Lolita

Shelley Winters' turn as TCM's Star of the Month continues tonight at 8:00 PM with Lolita.

Lolita is one of those movies that starts off at the end. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) shows up at the house of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). Quilty is a dissolute man, at least from the looks of his house, with a table tennis table in the main room covered with all sorts of junk, and a generally slovenly look to the whole place. But Humbert is really there to shoot Quilty!

Flash back four years. Humbert Humbert is a British professor of French literature who has gotten a job at one of those small liberal arts colleges that dot Hollywood movies, this one being somewhere in Ohio. But Humbert decides he's going to spend the summer before he has to go out to Ohio working on a book, so he shows up in the town of Ramsdale, NH, looking for a place to rent a room for the summer. The one he gets is in a house owned by Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters).

Haze is a widow with a teenaged daughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon), who has the nickname Lolita. Lolita is beginning to learn about boys, and don't you think she doesn't know the power that she has over them, what with her good looks and their hormones. She even pursues Humbert, who finds himself falling prey to her charms. But Charlotte is also in need of a man, not that she's going to be as direct about it as her daughter.

One night at a dance ostensibly for the teens, Charlotte and Humbert meet Clare Quilty, a screenwriter also in Ramsdale for the summer. Humbert keeps finding that he wants to be alone with Lolita, but this is obviously not morally acceptable, so he comes up with the next best solution, which is to start up a relationshp with Charlotte as a ruse to be able to be near Lolita. Charlotte, being in need of a man and not realizing what Humbert is up to, agrees to marry Humbert.

But then she reads Humbert's diary and learns the truth, which causes her to go nuts and run out in the rain, where she gets run down by a car and killed. Lolita is off at summer camp at the time, so she doesn't know what happened. And Humbert is too stupid to tell her the truth for several days after picking Lolita up from the summer camp!

On the way back from summer camp, they run into Quilty at a hotel, Humbert not recognizing him from that dance back in Ramsdale. But Quilty certainly recognizes Humbert and Lolita, and starts plotting a way into Lolita's life, as we see when he shows up at the Humbert house in disguise claiming to be a high school psychiatrist! He's also written a play just to get Lolita cast in it and near him. Humbert tries to get away, while Quilty keeps following.

I had two big problems with Lolita. One was with the characters. None of the four main characters was particularly likeable. Humbert lies for no good reason; Lolita is nastily manipulative; Charlotte is a shrill clingy harpy; and Peter Sellers is in post-Strangelove obnoxious mode even though this one was made a year before Dr. Strangelove. The other big problem is with the director, Stanley Kubrick, who decided that the best way to handle the material is to have it drag on for over two and a half hours. It's way too slow, I think.

Interestingly, the one thing I didn't have much of a problem with is the whole idea of a much older guy with a stepdaughter who may or may not be of legal age. That idea is handled reasonably well, in part because the Production Code hadn't been completely dismantled yet (even though the movie was made in England, Kubrick was obviously going to have to conform to the Code to get the movie shown in America). So everything is handled in a somewhat more circumspect manner than it would have been half a dozen years later.

There's also a 1990s version of Lolita, which I haven't seen, so be careful if you're looking for a DVD.