Word: humbert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...novel Lolita traced the carnal pursuit of a twelve-year-old American nymphet by a middle-aged European émigré named Humbert Humbert, and the rather Electrafying relationship that developed between the stepfather-seducer and the child-mistress. The book's last scene is the movie's first. Moving numbly through a Hollywood-style mansion full of bottles, harps, glasses, statues, bot tles, grand pianos, glasses, sheeted furniture and an incongruous pingpong table...
...Humbert (James Mason) plunks bullet after bullet into the drunk and glibly pro testing Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), a TV playwright who stole Humbert's Lolita from him but did not keep her. In the book, the shooting of Quilty was eerily comic; in the film, despite the inspired foolery of Sellers, the scene is awkwardly and ominously facetious...
With the end given away, the movie then goes on in a 2½hr. flashback to tell the full story. Humbert, a lecturer on French literature, rents a room in the home of Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), a New England culture voluptuary...
Charlotte has a seven-year widow's itch for a mate. Humbert obliges, but only because he has a very special itch for her gum-chewing, Coke-swigging daughter Lolita (Sue Lyon). The shock effect of this is dimmed, since the film ducks the duty of specifying Lolita's age and gives the part to a girl of 14 who looks a round 17. Making her movie debut, Teen-Ager Lyon is simply overmatched by the demands of her part. She acts knowing rather than sexy, and she lacks what Nabokov himself has defined as the "demoniac" essence...
...Miller's worst play, A View From the Bridge; who knows why (but don't get us wrong; we love Hollywood). At the Fenway (KE 6-0610),we would revert to our former mode of discourse to note that The Markis as dull as a film about a leching Humbert-type can be. Finally, at the Sack (CO 7-9030), Rosalind Russell and Alec Guinness reek of Absence de Gout (perfume and toilet water respectively) in A Majority...