Word: humbert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...movie's opening scenes establish the unreal tone which Director Kubrick adeptly maintains for the remaining two hours. While the titles are flashed on the screen, Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is shown behind them giving a manicure treatment to Lolita (Sue Lyon). The movie proper opens with the scene that ends the book. Gun in pocket, James Mason stalks into Clare Quilty's (Peter Sellers) mansion, and commits an amusing if horrifying murder. Sellers is superb as he tries to talk the insane Humbert out of killing him--an unshaven, hungover ping-pong player...
Until Sellers reenters the narrative, however, the humor lags. Mason is disgustingly lecherous enough and Sue Lyon, as a blond-haired, blue-eyed, bud-breasted adolescent, succeeds in making sensitive, intelligent Humbert become just a dirty old man. Shelley Winters, however, as Lolita's mother and Humbert's aggressive, nymphomaniacal, and pscudointellectual suitor, over-acts too much; in trying so hard to make poor Mrs. Haze an interesting character, she becomes a bit tedious and tiresome...
...between this film and the novel is accidental and inconsequential. The partners in this esthetic crime include Author-Scripter Nabokov, Director Stanley Kubrick and Co-Leads James Mason and Sue Lyon. Peter Sellers saves some scenes, and might have saved the movie if only he had been cast as Humbert...
...film and the novel is accidental and inconsequential. The partners in this esthetic crime include Author-Scripter Nabokov, Director Stanley Kubrick, and Co-Leads James Mason and Sue Lyon. The genius of Peter Sellers saves some scenes, and might have saved the movie if he had been cast as Humbert Humbert...
James Mason is equally misconceived as Humbert. All through the movie, he acts like an Englishman who has been caught cheating at cards in his club. He shows none of the Old World graces and cultural refinement that made the book's Humbert seem more of a sexual gourmet than a sexual monster. In the book, it was Humbert who appeared romantically naive when Lolita quite casually and ironically seduced him. As Nabokov created her, Lolita was as completely a symbol of innate depravity as Melville's Billy Budd was a symbol of innate innocence...