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I'm revisiting Kubrick's "Lolita". I had forgotten how wonderful it is, in so many ways. The performances by James Mason, Shelly Winters, and Peter Sellers are priceless, and the screenplay (by Vladimir Nabokov, adapted from his novel) is stellar. In a time when you couldn't be overly risqué in American film, Kubrick managed to make a movie about the sexual relationship between a grown man and an underage girl. And what's more, he somehow made it a comedy (albeit a dark one). It's amazing what they got away with in the dialogue. It's the same reason I love Douglas Sirk's films. How do you say it without really saying it? That's where great dialogue is born.
And Kubrick's direction is spot-on. This is truly one of his most underappreciated films, and one that gets better with every viewing.
3 comments:
Sue Lyon's Lolita bugs me. Not in the least because she appears to be 23 years old and therefore squashes some of the meat of the drama. The whole picture had sort of a slow, sixties sleeze to it, not bad by any means, totally Kubrick but not...not Nabokov.
Nabokov once said that Mr. Kubrick had produced a lovely movie with a lovely script, that, though baring his own (Nabokov's) name, had almost absolutely no similarities to the script he had submitted to Kubrick.
Sorry, Nabokov Freak.
I haven't read the book, so I can't make a judgement on that one. But Kubrick was famous for changing his source material. And believe it or not, Sue Lyon was only 14 when the film was made.
Can there be *one* non-emergent person left in Nashville? One?
~Grieved
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