Word: lolita
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Next came Patches, which sounded like a promotion piece for double teen-age suicide; it was among the year's biggest hits. This year's first hit was Go Away, Little Girl, in which the message sounds suspiciously like a souvenir from Lolita. It is sung by Steve Lawrence, who, perhaps significantly, has reached the Humbert Humbertish...
...hyphens between split hairs might call him a serio-comic or even a calamito-comic novelist). He is the author of The Manchurian Candidate, a comic eruption that simply as comedy ranks with the best funny novels done recently in the U.S.-that is, with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Richard Bissell's 7½ Cents and Peter De Vries's Comfort Me with Apples. But Condon is something more. He is a comedian who throws his custard pies in black anger, with intent to maim. His novels resemble (more accurately, are resembled by) Heller's Catch...
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...
Sellers turns up again--really for the first time--at the hotel where Humbert takes Lolita after her mother's death. With the collision of Mr. Swine, the desk man, Sellers starts his courtship of Lolita, the source of the remaining action in the movie. The hotel is the scene of a policemen's convention; and imitating a policeman, Sellers tries to worm information about Lolita out of Humbert. As Clare Quilty, Sellers is always impersonating somebody. These impersonations are the best things in the movie...
Although the censorship law prevents bodily contact between Humbert and Lolita, Kubrick and Nabakov do not leave as little as possible to the imagination. In the hotel scene Humbert tries desparately to arrange it so that there will be no roll-away bed for him. The eventual arrival of the bed late at night is funny enough, but even more amusing is the frightened face on Humbert the next morning when Lolita whispers in his ear presumably the very idea he was afraid to utter himself...