Word: humberts
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...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...
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...
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...