- "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" That's the infamous film's tagline, but it's the wrong question. They should have been asking why anyone would ever make a movie of Lolita. I've seen it twice now, and I still don't know the answer. It's certainly not because the film makes sense or has much of a point. Maybe it's one of those self-evident projects. Once you have James Mason and Stanley Kubrick on board, why not make a film?
- The story, as surely everyone must know by now, is that a professor named Humbert Humbert (Mason) falls in love with a teenage girl named Lolita (Sue Lyon). It's not a gradual process, either. While touring the home of Lolita's mother Charlotte (Shelley Winters), he happens upon Lolita sunbathing out in the garden, and immediately his fate is sealed. So desperate is Humbert for access to the young girl that he even marries Charlotte, whose dancing, attempts at intellectual conversation, and animal print he all obviously finds repellent. But then Charlotte reads Humbert's diary and throws herself in front of a car. What a perfect opportunity for him to spend more time with Lolita!
- Complications arise, some predictable, some not. Certainly everyone should have anticipated the rather liberal-minded Lolita's interest in boys who aren't her stepfather. Less foreseeable, and for that matter understandable, is the interference of a man named Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). For reasons that presumably have to do with competing affection for Lolita, Quilty hassles Humbert at every turn, dressing up as a school psychologist, impersonating a police officer, and even following Humbert and Lolita halfway across the country. If the prologue was any indication, we're just guessing that these sorts of activities are going to get Quilty shot by the film's end.
- So are there any profound messages behind these funny names and odd behaviors? I suppose the film is commenting on the nature of obsession when it has the sophisticated and erudite Humbert fall for a completely pedestrian girl over thirty years his junior. Further comment is provided by the fact that he seems to love her even more the worse she treats him. Still, that's pretty thin material for a two-and-a-half hour film, and Kubrick's famously impersonal style hardly helps push this character-driven jalopy along any faster. For every immensely enjoyable instance of Humbert ignoring the sexual advances of women his own age, there is a painfully quirky Quilty scene in which Peter Sellers trots out some silly voices. It doesn't make for a particularly enlightening or entertaining experience, but, to quote the eponymous Lolita herself, "I guess that's just the way things are."
- Peter Sellers quotes Spartacus and later does what is essentially the Dr. Strangelove accent.
- Based on that book (and more directly, that screenplay) by Nabokov.
- Lois Maxwell also has a small part as a nurse.
