Lolita

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: James Mason, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers, Shelley Winters
Runtime: 153’
Year of Production: 1962

Dark slapstick or the boldest literary adaptation of the 60s? James Mason dares to impersonate Humbert Humbert, the infamous middle-aged intellectual who we first met in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov's forbidden masterpiece, adapted by the Russian-born author himself to a screenplay which, despite its scandalous content, gained an Oscar nomination - only his cinematic Lolita, Sue Lyon, became necessarily three years older, in order to escape the claws of censorship.

Ever the grand stylist, Stanley Kubrick abstains from any kind of cheap sensationalism allowing the delinquent chase that hides at the heart of the film to speak on its own, and unfolding the repressed passions and destructive erotic obsession of his hero. Only in the end do we realize that the winner is not James Mason / Humbert Humbert, who grabs his beloved one and vanishes into the anonymous american avenues, but Peter Sellers / Claire Quilty who pursues him, destroys his life and then forgets all about him, as if he never existed. Sellers explicitly haunts every minute of the film where he appears in a revelatory role, competed only by Shelley Winters and her broken hearted heroine, who discovers that the man of her dreams only married her for her daughter. Thanasis Patsavos

60th anniversary screening of the film