How Did They Ever Make A Movie of Lolita?

Lolita

Starring James Mason, Peter Sellers, Sue Lyon, Shelley Winters
Written by Vladimir Nabokov and Stanley Kubrick
Photographed by Oswald Morris and Gil Taylor (title sequence)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

The headline was inescapable; “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Thanks to the persistence of the Hollywood hype machine, the paying public couldn’t wait to find out. It was the summer of ’62 and Stanley Kubrick’s new film dominated the zeitgeist: dissected by the press, teased on talk shows, and glorified by billboards flaunting the quintessential pin-up girl; a lollipop blonde with a heart-shaped mouth and sunglasses to match.

That candy-colored dream was the work of Bert Stern, America’s premiere glamour photographer—equally sophisticated and salacious, Stern’s interpretation of America’s latest “It Girl” made Lolita the talk of the town. MGM’s campaign could have been inspired by Kubrick’s own predicament, when he won the rights to Vladimir Nabokov’s best-selling novel, the director must have felt like the dog that caught the car: “How do I make a movie of Lolita?”

Lolita is the story of Humbert Humbert, an aging academic who weds a lonely widow so he might possess her 12-year-old daughter. A regal profile and expert command of the romance languages are just a part of the professor’s sly charm but it’s the kind of allure that withers in the face of a police warrant. His exploits have landed him in a prison cell, a cage he will use as a courtroom to defy his accusers and defend his actions to the only jury that matters—us. Humbert would make a brilliant trial lawyer, his confessions have a lyricism rarely found in the court of appeals, or English literature for that matter: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Humbert complains he has “only words to play with” but Kubrick himself enjoyed the usual perks available to a successful young director. His most recent film was 1960’s Spartacus, a troublesome epic (Kubrick replaced the film’s original director Anthony Mann) but also a box office success. Just 32 years-old, the director’s star was sky-rocketing and he could afford to staff his new project with brilliant actors, a sublime cameraman, and a screenplay by Nabokov.

But the story of Humbert Humbert and little Dolores Haze, Aka “Lolita,” was a hornet’s nest daring to be poked. In 1955 the book rode a roller-coaster of condemnation and praise all the way up the best seller list: banned in New Zealand, Argentina, and the Cincinnati Public Library, Orville Prescott called it “pretentious… repulsive… high-brow pornography.” Dorothy Parker praised it as “A fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book.” Nabokov would refer to the hubbub as “Hurricane Lolita.”

Though church groups are inclined to sleep with pitchforks under their pillows, by the early ’60s they were distracted by other shocks to the system like The Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch. Nevertheless Kubrick had a minefield to navigate; how to tell the story of a charismatic child molester without expressing a whiff of judgment, and how to present Humbert and Lolita’s extremely illegal relationship without actually showing it.

So Kubrick put his trust in that ultimate seducer, cinema. Just as Nabokov parodied romance novels, Kubrick mocked the gushing sentiment of the Hollywood soap opera. Lolita‘s brazen title sequence would set the stage: an unseen man is painting the toenails of an unseen child in the manner of a servant deifying his mistress, delicately addressing each toe as a separate work of art. Nelson Riddle’s lush music swells with every brushstroke and we can almost taste the champagne chilling in the corner of the bedroom. It’s the perfectly unnerving mood-setter for this perversely funny and beautiful film.

On more than one occasion Humbert Humbert admires himself as “an exceptionally handsome male,” a description that would be catnip to any working actor. Laurence Olivier was mildly interested, and David Niven actually signed a contract, but it fell to James Mason to play the part. Nabokov gave his personal blessing to Shelley Winters, alternately annoying and touching as Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze (better known as “poor Charlotte”). Peter Sellers, Britain’s premiere shapeshifter, was cast as Claire Quilty, a master of disguise and dogged mischief-maker, he functions as Humbert’s evil twin, a supernaturally talented doppelgänger who has his own plans for Lolita.

Sellers was a master improviser in the style of Nichols and May and Jonathan Winters, artists capable of creating memorably peculiar characters before our eyes. With flashes of the “sick” humor ascribed to Lenny Bruce, Sellers had emerged as the new-style hipster actor of I’m Alright Jack and The Naked Truth, a beat poet of surreal comedy with a sinister edge. The novel may have been set in the late forties and fifties, but with Sellers on board, Lolita’s bobby-soxed feet are firmly planted in Kennedy’s New Frontier.

The search for the tragic young lady herself was a carrot dangled in front of hungry gossip columnists; a line of hopeful starlets and certified stars made daily appearances in Hedda Hopper’s byline (like Hayley Mills, who was ready and willing till Uncle Walt stepped in, and Tuesday Weld, who rejected it out of hand; “I don’t have to play Lolita, I was Lolita.”) A  relative unknown named Sue Lyon won out. Slouching around the Haze house with tousled bangs, unwashed corduroys and a Hula-Hoop in perpetual motion, the 16 year-old Iowa native was the mirror-image of what Humbert described as a “disgustingly conventional” teen. And that—Lyon’s utter normality—was the point.

The casting was one hurdle, the screenplay for Lolita had been another obstacle altogether. Though Nabokov was a passionate movie fan (he and Alfred Hitchcock circled each other for years hoping to collaborate), Kubrick found the writer reluctant to adapt Lolita into another medium. The director turned to Calder Willingham who wrote Paths of Glory and would add The Graduate to his resume in 1967. It was Willingham who suggested Lolita to Kubrick in the first place but Kubrick was unhappy with Willingham’s first attempts. So back again to Nabokov who by then was experiencing second thoughts and agreed to make Lolita ready for her big screen debut.

The result gave Kubrick his own second thoughts: Nabokov turned in a phone book-sized screenplay which the director, and producer James B. Harris, were compelled to trim and rewrite (Harris groused, “You couldn’t make it. You couldn’t lift it.”); Nabokov’s monolith was 400 pages, the movie is 152 minutes. While daring to fiddle with Nabokov’s scenario Kubrick also built upon the novel’s mythology with original visual tropes, like Lolita’s heart-shaped sunglasses, a disguise that promised pleasure while shielding her contempt.

One of their inventions made the hit parade: “Lolita Ya Ya,” the obnoxiously catchy theme song which heralded her every entrance (composed by Riddle, it was covered by The Ventures whose version stayed on Billboard’s Hot 100 for one whole week). Kubrick’s most audacious alteration took place right at the start, moving the finale of Nabokov’s novel to the front of the movie. The effect is dissonant even for those familiar with the book; two men, a compulsive joker and a sober judge, face off in a cluttered manor house. Who are they and why is one of them trying to assassinate the other?

A celebrated playwright, Claire Quilty enjoys the life of a golden age movie producer, a late-night world of bacchanals and starlets. It’s the morning after one of those shindigs when a solemn figure appears before him in this cavernous wreck the writer calls a living room.

Quilty is in no shape for visitors, sick with a hangover, he barely registers his intruder’s intentions until the stranger reveals a gun and a game-plan: he’ll recite a poem (a “death sentence), and then execute Quilty. The woozy playwright assumes that this madman must be joking and uses every trick—from a ping-pong match to a piano recital—to delay his demise. But the executioner’s weapon is already drawn. Quilty scrambles behind a painting, a portrait of the 18th century philanthropist Frances Cooke. The shooter fires blindly but energetically, putting several bullets through Mrs. Cooke’s face, and, presumably, into Quilty’s skull.

A cat and mouse game between two rats, the sequence is slapstick sadism, as squirrelly and unpredictable as Quilty himself. For those in the audience who might miss Sellers’s presence, never fear, he’ll soon be resurrected: in a nervy show of style, Kubrick begins the film again, reversing the clocks to four years earlier: Humbert Humbert has arrived at the doorway of a modest duplex in the resort town of Ramsdale, New Hampshire where he will meet the two women he will effectively destroy just as surely as he destroyed Quilty.

Kubrick was a gifted chess player. A member of New York’s ritzy Marshall Chess Club, he’d hustle lunch money in marathon chess matches in nearby Washington Square. Nabokov was a master, he relaxed by composing chess problems, some of which found their way into his novels. Lolita is an amusement park for puzzle-solvers, the text is chock-a-block with word games, hidden riddles, and anagrams (“Vivian Darkbloom“), but just beneath the surface is a more calculated battle brewing, a practical chess match with each character represented by their own board piece. Nabokov and Kubrick invite us to view the shifting landscape of Lolita—from Connecticut to California—as a checkerboard map of America where King Humbert reigns and Lolita is his unlucky queen.

As in most chess games, the first move belongs to a pawn: Charlotte Haze is a small town widow with too much time on her hands and an extra room to rent. Humbert is looking for lodging and this love-starved landlord is determined to give it to him: “I can offer you a comfortable home, a sunny garden, a congenial atmosphere… my cherry pies.” This woman already has the chapel reserved but her brash sales pitch would embarrass a used car salesman, let alone the shy, bookish Humbert. Immune to the charms of adult-sized women, he keeps one eye on the exit until he gets a glimpse of Charlotte’s garden. And her daughter. Lounging in her own personal Eden is Lolita, looking all of 15 in her bikini, heart-shaped sunglasses, and super-sized sun hat. If marrying Charlotte will bring Humbert closer to this radiant child, so be it.

Thus begins Humbert’s greatest performance. Some of the film’s blackest comedy derives from his struggle to disguise his sweaty impulses. Yet Charlotte is mesmerized by the monster… until she finds his diary, a blow by blow account of his desire for Lolita and his hatred for her mother, “the Haze woman, the brainless baba…” The walls collapse, the roof falls in, the police will be called. It could have been the end of Humbert. Instead, it’s the end of Charlotte—in her mad dash to escape his presence she runs in front of a car, “knocked down and dragged several feet.”

With Charlotte six feet under, Humbert is ready to celebrate his freedom; he secures Lolita in the passenger seat and sets off on a cross-country tour of motels and hotels. Though a troublesome pawn has been cast aside, he’s still on the lookout for rooks, knights and bishops, anyone who might suspect him of the foul play he’s planning to commit with Lolita. He’s more of a fugitive than a tourist and adding to his already percolating paranoia is the presence of another car—one that appears to be following them. Even when it recedes in the distance, Humbert has reason to fear—his destination, “The Enchanted Hunters Hotel,” is swarming with lawmen. A police convention is in full swing, drunken coppers roam the hallways and busy bodies haunt the food bar: Humbert cannot hide his guilt and he’s surrounded by professional snoops.

One of those snoops is quite the chatterbox: “Tell me, I couldn’t help noticing when you checked in tonight… and I noticed your face. I said to myself… there’s a guy with the most normal-looking face I ever saw. It’s great to see a normal face, ’cause I’m a normal guy.” Audiences will see what Humbert cannot; this is no normal guy but Quilty. He even has a musical theme, like Lolita, but his is the sinister but playful sound of a harpsichord—like a snake’s rattle, it’s there to warn us.

Poor Humbert, like the sap in so many ’40s noirs, he is the perfect fool, a “figure of fun” who has overestimated his own powers of perception, he sees but he doesn’t comprehend, he didn’t know he was in a chess match until his queen was captured: Lolita has vanished along with Quilty to parts unknown. But though he’s lost Lolita, Humbert finally has the audience—his jury—right where he wants them. He stands before us a man betrayed, a noble creature asking for mercy. Those who have resisted Humbert’s protestations of innocence may find themselves weakening. Thanks to Mason’s wrenching performance (equal to his work in A Star is Born), the jury just might shed a tear as they send him to the gas chamber.

As for the lost Lolita, three years will have passed till Humbert sees her again. She is now Mrs. Dolores Schiller, no longer royalty, but a chambermaid, an exhausted hausfrau in prescription glasses and a baby on the way. The near constant comedy of the film feels like three years ago too—Lolita has shed its farcical skin and transformed into a soap opera with real-world pain.

Lolita was released on June 13, 1962 with the warning, “for persons over 18 years of age.” A few weeks later it was amended to “for persons over 18 years of age unless accompanied by a member of the family.” In 1965, without a hint of scandal, Lolita was being broadcast into American living rooms.

Bosley Crowther, the Wrong-Way Corrigan of movie critics, got one thing right in his review: “How did they make a movie of Lolita? The answer to that question is… they didn’t.” Kubrick would have been the first to agree. In 1960 he was far from being the gung-ho technocrat of 2001: A Space Odyssey—but as early as Paths of Glory he was refining what would be his trademark style, particularly the headlong tracking shots that gave the audience the feeling they were being taken for a disastrous train ride. Lolita has these moments too but it’s Kubrick’s calculating manner—a resistance to easy sentimentality—that gives the movie’s cold-hearted comedy its punch while leaving room for the heartache of the film’s finale.

Kubrick and Nabokov had more in common than their Machiavellian natures—if their collaboration could be described as a competition, then it was the man with the movie camera who prevailed. Commanding an army of remarkable artists and craftsmen, he captured Nabokov’s queen and put her on a cinematic throne: ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a new title is in order: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

Here’s Larry Karaszewski on Lolita: