Lolita began as a best-selling novel by Vladimir Nabokov. For an era that had never heard of Jerry Springer, the book's subject matter was shocking. It was about a love affair between a twelve year old girl, and a middle-aged man.
For the film adaptation, Nabokov also wrote the screenplay. It was to be his only script, despite getting an Oscar nomination for his effort. The story saw some changes for the transition to film, with the most important having to do with Lolita's age. She was played by fifteen year-old Sue Lyon, making her film debut.
Lolita is the selfish, promiscuous daughter of Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). Charlotte rents a room to Humbert Humbert (James Mason), an English professor in town only for the summer. Love-starved, clinging Charlotte sees the well-spoken professor as her savior. Humbert despises her but pretends otherwise, to maintain his access to Lolita.
Despite his congenial front, Humbert is actually a disturbed man. His obsession for Lolita gradually betrays his ugly true self. (This is further proof that getting what you really want isn't always what's good for you.) His spiritual decline is hastened by Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), a strange, dissipated artist who torments Humbert while in various disguises.
Lolita was blessed with excellent casting. Winters is the standout. She was the perfect choice for her blustery, prattling, pathetic character. Mason is very good as the suave literature professor, a hypocrite who secretly despises everything, except for his books and Lolita. Lyon, whose film career would fizzle out with a string of bad movies and bad marriages (her third husband was imprisoned for murder), is good as well.
Peter Sellers is technically excellent, again demonstrating his proficiency at playing disparate characters within the same film. (He would do so again for director Stanley Kubrick, in his next film Dr. Strangelove.) The different characters are all Clare Quilty, but Humbert doesn't know that.
There is a problem, however, with Quilty's motivation. He wants to lavish Lolita, of course, but Humbert is his real victim. Quilty toys with Humbert like a cat does with an injured bird. Since the film is from Humbert's point of view, we feel his anxiety. But we don't understand Quilty, whose omnipresence is such that it is almost as if he is a figment of Humbert's guilty imaginations.
Lolita is a very good black comedy until Winters' character takes her exit. Quilty then becomes more sinister, while Humbert becomes more of a fussy, jealous bore. The film's 152 minutes could have used some pruning, especially from its slower second half.
The early 1960s seems to be a goldmine for wicked black comedies, the best among them Kubrick's own Dr. Strangelove. But The Manchurian Candidate, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Little Shop of Horrors and Psycho are also good to great films.
Useless trivia: the character Vivian Darkbloom (the silent, comic relief
companion of Quilty) is an anagram of author Vladimir Nabokov. (66/100)
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