Lolita (1962) Review

Kubrick later said that had he understood how severe the censorship would be, he would not have attempted this at all, and the finished film is the record of that fight. The girl is aged into adolescence and cast accordingly, the abuse is displaced into innuendo and reaction shots, and what remains is a comedy of manners about a European academic humiliated by American suburbia. On those reduced terms it often works.

James Mason gives one of the great performances of the decade, all fastidious self pity, and Shelley Winters is fearless as a lonely widow the film treats with more cruelty than she deserves. Sue Lyon is asked to hold an impossible role and mostly manages a knowing blankness. The imbalance is Peter Sellers, whose Quilty improvises through half a dozen accents and disguises and takes over any scene he enters, which turns a novel about one man's self justification into a duel between comedians. It is a fine film and a defanged one, and Kubrick knew it.