Lolita (1962)
USA 152, B&W
Director: Stanley Kubrick; Cast: James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers
Set in the 1950s, Lolita is the story of a literature professor who becomes infatuated with the flirtations teenage daughter of Charlotte, his lonesome and sexually-frustrated widowed landlady. As Charlotte, Shelley Winters is wonderful in her role as the overbearing and jealous mother who pursues her daughter’s admirer with tragic results. As a comedic-drama Lolita is a heavily censored version of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov of the same name. Despite the censorship of the period, the film remains controversial for the complex nature of Lolita’s relationship with her increasingly jealous step father who attempts to control every aspect of her life (Klaus Ming May 2010).
This is a great, great film. And it’s a great, great book. Have you seen the remake? It’s a much better interpretation than the original even though Nabakov wrote the screenplay for the original.
My undestanding is that very little of Nabokov’s screenplay made it to the screen. The description on wikipedia agrees with other things I’ve read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Adaptations
I didn’t care for the remake, which may have been much closer to the words of the book, but it missed the mood completely (at least as much as I watched, I’m not sure I made it to the end.
By the way, I just posted on my blog about how Ulysses ended up as the “greatest novel of the 20th century” because the Modern Library didn’t dare give the prize to Lolita:
http://u-town.com/collins/?p=2606