Lolita

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Summary: Very good, but not Kubrick's best
Review: Well, i think this film is very good, but i think kubrick wasted his time in making it. Kinky sex and some violence make this a film that only needs to be seen once.

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Summary: Passionate romance leads to murder and lust !
Review: Excellent Stanley Kubrick film starring James Mason, Sue Lyon, Shelly Winters and Peter Sellers. Tweleve year old Lolita (Sue Lyon) becomes sexually involved with aged proffesor (James Mason). Outstanding performance by Shelly Winters as Lolita's sex-starved mother and Peter Sellers as the bizzare Claire Quilty. Unfortunately, Sue Lyon is misplaced ; she looks too old for her role. Based on the banned French novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Nicely remade in 1998 by Adrian Lyne.

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Summary: images
Review: [e-mail] miguel ange

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Summary: Kubrick Botches Great Book--With Author's Help
Review: Among all of the other things that are wrong with this adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel, there's the fact that EVERYBODY calls Dolores Haze "Lolita." As Humbert Humbert goes to pains to explain to the reader early on, "Lolita" was his pet name for the poor creature, the emblem of his destructive passion for a lonely, rather dim 12 year-old girl. It's rather like the way that everyone in the "Peyton Place" films kept evoking the town's name, in hopes of reminding you that you're watching the Daring, Shocking Film of the Daring, Shocking Book, even if the censors have made it almost impossible for you to do anything Daring and Shocking.

There are lots of other mistakes on display here, such as Shelley Winters' shrill, sloppy performance as Dolores' mother Charlotte. In the novel, she is a credible and touching mixture of the annoying, the pathetic, and the touching. And in the hands of a director who cared more about people than visuals, Winters might have gotten the mixture right. But that would have to be someone other than Stanley Kubrick.

And then there is the matter of Peter Sellers as Claire Quilty, Humbert's loutish competitor for the hand of Miss Haze. If you're going to cast a nightclub comedian in the role, at least choose one who approximates the character that Nabokov wrote. Lenny Bruce had the mean, dirty streak the character needs and a real genius for off-the-cuff humor. Peter Sellers had mostly his skill with accents; much of his work, with The Goons on radio and television and with the Boulting Brothers on film had a flat, impersonal quality to it. The film's opening scene, which Sellers mostly winged, is amusing, but nothing devastating. And there is so much of him in the movie, to fill in the spaces where all of the material that couldn't be filmed was cut. On a more positive note, the performance comes without the burden of a cover charge, a three-drink minimum, and a bunch of heckling drunks blowing cigarette smoke up your nostrils.

Sue Lyons is too old and too smart to be playing the title character, but despite this fact, and her director's vigorous efforts to portray the character as contemptible jail-bait, she proved a deft and witty actress, and the muddled, truncated nature of her acting career is one of the real causes for sadness in American show business.

Only James Mason, playing Humbert Humbert, brings us into the world of the novel. Despite everything the film does to make literature's most famous pedophile into a solid citizen, Mason never loses the dirty gleam in his eye or the sense of heartless obssession in the character's soul. And the film's conclusion, where he encounters an impoverished, physically-ruined Dolores and falls in love with her, is as heart-wrenching, in its quiet way, as the same scene was on paper, a moment of fellow-feeling that comes too late to do any good.

The director was Stanley Kubrick, whose career was never as impressive as some have believed and which went into a serious decline from the film forward. His best films, PATHS OF GLORY and SPARTACUS, were sparked by the involvement of actor/producer Kirk Douglas, who not only gave Kubrick strong performances, but prevented him from drifting into empty visuals and air-conditioned misanthropy. Indeed, the films belong much more firmly to Douglas than Kubrick, which should not be construed as a complaint. On his own, Kubrick's pretentions to Great Art increased in direct relation to his disinterest, indeed flat-out loathing, for his fellow human beings (with extra bile reserved for the female of the species). LOLITA is only the first serious novel that Kubrick proved incapable of doing cinematic justice to. It's actually a little better that the hash he made of Anthony Burgess' A CLOCKWORK ORANGE or William Thackeray's BARRY LYNDON. The pity of it is that Kubrick's tidy cleverness was perfectly suited to slick thrillers like Michael Crichton's THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and Frederick Forsyth's THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, films that were bungled, slightly, by Robert Wise and Fred Zinnemann, directors of a more humanistic bent than Kubrick. And then there is the decision to shoot the film in England. Your sets may look authentically Yankee, you may be able to import American actors and get everybody else to fake a credible accent. But there is no way to make the gentle English countryside look like the wastes of the California desert or the hardscrabble greenery of Vermont and New Hampshire. Kubrick may have arranged his work schedule so that he could live on New York time, but that is not the same thing as living in New York. And that difference is one more thing that hurts the film.

As for Nabokov, I can only shake my head at his involvement in this project. I assume, indeed fervently hope, that he was only in it for the money (the profits from both the novel and this film version allowed him to retire in style to Switzerland). To his credit, he gutted the novel very deftly, leaving the basic shape of the creature intact, while replacing all of the blood, bone, and soul of the enterprise with sawdust. It was he who obviously came up with the gimmick of Quilty's vaudeville-turn appearances throughout the film, and the dialogue is bright enough. I suspect he knew that this film was unworthy of the book, but he also knew that it would drive more people to read the thing, and that long after the film was forgotten, the book would still be in circulation.

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Summary: Oh, the sweet obsession
Review: I recently watched the movie Happiness, which centers in on a pedophile very closely. Watching that movie from start to finish left me feeling kind of like a pedophile myself...Incredibly disturbed and shameful. Anyway, I couldn't help but notice that I was nursing similar feelings as I watched Lolita. Luckily, I realized some time into the film that there was more to this man's obsession than that-distracting albeit-aspect...And my apprehensive feelings were on a low-heat anyway thanks to the AMAZING performances throughout, not to mention some nice dialouge and surreal humor. It wasn't until Humbert was in his full blown neurosis; his total and complete desperate obsession for his "nymphet" that I realized he wasn't just some pervert. His need for Lolita was a force that he built up so profusely in his mind, that it encompased every hope, want, need and desire imaginable to him-past, present and future...A great dillusion in other words, but not a seething perversion, which was my initial assumption.

All around, Lolita was a very thought-provoking movie and in the end, touching. I felt incredible sadness for Humbert, who lost a lot and gained nothing for love...Ultimately it was a love story, as Mr. Kubrick himself explained it. Basically, this was a man going crazy out of his mind to keep the object of his affection safe and near him. I guess in that case, wife beaters, control freaks and the like are just fools for love. But whatever. In the end, Humbert honors Lolita's wishes and at the same time, faces the fact that she does not belong to him. Then he throws his life away for the sake of quietly giving her some good ol' fashinoned dignity. So I'm with Stan-it is a love story. The only reason I left a star out is because I've seen better movies, some of which, Kubrick did.

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Summary: Kubrick's Lolita is an under-rated masterpiece.
Review: Carefully watch Kubrick's Lolita before you read the book, and before you read reviews, and you will see a magnificant work. Mason excels as the reserved, continental pedophile. Lyons is the perfect nymphet. I have not read other reviews on this page. Reviewers often comment that she was too old. No, her age was perfect, half child, half adolescent. Her acting was clever and natural throughout, the one exception being her last scene. Reviewers often comment that Sellers dominates the movie with brilliant ad libs. A great performance, true, but most of his "ad libs" are in the book. Many scenes in this movie are perfect. Each is rich with subtle details that either support the main events or hint at other hidden plots, agendas, or possibilities. The only flaw in this movie is Lyon's last scene where her acting appears forced. People often complain of Kubrick's liberal book adaptations. Books are not movies. Kubrick's Lolita stands on its own, rich in subtle, perverse humor and powerful tragedy.

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Summary: Well acted
Review: The first one with James Mason was good, but I thought Adrien Lyn's version was a little better. The movie is dark though and the characters (with the exeption of Melanie Griffith) manipulative and very unlikable. I suppose this is what they are meant to portray though and they (Irons and Swain) do it well.

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Summary: Kubrick's Weakest Masterpiece
Review: Although Stanley Kubrick took meticulous care when making his movies, "Lolita" doesn't quite measure up to his later masterworks ("Dr. Strangelove," "2001," "Clockwork Orange"). I enjoyed the movie very much for its naughty charms and double entendres (Camp Climax, and so on) when I initially saw it several years ago. Unfortunately, after having seen Adrian Lyne's 1997 cinematic interpretation, and after having savored several times Vladimir Nabokov's intricate manipulations of the English language (as well as others that make cameos throughout the book), the film seems like it has much missing. For instance, gone is Humbert's proto-Freudian rationalization of his predilection for nymphets. And gone from Nabokov's screenplay are such gems as Lolita watching the film "Stan and Izzy" (starring Mark King), and the character whom Lolita calls the "Nut with the Net." (An intended Hitchcockian cameo by the author, hunting butterflies.)

Kubrick assembled quite a good cast. James Mason is superb (as usual) as Professor Humbert, infatuated with the twelve year old titular character. His iciness and sang froid work well in contrast to the poisonous bubble of lust within, although he is not nearly as malevolent as Nabokov's Humbert. Mason is Humbert the Humble in this film, while in Lyne's version Jeremy Irons comes closer to Humbert the Horrible: part-tragic, part-sardonically humorous, part-swine. Shelley Winters is perfect as vulgar bourgeois phillistine Charlotte Haze, mother of Lolita and (briefly) wife of Humbert. Unlike the book, however, Kubrick allows us to see a bit of pathos in her character (Something Humbert, in his musings, never would have allowed "The Haze Woman."). Perhaps the most maligned casting is of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty, the playwright who takes advantage of Humbert's disadvantage by luring Lolita away from him. Sellers may overindulge (under the tutelage of Kubrick, of all people), but, in the end, his resourceful Quilty comes closer to the one inhabiting Nabokov's novel than Frank Langella's jaded pervert in the newer film. Sellers mimicks the accent of an American smooth talker well, accompanied by the Ayn Rand-like "Vivian Darkbloom." Finally to Sue Lyon, who plays Lolita herself. She is attractive in an early 1960s sort of way, and certainly more willful than the one in the book. Unfortunately, she hardly resembles that Lolita. For greater accuracy (especially in appearance), look at Dominique Swain's brave and mature portrayal for the ideal celluloid counterpart to Humbert's rhapsodies.

After having seen Adrian Lyne's more faithful and overall better movie (Sorry, Stanley.), and after having read Nabokov's masterpiece, I feel that Kubrick's vision of "Lolita" does not quite fulfill its potential. To its credit, Kubrick's darkly humorous "Lolita" is still better than most of the insipid, over-extended sit-coms that make it to the cinema today (or, for that matter, many of the ones that came out when it was new). But thinking about Lyne's film, and after having seen what little we've been allowed to view of Kubrick's final opus "Eyes Wide Shut," one cannot help but imagine how he could have made a true masterpiece of "Lolita."

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Summary: I thought it was the best movie ever made!
Review: I thought that this was the best mover ever made. This stuff really happens. It had the perfect combanation of the cold hard facts and a great touch of hollywood. Jermy Irons and Dominique Swain were perfect. For being such a hush-hush topic, the public sure did like it. Go figure....

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Summary: Sellers is Sellers
Review: Another Kubrik classic contains a superb performance by James Mason. Unlike the remake made recently, this film has tecture and nuance . Sellers role is 'exactly' meant to de a diversion. The diversion is in all those absurd characters that Sellers delivers throughout the film which "diverts" your attention so the viewer cannot quite deduce the finale.