Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...problem of casting Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita provoked more of a stir in Hollywood than there would have been over an open call for dogs after the death of Rin Tin Tin. The late Errol Flynn once offered the services of his teen-age mistress, Beverly Aadland, along with his own for the part of Humbert Humbert, Lolita's tragicomic, middle-aged lover. Director Stanley Kubrick was swamped with letters from U.S. mothers who thought their daughters just right for the part, surveyed 800 budding teen-agers before finally announcing the winner last week. Kubrick's choice...
...other distinctions: last year she won the "Smile of the Year" contest staged by the Los Angeles dental societies, and at East Hollywood's King Junior High School she played the cello. Her principal finds her "not bizarre," but if she is to play the role as Nabokov put it in the novel, she will have to be a "mixture ... of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity...
Although he knows less about moviemaking than the average scriptwriter knows about lepidoptery (one of Nabokov's scholarly specialties), the novelist himself wrote the movie adaptation. He had at first refused, but reconsidered after dreaming one night, while traveling in Italy, that he was reading the screenplay. Says he: "Almost immediately after this illumination, Mr. Kubrick called me again, and I agreed." He is pleased with his own job: "The screenplay became poetry, which was my original purpose...
...intent on castigating his characters to really create them. Like many a transplanted American, English-born West, the son of British Author Rebecca West and the late great H. G. Wells, is drawn to the neon glare of U.S. life, but he lacks the gift of a Nabokov for rendering the garish horrors of motel culture. Author West obviously intends his critique of the horrible Hatfields to embrace the present-day U.S., but one rotting family tree scarcely makes a national forest...
Author Vladimir Nabokov was in the news in two distant lands, where his controversial novel Lolita was upsetting both decent and indecent folks. In New Zealand a Supreme Court judge upheld a customs ban on the book. Ruled Sir Douglas Hutchison: "With the best consideration I can give it, I think Lolita is aphrodisiac.'' A sort of proof of his contention came in Israel, where one Joseph Wahrhaftig was nabbed for behavior tending to corrupt the morals of a minor girl. Wahrhaftig recently translated Lolita into Hebrew...