Lolita

THE BOOK THEY SAID COULD NEVER BE

MADE INTO A MOVIE ftiWBOKEXPLORES THE MAKING OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS

FILM OF THE 1960S IN THIS HOMAGE STARRING SASHA GREY

AS DOLORES HAZE

The ads asked, "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" The answer, The New York Times reported the day after it opened, was— they didn't. Stanley Kubricks 1962 film sidesteps most of the eroticism of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, con­tains no nudity, dis­creetly fades to black at the slightest hint of sex and uses the mature 15-year-old Sue Lyon as its 12-year-old nym-phet. Kubrick made Lolita in England, ex­cluding the novel's od-yssey across America, because he feared film­ing in the U.S. Even then, he said, "It was

almost impossible to get the film played. Even after it was fin­ished, it laid around for six months." It's hard to realize today how scandalous the novel was. Completed in 1953, the same year playboy was founded, it was shunned by publishers. After two years, Nabokov found a home for it with Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in Paris; a signed copy of that first edition now sells for $35,000. After Graham Greene praised it, Putnam's in New York took a chance and found itself with the fastest-selling new novel since Gone With the Wind. Its title added a new word to the English language.

Kubrick made the film two years before Dr. Strangelove, so he was not yet a cult hero. He commissioned a screenplay from Nabokov, but it was long enough for a six-hour film and too suggestive. Nabokov complained that only "ragged odds and ends" of his work were used. Kubrick's screenplay, written with James Harris, made major changes.

The filmmaker began by realizing that a frank treatment of a sexual liaison between a middle-aged professor and a 12-year-old girl violated the Production Code and would quite

probably repulse audiences. He focused on the novel's theme of erotic obsession and sorcery. Certain young girls, Nabokov wrote, "reveal their true nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoni­ac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets." In other words. Professor Humbert Humbert was not evil but bewitched. Tell that to the judge.

After a famous search for his Lolita, during which eager mothers paraded their daughters before him, Kubrick settled on Lyon, whom he'd seen in a squeaky-clean role on The Loretta Young Show. For his Humbert he chose James Mason, who portrays not a horny lecher but a diffident, meticulously polite gen­tleman. Shelley Winters is a life force as Lolita's mother, a widow who covets Humbert and within a few weeks mar­ries him—though not for the reasons she supposed. Peter Sellers plays the ubiqui­tous Quilty, a TV writer who also desires Lolita. Sellers does several accents in the film, persecuting Humbert while imper­sonating a cop, a German psychiatrist and a regular guy; he improvises a long scene in foreground, his back turned to Humbert, pretending to be a detective curious about the professor's underage traveling companion. These choices and Kubrick's detailed visual style make for a film that probably plays better today than in 1962, when many admirers of the novel felt betrayed.

Kubrick upends Nabokov's structure, beginning instead of ending with Hum­bert's murder of Quilty. He arrives much more quickly at Humbert's first sight of Lolita, sunbathing in the backyard of her mother's home, but the first half hour is devoted mostly to Humbert's intro­duction to a New Hampshire town he loathes. Mason is sublime in the subtle way he cannot tear his eyes from the girl. After Lolita's mother is killed by a car, Humbert schemes to get her alone overnight in a hotel, arriving at a point when audiences must have been holding their breath. How would Kubrick deal with this? He uses slapstick to defuse the scene. Mason looms yearningly over the sleeping girl, who awakens and makes it clear he is not going to share the bed. He and a bellman struggle with a spring-loaded cot. The next morning, when Lolita coyly suggests they play a "game" she learned from an older teen, Kubrick fades to black, but not routinely: He stays on the black screen a couple of beats too long, and the audience gets the message— how could a censor object to that? Then he depends on the subplot with Quilty, judging correctly that the film would lose tension after the morning.

Had he realized how severe his com­promises with the novel would have to be, Kubrick said, "I probably wouldn't have made the film. Maybe the book was simply too good to be filmed."