.  Years pass.  When he hears from her again, she is married, pregnant, and in need of money.  She tells him what had happened:  she had run off with Quilty, the playwright from Ramsdale, prompting Humbert to go settle the score.

I can only speak for myself, but I’d say the appeal of the Lolita story is no longer what it used to be.  Perhaps the times have changed, or perhaps I’m just older and see things differently.  Becoming a parent can do that to you.  It’s not that I have a problem with unsavory characters; they’re a basic ingredient for drama, and even child molesters have their place.  I don’t have a problem with their sympathetic portrayal, either; that’s welcome if done right .  But how the characters are treated matters, and there’s something about Lolita that seems a little off.  The characters care for each other while exploiting each other, and that seems to be the filmmakers’ approach to the audience.  We get a very well-done film, mixing everything from slapstick comedy to tender love story, but in the end it doesn’t all add up.

One other note, the film seems to have a blind spot in how the sexes are handled.  Both writer and director, Nabokov and Kubrick, are men, and that may account for why a certain perspective, a certain empathy, is missing.  Maybe this wouldn’t have been a problem in the hands of other men, but if a woman had told the story, no doubt we’d have a different movie.

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Lolita (1962)
Stanley Kubrick, director
Vladimir Nabokov (novel, screenplay), writer
Oswald Morris, director of photography
Trailer

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Lolita (1962)
James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon

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Quote of note
“What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet, a veteran nymphet perhaps, this mixture in my Lolita of tender, dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity.  I know it is madness to keep this journal, but it gives me a strange thrill to do so.  And only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script.”
—Humbert Humbert (James Mason), Lolita (1962)

…58…59…60.