Lolita (A.A. Productions, Anya, Transworld Pictures, Harris-Kubrick Productions, Seven Arts, MGM, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 10) I caught a film on Turner Classic Movies that I’d seen only once before, at the late, lamented Ken Cinema in Normal Heights: Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov’s alternately revered and reviled 1955 novel about romantic pedophilia. I liked the film a lot better on this go-round than I had before. Like the novel, the film tells the story of Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his infatuation with Dolores “Lolita” Haze (Sue Lyon in her film debut; she was 12 in the book but Nabokov, adapting his own work for the screen, and Kubrick made her 14). I remember reading the book decades ago and being amazed at the contrast between the sordidness of the plot situations and the dazzling prose style with which Nabokov narrated them. The book is told in the first person by Humbert himself, and the depths of his self-delusion as he describes his sordid attraction to Lolita in some of the most gorgeous prose ever written in English (like Joseph Conrad, Nabokov became a major English-language writer even though it wasn’t his native tongue) are key to the novel’s appeal. Humbert has been living in Europe and has acquired a minor reputation as a translator of French poetry into English that has earned him a position as guest lecturer at Beardsley, a women’s college in Ohio. Needing a place to stay for the summer until his term starts, Humbert settles in a quiet town in New Hampshire where he rents a room from a widow named Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). Charlotte is still pining for her late husband, who’s actually on the premises (she’s kept his ashes in a black urn she literally hugs and talks to), but she’s immediately smitten with Humbert as a potential replacement. At one point she demands he either vacate the premises or marry her, and he’s so taken with Lolita (whom he meets while she’s sunbathing on the back porch) he agrees to marry her mom. He also keeps a secret diary in his study detailing his attraction to Lolita and his utter revulsion for Charlotte. Humbert attempts to have sex with Charlotte but he’s only able to do so because there’s a photo of Lolita on her bedside table that he can look at and get turned on by. Ironically, the last time I watched Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter I noted the similarity between the characters played by Shelley Winters: in both films she marries a sinister outsider who only wants her for her kids, to kill them for their dad’s stolen money in The Night of the Hunter and to have sex with her daughter in Lolita. Also the sheer level of bitchery between James Mason and Shelley Winters in their scenes together made me wish it could have been them, not Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, in the film of Edward Albee’s caustic play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Ironically the play premiered in 1962, the same year Lolita was made.)

Ultimately the Humberts move to Ohio, where a TV writer named Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) – a character much more important in the movie than the book – is leading a drama workshop and presenting a new play he’s written for the drama students at the nearby high school where Lolita attends. Humbert is ferociously jealous of any of Lolita’s age-peer friends and also of the middle-aged couple, John and Jean Farlow (Jerry Stovin and Diana Decker), who hold forth at the local college where Humbert is teaching and announce themselves as being “broad-minded,” which in the early 1960’s was code for wife-swapping. (One of the reasons I know that is by reading Michael Leigh’s 1964 book The Velvet Underground, his journalistic account of the multi-partner sex scenes of the day. Lou Reed read the book when it came out and took the name of his rock band from it.) Midway through the movie Charlotte Haze sneaks into Humbert’s room, reads his diaries detailing his love for Lolita and hatred of her, and immediately reacts the way you’d think she would. She demands that he leave and storms out of the house – only as she’s on her way out, after he’s made the preposterous excuse that these were only notes for a novel he was writing, she gets run over by a car and killed. Meanwhile, Charlotte had shipped off Lolita to an all-woman camp called “Camp Climax,” but after Charlotte’s death Humbert drives out to the camp, signs Lolita out of it (arousing the suspicions of Charlie Sedgewick, played by Colin Maitland, the one male who lives at the camp and does odd jobs around the place), and drives with her around the country. Lolita turns out to be a spoiled brat, a bitch who arrogantly refuses to let Humbert tell her what to do as she earlier fought back against her overprotective mother. When Lolita asks Humbert for permission to be in the school play, he angrily turns her down. Then he’s visited by an alleged psychiatrist named Dr. Zempf who’s really Clare Quilty in disguise. Zempf threatens Humbert with a long-term visit from four other psychotherapists to examine Lolita’s sexuality unless he signs the permission slip allowing her to act in Quilty’s play. She’s a hit on opening night (even though what we see of her performance is terrible) and she wants to attend the cast party with a lot of age-peer men around, but Humbert angrily refuses to let her go. Humbert also learns that instead of taking piano lessons every Saturday afternoon, she’s been visiting another man. Humbert walks out on his job as a lecturer and takes Lolita across the country again, but notices another car following him across country. When Humbert’s tire goes flat and the resulting accident puts Lolita in a hospital, Humbert finds out to his shock that a man claiming to be Lolita’s uncle has already signed her out.

Three years later Lolita writes Humbert a letter asking for money, and thus Humbert is able to track down the now 17-year-old Lolita married to an empty-headed young man named Richard T. Schiller (Gary Cockrell) and pregnant by him. They’re planning to emigrate to Alaska to take advantage of his job opportunities there, and Humbert gives Lolita all the money he got from selling her mother’s old home before setting out to track down Quilty, the mystery man who had signed Lolita out of the hospital and thereby taken her away from him, whom he intends to kill. Kubrick decided to move Humbert’s murder of Quilty to the start of the film and tell the rest in flashbacks, and there are plenty of in-jokes in the movie. One occurs at the start, when Humbert invades Quilty’s home, finds it looking like the alcohol-fueled detritus of a frat party, and encounters Quilty hiding out under a furniture cover. When Humbert asks Quilty who he is, Quilty says, “I’m Spartacus, come to liberate the slaves” – the joke being that Kubrick’s immediately previous film before Lolita had been Spartacus, the 1960 film adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel produced by and starring Kirk Douglas from a screenplay by formerly blacklisted author Donald Trumbo. Kubrick had originally bought the film rights to Lolita in 1957 intending to make it as a follow-up to his anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory, but he got sidetracked by two actor-producers. First Marlon Brando hired Kubrick to direct his offbeat Western One-Eyed Jacks, only after some creative disputes Brando fired Kubrick and took over the direction himself. That left Kubrick free to take over Spartacus after Douglas fired his original director, Anthony Mann, but it also meant Kubrick wasn’t free to make Lolita until 1961. Kubrick and his producing partner, James B. Harris, made Lolita under a deal with MGM that required them to make it in Britain to take advantage of frozen funds MGM had earned in the United Kingdom but couldn’t export, though for the exteriors showing Humbert’s and Lolita’s cross-country road trips Kubrick brought his cast and crew back to the U.S. for location shooting in and around Albany, New York. (Once Lolita was finished Kubrick lived in Britain for the rest of his life. Ironically, for someone who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, which among other things was an ode to space travel and science-fiction technology, he was deathly afraid of flying and never again attended the U.S. premiere of one of his films.)

Another set of ironies concerned Kubrick’s choice of a composer: Nelson Riddle, who at the time was best known as an arranger, and specifically for his work with Frank Sinatra. In Will Friedwald’s Sinatra biography The Song Is You he wrote about how jealous Riddle was of Henry Mancini, since as a composer Mancini got royalty payments every time a song of his was recorded, while as an arranger Riddle got paid just once per chart. In his autobiography All You Need Is Ears, George Martin (whose main claim to fame was as producer for The Beatles) recalled sitting in on one of the mixing sessions while Riddle was dubbing the Lolita soundtrack to the film. Martin was astonished at how precisely Riddle was able to cue the musical “stings” to the action on screen, and Riddle explained it was because he was using a click track, something Martin had never heard of before despite having been a record producer and label head for over a decade. Though Lolita’s main theme was written by another composer, Bob Harris, Riddle did the rest of the score and also selected the source music for the film, which included at least three songs associated with Sinatra: “There’s No You,” “Learning the Blues,” and his radio theme song, “Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day).” One of the most remarkable things about Lolita was how much Kubrick and Nabokov were able to get away with given that the Motion Picture Production Code was still in effect (in fact Lolita bears Production Code Seal number 20,000). They were able to suggest the mutual sexual attraction between Humbert and Lolita, and later between Quilty and Lolita, without any physical displays of affection between James Mason (or Peter Sellers) and Sue Lyon. On at least two occasions we see James Mason painting Sue Lyon’s toenails, thereby creating the impression of a sexual relationship without showing Mason slobbering all over her. Though most of the movie is told third-person, there are at least fragments of Humbert’s first-person narration from the novel in the film, and as with the book they at once reveal and conceal the sordidness of the relationship by the sheer beauty of the prose with which Humbert expresses it. Among other things Lolita is a virtuoso explication of just how much you could get away with under the old Code (which had been liberalized in bits and pieces since its initial promulgation in 1930, but not by much) if you were a filmmaker with the right sort of imagination. Indeed, the original promotion for the film used its daring challenge to the censors as a major selling point: the ads proclaimed, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”

I used to divide Stanley Kubrick’s films between Stanley Kubrick I and Stanley Kubrick II: Kubrick I made deathless masterpieces like Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, while Kubrick II made pretentious, overblown films like Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. After last night I’m willing to move Lolita from Kubrick II to Kubrick I; whereas I didn’t connect with it the first time I watched it, I did last night and was gripped by the sheer imagination of the filmmaking and in particular how Kubrick and Nabokov were able to navigate the true dynamics of the power relationship between Humbert and Lolita. The modern stereotype of a couple with a major age difference between the parties, especially when one of the partners is underage, is that it’s always the older partner exploiting and using the younger one. At times the relationship between Humbert and Lolita looks like that; at other times Lolita is shown as a grasping little bitch who’s all too aware of her power over Humbert and exploits it mercilessly. Lolita is also fascinating in how Kubrick uses Peter Sellers, an actor he’d long admired but hadn’t worked with before. In a way it anticipates what Kubrick would do with Sellers in his next film, Dr. Strangelove, in which Kubrick cast Sellers as three different characters: U.S. President Merkin Muffley, British army officer Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove. Here, though Sellers is playing just one person, he’s taking on three distinct personae: as the TV playwright with delusions of grandeur, as an undercover cop supposedly trailing Humbert and Lolita to bust them, and as Dr. Zempf, the fake psychiatrist who confronts Humbert. Dr. Zempf didn’t exist in Nabokov’s novel, and between them Kubrick and Sellers (Sellers liked to improvise as much as possible; also, like Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Sinatra, Sellers did his best work on the first take of a scene, so Kubrick had to set up enough cameras and lights to make sure he captured Sellers at his best) used the same fake German accent with which he’d later play Dr. Strangelove.

In 1997 Adrian Lyne did a remake of Lolita with Jeremy Irons as Humbert, Melanie Griffith as Charlotte, and Dominique Swain as Lolita. Like Nabokov in the earlier film, Lyne’s screenwriter, Stephen Schiff, moved Lolita’s age from 12 to 14, but Schiff otherwise stayed a good deal closer to the original novel. Ironically, the 1962 Lolita was a solid hit while the 1997 film was a flop, probably because attitudes about cross-generational sexual relationships had hardened in the meantime and today we tend to see them exclusively through the lens of the innocent child being exploited by the older pervert, even though the reality can be a good deal more complicated than that and Kubrick and Nabokov did a great job depicting the emotional, romantic, and sexual complexities of such a relationship, including the fact that the power imbalance doesn’t always work in favor of the older partner. And one of the ironies about the Kubrick Lolita is that it was released under an age-related exemption to the Production Code, anticipating the ratings system which replaced it in 1968, with a lot of publicity at the time noting that Sue Lyon wasn’t allowed to see the movie she was in! I’ve seen only two other films featuring Sue Lyon, Evel Knievel (1971) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/02/evel-knievel-fanfare-corporation-1971.html) and a lousy science-fiction exploitation film from 1976 alternately called The Astral Factor and Invisible Strangler (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/astral-factor-invisible-strangler.html), and in both cases I noted that having started at the top, in a film of a classic novel with the original author doing the screenplay and an acknowledged master like Stanley Kubrick directing, after that the only place Sue Lyon’s career had to go was down!