"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" - The film's tagline.
Lolita is a the fifth feature length film directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is an adpatation Vladimir Nabokov's controversial 1955 novel of the same name.
Summary[]
Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is a European professor who arrives at Ramsdale, New Hampshire. Before his professorship begins, he wants a way to spend his summer. Humbert rents a room from a widow named Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). Nurturing his obsession with his teenage daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon), he marries Charlotte. But Charlotte dies, and Humbert seems to have Lolita all to himself.
Plot[]
In a remote mansion, Clare Quilty, drunk and incoherent, plays Frédéric Chopin's Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1 on the piano before being shot to death by Humbert "Hum" Humbert, a middle-aged British professor of French literature.
Four years earlier, Humbert arrives in Ramsdale, New Hampshire, intending to spend the summer before his professorship begins at Beardsley College, Ohio. He searches for a room to rent, and Charlotte Haze, a cloying, sexually frustrated widow, invites him to stay at her house. He declines until seeing her 14-year-old daughter, Dolores, affectionately nicknamed "Lolita", with whom he becomes infatuated.
To be close to Lolita, Humbert accepts Charlotte's offer and becomes a lodger in the Haze household. However, Charlotte wants all of Humbert's time for herself and tells him that she will be sending Lolita to an all-girl sleepaway camp for the summer. After the Hazes depart for camp, the maid gives Humbert a letter from Charlotte, confessing her love for him and demanding he vacate at once unless he feels the same way. The letter says that if Humbert is still in the house when she returns, Charlotte will know her love is requited, and he must marry her. Though he roars with laughter while reading the sadly heartfelt yet characteristically overblown letter, Humbert marries Charlotte.
Things turn sour for the couple in the absence of the child: glum Humbert becomes more withdrawn, and Charlotte grows increasingly unfulfilled and upset. Charlotte discovers Humbert's diary entries detailing his passion for Lolita and describing Charlotte as "obnoxious" and "brainless". In an outburst, she runs outside, but is hit by a car and dies.
Humbert arrives to pick up Lolita from camp; she does not yet know her mother is dead. They stay the night in a hotel that is handling an overflow influx of police officers attending a convention. One of the guests, a pushy, abrasive stranger, insinuates himself upon Humbert and keeps steering the conversation to his "beautiful little daughter", who is asleep upstairs. The stranger implies that he too is a policeman and repeats, too often, that he thinks Humbert is "normal". Humbert escapes the man's advances, and, the next morning, Humbert and Lolita play a "game" she learned at camp, and it is implied that they have a sexual encounter. The next day, Humbert confesses to Lolita that her mother is not sick in a hospital, as he had previously told her, but dead. Grief-stricken, she stays with Humbert. The two then commence a trip cross country, traveling from hotel to motel. In public, they act as father and daughter.
In the fall, Humbert reports to his position at Beardsley College, and enrolls Lolita in high school there. Before long, people begin to wonder about the relationship between the father and his over-protected daughter. Humbert worries about her involvement with the school play and with male classmates. One night he returns home to find Dr. Zempf, a pushy, abrasive stranger, sitting in his darkened living room. Zempf, speaking with a thick German accent, claims to be the psychologist from Lolita's school and wants to discuss her knowledge of "the facts of life". He convinces Humbert to allow Lolita to participate in the school play, for which she had been selected to play the leading role.
While attending a performance of the play, Humbert learns that Lolita has been lying about how she was spending her Saturday afternoons when she claimed to be at piano practice. They get into a row and Humbert decides to leave Beardsley College and take Lolita on the road again. Lolita objects at first but then suddenly changes her mind and seems very enthusiastic. Once on the road, Humbert realizes they are being followed by a mysterious car that never drops away but never quite catches up. When Lolita becomes sick, he takes her to the hospital. However, when he returns to pick her up, she is gone. The nurse there tells him she left with another man claiming to be her uncle and Humbert, devastated, is left without a single clue as to her disappearance or whereabouts.
Some years later, Humbert receives a letter from Mrs. Richard T. Schiller, Lolita's married name. She writes that she is now married to a man named Dick and that she is pregnant and in desperate need of money. Humbert travels to their home and demands that she tell him who kidnapped her three years earlier. She tells him it was Clare Quilty, the man that was following them, who is a famous playwright and with whom her mother had a fling in Ramsdale. She states Quilty is also the one who disguised himself as Dr. Zempf, the pushy stranger who kept crossing their path. Lolita admits she was infatuated by Quilty and also carried on an affair with him at Beardsley, then left the hospital with him when he promised her a Hollywood contract. However, he then demanded she join his bohemian lifestyle, including acting in his "art" films, which she refused.
Humbert begs Lolita to leave her husband and come away with him. She declines, reminding him that she has a baby due in three months, but apologizes for cheating. Humbert gives Lolita $13,000, explaining it is her money from the sale of her mother's house, and leaves to go shoot Quilty in his mansion. Intertitles explain that Humbert died of coronary thrombosis awaiting trial for Quilty's murder.
Cast[]
- James Mason as Humbert "Hum" Humbert
- Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze-Humbert
- Sue Lyon as Dolores "Lolita" Haze
- Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty / Dr. Zempf
- Gary Cockrell as Richard "Dick" Schiller
- Jerry Stovin as John Farlow, a Ramsdale lawyer
- Diana Decker as Jean Farlow
- Lois Maxwell as Nurse Mary Lore
- Cec Linder as Dr. Keegee
- Susanne Gibbs as Mona
- Bill Greene as George Swine, the hotel night manager in Bryceton
- Shirley Douglas as Mrs. Starch, the piano teacher in Ramsdale
- Marianne Stone as Vivian Darkbloom, Quilty's companion
- Marion Mathie as Miss Lebone
- James Dyrenforth as Frederick Beale, Sr.
- Maxine Holden as Miss Fromkiss, the hospital receptionist
- John Harrison as Tom
- Colin Maitland as Charlie Sedgewick
- C. Denier Warren as Potts
Differences between film and book[]
Lolita is not always loyal to Vladimir Nabokov's novel. One of the most notable changes in the film is Kubrick's style of direction. Events that happened in the novel's ending occured in the film's beginning. This is a rarely used technique called in medias res.
Kubrick had Nabokov's consent to have the film adaptation be like this, and said that the reason for using this technique was to maintain interest in the film, as Kubrick thought that the novel started to lose interest halfway through when Humbert had seduced Lolita.
There are also other changes, but some of them have been defended, as these differences are only due to the heavy and strict censorship of the 1960s:
| In the Film | In the Novel |
| Very little sexual innuendo | More innuendo |
| Sexual relationship between Lolita and Humbert only implied | Relationship much more graphically portrayed |
| Lolita was 14 years old | Lolita was only 12 years old |
|
Lolita is actually called "Lolita" by several characters |
Lolita is only called "Lolita" by Humbert |
Kubrick later said (in a 1972 interview) about Lolita that had he known how extreme the censorship limitations would be, he probably never would have made the film at all, because he felt that he wasn't able to make the relationship between Lolita and Humbert fully accurate.
Awards[]
Lolita was nominated for three Golden Globe awards and won the first one:
- Most Promising Newcomer (Sue Lyon)
- Best Motion Picture Actor (James Mason)
- Best Motion Picture Actress (Shelley Winters)
- Best Motion Picture Director (Stanley Kubrick)
- Best Supporting Actor (Peter Sellers)
Stanley Kubrick was also nominated for two other directorial awards:
- Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures
- Venice Film Festival Award for Best Director
James Mason was nominated for another award as an actor: the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Actor.