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Lolita
on DVD (1962)
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| Starring: |
James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Gary Cockrell, Diana Decker, Lois Maxwell |
| Director: |
Stanley Kubrick |
| Studio: |
WARNER HOME VIDEO |
| Run time: |
147 mins |
| Certificate: |
 |
| User collections: |
My Film Collection, My Collection at Home |
| Genres: |
Drama |
| Languages: |
English |
| Dubbed: |
French, Italian |
| Hearing-impaired: |
English, Italian |
| Subtitles: |
Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish |
| Released: |
10/09/2001
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Brief synopsis of Lolita
Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial LOLITA is a wicked satire of sexual obsession, sadomasochism, and fetishism. When mild-mannered professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) arrives in the small town of Ramsdale, New Hampshire, he is immediately set upon by his landlady, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), and her adolescent daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon). Although Humbert gets involved with Charlotte, it is Lolita with whom he becomes obsessed. When Charlotte sends her daughter away to summer camp (the aptly named Camp Climax), Humbert becomes consumed with jealousy. When he finally takes Lolita out of camp and heads out alone with her, he is pestered along the way by Clare Quilty (played magnificently by Peter Sellers), who threatens to expose him. But nothing can break the hold Lolita has over Humbert.
From the opening credits sequence--a close-up of a man's hand (with a wedding ring) carefully polishing a young girl's toenails--Kubrick's LOLITA burns with sexual energy that is biting, ironic, and darkly comic as it follows the debasement of an intelligent, worldly man in a series of carefully choreographed long takes that boils over with psychosexual tension. Although little physical contact is shown, Kubrick hints at it beautifully, especially in the drive-in scene in which both Charlotte and Lolita grab on to Humbert's hands. And yet given the serious nature of the subject matter, Kubrick pauses long enough to include a riotous slapstick scene of Humbert and a bellhop struggling over a cot as Lolita sleeps quietly on the bed, as well as Quilty playing Ping-Pong with a seemingly endless supply of balls. Stanley Kubrick's highly controversial masterwork is a fascinating look at pedophilia and sexual taboos that lead to obsession and murder.
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Related
Critics Reviews
Radio Times
“How did they ever make a film of Lolita?” asked the posters for this brilliant Stanley Kubrick film. Well, in Vladimir Nabokov's adaptation of his own famous novel about the professor and the 12-year-old girl, there are added layers of black comedy and only slight compromise: James Mason seems to love Sue Lyon rather than lust after her, and Lolita's age is increased to 15. As time goes by, Lolita gets better and funnier. Shelley Winters's hilarious and sad portrayal of Lolita's mother is American momism incarnate, while Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty is like a creepy chameleon. Only one quibble: for economic and censorship reasons the picture was made in England, and because of this Nabokov's nightmare vision of urban America and its seedy motels is reduced to obvious back projection and even more obvious Elstree locations. This apart, a perfect movie that gets better as time goes by.
Time Out
Less genuinely ecstatic in its portrait of paedophiliac obsession than Nabokov's novel - Kubrick is too cold and...
Read more on www.timeout.com
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