1962/b&w/152 min. | Scr: Vladimir Nabokov, Stanley Kubrick; dir: Stanley Kubrick; w/ James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers.

With the clout of a roadshow picture under his belt, Kubrick turned to a far riskier project for his follow-up to Spartacus: he hired Vladimir Nabokov’s to pen the screenplay adaptation of his controversial novel. But after Nabokov turned in a tome more than four hundred pages long, Kubrick and his producer James B. Harris radically edited it to suit a major motion picture, honing its humor in the process. James Mason stars as Humbert Humbert, who hides his twisted desires behind the façade of a suave European academic, made all the more palpable by Mason’s velvety baritone and pomaded elegance. Humbert insinuates himself into the life of fourteen-year-old Lolita (Sue Lyon, whose only prior credit of note was as “Miss Smile” for the Los Angeles County Dental Association). First, he’s a lodger in her home, though subsequently he becomes her stepfather, after marrying her lovesick mother (Shelley Winters). It’s not long before Humbert and his self-centered nymphet embark on a cross-country car trip closely shadowed by the ominous Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). A visually rich adaptation of a novel that many felt could not be filmed, Kubrick’s Lolita is rendered with the sheen and polish of classic Hollywood. Lolita marks a major turning point for Kubrick: due to the book’s incendiary content, financing for the film had to be secured abroad through a British production company, meaning that the film was predominately shot in England. Kubrick subsequently settled there for the rest of his career.

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