Word: lolita
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Actually, his later novels, notably Lolita and Pale Fire, are far more elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough-the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic...
...trends. At 27 he made a killing with The Killing, a gritty city melodrama that is still being imitated. His next project was Paths of Glory, one of the first-and best-of this generation's antiwar films. After that came two more trend setters. The first was Lolita, a hollow, literalized adaptation of the book, for which it can be said only that it wore basic black before black comedy was fashionable. The other, Dr. Strangelove, was a major American contribution to the furiously active cinema of the absurd...
...Kubrick, this dehumanization is more than the result of the undefined force exerted by the monolith and proves a direct consequence of advanced technology. Kubrick is no stranger to the subject: The Killing and Lolita both involve man's self-expression through the automobile; Spartacus's defeat comes because he is not adequately prepared to meet the advanced military technology of the Roman army; Dr. Strangelove, of course, contains a running motif of machines assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in 2001. The central portion...
...European directors, Hollywood has turned out movies that at least in retrospect, have the qualities of classics. Hitchcock's Psycho inaugurated America's cinema of cruelty, with a demonic amalgam of bloodshed and violence that was not equaled until Bonnie and Clyde. Stanley Kubrick's Lolita treated the forbidden subject of nymphet-mania with cool humor; his Dr. Strangelove demonstrated that the biliousness of black comedy was as American as the H-bomb. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was a flawed murder drama that explored the mind of a brainwashed assassin with psychological depth...
NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. Though his performance as critic is generally excellent, Field contributes mainly an engrossing review of Nabokov's entire career-in Russian and English-and finds the roots of such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire...