Word: lolita
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lolita. Wind up the Lolita doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits nymphanticide. Director Stanley Kubrick and Novelist-turned-Scriptwriter Vladimir Nabokov shadow the plot of Nabokov's perverse and remarkable novel rather faithfully, but they have filtered out its shades of meaning. Those who know the book will hoot at this decontamination; those who do not will be mystified as to how the story ever got its lurid reputation...
...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...
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...
...Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, by Arthur Kopit. An evening of surrealistic foolery on the topic of why Mom is a witch. Goofy, oomphy Barbara Harris is the Lolita of off Broadway...