The director found himself in front of the best cast of his career: from rookie Sue Lyon to genius Peter Sellers
On June 13, 1962, the world premiere of “Lolita” took place in New York, the adaptation by Vladimir Nabokov who then trentaquattrenne Stanley Kubrick he chose as a follow-up after the Hollywood odyssey of making the blockbuster “Spartacus” (1960). Director and producer James B. Harris, who had previously jointly made “Armed Robbery / The Killing”, 1956, and the masterpiece “Paths of Glory / Paths of Glory”, 1957), had begun planning the film three years earlier, immediately after having acquired the rights of the controversial novel that in 1955 the Russian writer transplanted to America had struggled to get published: and they contacted Nabokov directly for the writing of the screenplay.
After his first two feature films, based on original scripts by playwright Howard Sackler (later Pulitzer Prize for “The Great White Hope”, which Martin Ritt adapted for the screen with “The Great White Hope”, 1970), Kubrick had indeed begun to draw his films (a characteristic that will then accompany him until the end of his career without exception) from literary works; and in the case of “Lolita” he immediately identified Nabokov as the only possible figure capable of handling such a delicate material with due skill.
However, the first meeting with the writer, A great film lover and in turn a screenwriter of films during his stay in Weimar Germany, he was a failure: fearful of having to compromise narrative in order not to run into the meshes of censorship or, worse, of having to mutilate or distort his work, Nabokov immediately declined the offer. Despite this, in January 1960, when he was contacted by a dissatisfied Kubrick who in the meantime had entrusted the task to Calder Willingham (who had collaborated in the drafting of his aforementioned “Horizons of Glory”), he did not have it repeated a third time. . The result of six months’ work, Nabokov’s first draft turned out to be an imposing manuscript that, when filmed in its entirety, it would take a ten hour movie. But even after the writer reduced the script to the dimensions desired by the director, “his” vision of the novel could only be transformed into that of the genius-demiurge Kubrick, despite the opening credits of the film (perhaps also to chivalrously keep faith with a clause of the contract which provided for a higher remuneration for Nabokov if at the end of the production he was shown as the sole author) no other name was credited to the screenplay.
Probably still today (or perhaps even more so todayi, seen through the neo-moralist lens of the 2000s) the pure subject of the film remains one of the most complex and difficult ever faced by Kubrick, struggling with very delicate materials for the time. Because “Lolita” is at first the tale of the morbidity of a divorced professor, Humbert Humbert (James Mason), obsessed with the desire for the minor daughter (Sue Lyon) of a widow (Shelley Winters) who decides to marry for the sole purpose of being closer to his forbidden passion; then it becomes the Time.news of the descent into abjection of the man to whom (despite the accidental death of his wife which allows him to transform himself into the ambiguous putative father of the young woman) the relationship with the problematic adolescent – naturally attracted to his peers but not only – completely escapes by hand; and then transforms into the tragedy of a gesture of reckless revenge against the slimy and transforming playwright Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), who has long been plotting in the shadows to be able to “steal it”.
Put this way, the question almost seems to boil down (so to speak) to what were the objectives of Nabokov’s prose; pushing oneself into a mental terrain that is usually removed, in order to confront unspeakable impulses (the desire for death and annulment, sexuality as a pathology, the confrontation with the subjectivity of the concept of Evil). But in the hands of Kubrick (who by Nabokov’s own admission manipulated and altered his treatment to use no more than twenty percent of it, also due to the total freedom of improvisation left to Peter Sellers on the set) the sense of “Lolita” shifts and deforms, becoming more nuanced and mocking, while the very climate of the story oscillates between the forms of drama and the grotesque in an illusion of realism that acidly becomes satire (in the case of Humbert’s character, cynically outlining the collapse self-destructive of the figure of an “intellectual”; in the protean one of Quilty – attention to the name, which rhymes and echoes dangerously “guilty” -, configuring the figure as a monstrous metaphor of the mental and moral corruption of contemporary America itself).
The “double” Humbert (split since his name in copy) clashes with a double that is equally “guilty”: there is no “normality” or “innocence” in “Lolita” other than that, however also widely relativizable, of the very young protagonist, whose alleged “registry” candor is not reflected in the evident aptitude for manipulation and lying. Kubrick, however, adopting an objective point of view and distance from the characters (a characteristic that he will also maintain in the face of the perverse behavioral forms of his later protagonists, such as the Alex from “A Clockwork Orange”, 1970, the Jack Torrance of “The Shining”, 1980 and even the inverted doubles Joker / Hartman of “Full Metal Jacket”, 1987, in an increasingly abstract and icy progression of direction of the actors) it is no coincidence that the death / punishment of Lolita.
He is not interested in issuing a “judgment”, nor does he leverage the prudery triggered by the comparison of his film with the very hated novel. And even eroticism, although “hidden” in the folds of the written page, is eliminated at its root in all its possible declinations (from the morbid one of the professor’s substantially pedophile attraction for the “girl” to the seductive and conscious one of the “girl” for the professor). Although the young, talented (and unfortunate: her career never took off) of her Lyon of hers, her lollipop and heart-shaped glasses have over time become an absolutely iconic and somewhat uncanny image.
Of a film that still today, sixty years later from its appearance (but in Italian cinemas it had to wait for December for its distribution), it stands as an emblematic and unapproachable work (let’s pretend that the 1997 remake of Adrian Lyne never existed, also because it left no trace even in the memory of the very few audience who went to see it), it is also impossible not to celebrate what probably in the complex and in the economy of the story the best cast that Kubrick has ever found in front of the camera: if the debutante Sue Lyon was a surprise first of all for Nabokov ( who participated in the casting and never had any doubts about his choice, already predestined for the mere sight of the girl in the photograph during the preselections) and both James Mason and Shelley Winters (whose misunderstandings on the set were paradoxically decisive for perfectly rendering the ambiguous relationship of the characters) are at the height of their dramatic and histrionic abilities, the genius Peter Sellers obviously stole the show from anyone (to which Kubrick, unlike any other actor I’ve ever worked with, left completely free paper both as regards the improvisation of the dialogues and for the stage movements), which obviously seems to anticipate in the very nature of the character of Quilty his legendary triplication on screen in Kubrick’s next project (with which, in an absolutely natural and logical way, he never collaborated again): “Doctor Strangelove – Or: how I learned not to worry and to love the bomb / Dr . Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ”(1964). And what is universally recognized as one of the most ingenious and subtle sequences of the film is totally his own work: the famous ping pong match prior to his death, which did not exist in the script or in the original novel and was proposed to the director a few hours after his death. his entry on the set.
June 13, 2022 (change June 13, 2022 | 11:47)
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