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"How DID THEY ever make a movie of Lolita?" the teaser ads asked in the summer of '62, when Stanley Kubrick's film of the Vladimir Nabokov novel was released. The general critical opinion was that they hadn't. They - Kubrick, his producing and writing partner James B. Harris, and Nabokov, who contributed his name and six months' work to the film's screenplay - had turned a story about a middle-age man's obsession with a 12-year-old girl into an April-July romance about a fellow who goes daffy over a wily, willowy teenager. The Blue Angel, but not all that blue. The film is remembered today mostly as a step that Kubrick took on his way to film maturity.
Nabokov's "Confession of a White Widowed Male" is the autobiography of one Humbert Humbert, bewitched at 13 by a girl his age and, when she dies, a searcher for her double in the lithe form of any girl on the cusp of puberty. This European gentleman is, in short, a pedophile, though not a child molester; he looks but does not touch. In New England for a teaching assignment, he boards with Charlotte Haze, a widow on the make, and her daughter Dolores Dolly, Lo, or Lolita in variously saucy diminutives - and sees in the girl both the reflection of his lost love and a true American original. Upon Charlotte's death, Humbert becomes Lo's lover and takes her on a crosscountry trip in which they are hounded by a mysterious demon, the playwright Clare Quilty. It all ends tragically. By relating the narrative in Humbert's lavish, not necessarily reliable voice, Nabokov created a work that was its own validation and autocritique. Neither Kubrick nor any other director could be expected to render this voice, these devious internal contradictions, faithfully on film.
One sidewise defense of Kubrick's film is that it was made in a cloistered era, when sex had to be suggested, whispered, shadowy, and, typically, sniggered at. Kubrick used all those strategies, made small advances and significant compromises, but at least he got his film released - by MGM, once Hollywood's most conservative studio. Fast-forward to the Nineties, when Adrian Lyne makes his film of Lolita. It is less explicit for its time than the Kubrick...