Word: lolitas
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...Lolita...
...picture," Broadway has a long and loving memory. Perhaps because stage failures are not embalmed on film, backers and producers and actors and directors tend to forget unpleasant history. This time they forgot that Lerner's last two tries for the theater, a stage version of Gigi and Lolita, My Love, were flops and that two previous shows, Coco and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, were coolly received by the critics. In fact, Lerner's last clear-cut hit was Camelot in 1960, while Bernstein had not written for Broadway since West Side Story...
...though, it is similar--like every Kubrick film since Lolita, Barry Lyndon is adapted from a book. Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, like his far greater creation, Becky Sharp, is a social climber at heart. Thackeray's attitude to figures of this kind is a mixture of sympathy and a consciousness that they must not be allowed to succeed. Thus Barry ends his life as a poor invalid in Ireland and Becky as a tattered card sharp making the rounds of tawdry German courts. Yet some sympathy always remains for these characters, either because--like Becky--they are so much brighter...
...emotional response, and he certainly doesn't give us enough accurate material to go on. The characters are like the puppets Thackeray describes in the prologue of Vanity Fair--neither rounded human figures nor Dickensian caricatures. Kubrick rarely creates human characters--Dr. Strangelove was a gallery of types, Lolita a collection of perverts, 2001 veered from the banal to the superhuman, and A Clockwork Orange was about the warping of humanity...
With the exception of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, this is the first time that Kubrick has moved beyond pop archetypes and taken the measure of a man with a novelist's sense of psychological nuance. Still, it is not as a study in character that Barry Lyndon will be ultimately remembered. The structure of the work is truly novel. In addition, Kubrick has assembled perhaps the most ravishing set of images ever printed on a single strip of celluloid. These virtues are related: the structure would not work without Kubrick's sustaining mastery of the camera, lighting...