Lolita (1962)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.
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What critics compared Lolita to
“The Last of Robin Hood” is more of a character study than a straightforward biography, which means it doesn’t have to get by peddling lurid True Hollywood Stories! (Although one eyebrow-raising factoid it does present is Flynn wanted to play Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” on the condition Beverly play Lolita.
Shedlo was the one who drove the star to meet with Stanley Kubrick about playing Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” an irony almost too good to be true.
We follow Flynn's physical and professional decline while he apparently tries to do right by Woodsey, flying her to Africa to end up cut out of a John Huston film, losing a bid to star in Kubrick's "Lolita" when he insists she be part of the deal, writing a lead role for her in "Cuban Rebel Girls" (in which she's awful) and dictating his will to her while on location.
Flynn's encounter with Stanley Kubrick (Max Casella) over Beverly playing Lolita to his Humbert Humbert in "Lolita" is also very unsatisfying.
There’s even a moment to sort-of back this up, as Flynn takes a meeting with Stanley Kubrick (Max Casella) to pitch Lolita with him in the lead and Beverly as the title temptress.
Flynn strives to build a career for his "protege," going so far as to insist that Stanley Kubrick cast her in Lolita if he wants to secure Flynn's services.
It’s as if instead of showing “Lolita” from Humbert Humbert’s p.o.v., little Dolores Haze had grown up and taken matters into her own hands.
Neither “Blackbird” nor “Una” are works about the horrors of pedophilia, any more than that was the main theme of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
Mendelsohn makes Ray plausibly remorseful, yet the suspicion remains that he’s as creepily self-serving as Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita .
The character's childhood history of violence could have felt like a silly copout, akin to the introductory scenes from Adrian Lyne's Lolita, where Humbert Humbert's pedophilic desire is blamed on a precise trauma, were it not for the fact that the paternal violence of Elle is clearly just a more methodical rendition of the misogyny of everyday life.
Its subject of forbidden love and deeply literary tone reportedly inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
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The verse and short stories of “the divine Edgar” — as Humbert Humbert calls him in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — have inspired more movies than the works of any writer but Shakespeare.
And, of course, his provocative 1997 treatment of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita took full advantage of the relaxation of censorship since Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version, in which the verbal virtuosity of Peter Sellers served as a comic diversion from the nitty-gritty of nymphet worship.
The British-born director peaked with 1987's "Fatal Attraction" but then managed to follow that major success with an undeserved hit (1993's "Indecent Proposal") and a real clunker adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel "Lolita."
When Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" was released in 1962, it drummed up curiosity with the tagline "How did they ever make a movie of 'Lolita'?"
Worth it only to be reminded that Flynn really did want to star in Stanley Kubrick's movie adaptation of "Lolita" -- but only if Aadland was cast in the title role.
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Like Vladimir Nabokov ’s Lolita — the other supreme American road novel of the ’50s — the Kerouac book was a controversial best-seller that Hollywood deemed unfilmable.
"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" was that film's famous poster tagline, but Kubrick promptly answered the question.