I love that someone else is interested in these versions of “Lolita.” I used to teach a course on the book, the screen adaptations, and how the Lolita archetype persists in cultural representations. It was one of the most enjoyable courses I taught during my years of university teaching. I don’t agree about the remake being better than the Kubrick, though. I’m going to look for a link to something I wrote that will interest you!!
Yes, please, I'd love to see it, so please send me a link. The reason I think the second is better is that the screenplay is so much better because Schiff leaves in the inciting incident in Humbert's past. AND he lets us know what happens to both at the end. And Frank Langella is so deliciously evil as Quilty that he really deepens the story. But whichever film one likes best, it's Nabokov himself who is so extraordinary. Every single character in this book is virtually perfectly drawn in an archetypal sense, so their motivations don't come under any real question at all. I am amazed that Nabokov wrote this story, and I will always be stunned that somebody made it in the 1950s--not that the 1997 remake was any less difficult to get into any theater anywhere on or TV. ... So glad I found you. And yes, please send it right along, or post it here so we can all see it!
My main problem with the second is the way Lolita is portrayed. Not at all like a fifty’s teen—which Sue Lyon actually captured perfectly. And it’s too dreamy a movie, lacks Nabokov’s biting wit (which Kubrick perhaps overplayed!)
Ooooooh. I can definitely see your point. I would have loved to see Jeremy Irons with Sue Lyon!! ... And yeah, it is dreamy. But, sap that I am, I kinda liked that! I think also there may have been the same problem with Schiff's film that Guillermo del Toro--I wrote my dissertation on the myth and psych stuff in his Spanish-language films--had with Ivana Baquero. He wrote a 10-year-old girl character and cast Baquero, who was tiny. When she showed up on the first day of shooting, he nearly had a heart attack because she wasn't a CHILD anymore, she was preteen. GdT said he could see her growing EVERY DAY. Of course, maybe that was just hysteria (!) -- and I can certainly have compassion for that! -- but I can also see it in Swain. She looks fully like a teen, not a preteen nymphet. Lolita is supposed to be 12 when Humbert meets her, and Swain looks far older, and even Lyon does, too.
The thing is though that a 12 year old in those days (I know, cause I was a pre-teen myself when Kubrick’s movie came out) tried to look like Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee. I suppose it you were going to update it she’d be much less curvy than Sue Lyon, but that’s because the hourglass isn’t in style the way it was then, when 12-year-old girls tried to look like mini-women. In an updated Lolita, we’d want a Zendaya type.
Um, I find Jeremy Irons sexy in this film. I found James Mason about as sexy as a bag of wet potato chips. Oh, I know. He's got the PIPES, but, Lordy, he's drab. But I still think the problem with the original film is that the inciting incident is cut out, so there's no hint of how much pain Humbert is in from "the wound [that] wouldn't heal."
Lovely review, Morgaan. Thanks. I've seen the original several times, and read the book, but never the '97 version. I'm a Kubrick fan of longstanding and I suppose I didn't want my admiration tarnished, even a little. I'll fix that now.
I'm proud to have read all ten banned books! re: The Grapes of Wrath: I lived for long stretches when I was a young boy with my grandfather, who was a widower. We lived in the same house he'd built in the New Mexico Territory well before statehood, alongside the wagon trail he'd followed west from Tennessee, which became the original roadbed of Route 66. Our adobe and frame house consisted of four rooms built atop what was originally a half-dugout, characteristic of early plains dwellings. We had no running water and only got electricity when I was about five. There was a water pump in the front yard (called the door yard in them days) and another out back behind the kitchen. The toilet was a two-holer reached through the chicken yard, about 50 yards in back. There was a large rooster who patrolled the yard, just waiting to chase me to and from the outhouse. He scared the bejesus outta me. He always referred to us as a couple of old bachelors, even when I was just a kid.
We used to take long walks together through the mesquite and piñon speckled hills round about the place. The nearest house was the better part of a mile distant. There were mazes of sand hills that had been formed by dirt blowing westward from Texas and Oklahoma in the 30s, and catching around the bases of the mesquites. Grandfather would poke around in the sand hills and show me the artifacts abandoned there - a rusted-out blue enameled coffee mug, a busted fan belt, a tattered and yellowed bible in a box once. He explained to me that California bound dust bowl refugees traveling on 66 would camp the night in those little pockets of shelter provided by the very dust they were escaping and sometimes come sheepishly to the door, asking for a little milk for their babies (he always kept a few cows) or to fill a flax water bag at the pump.
When I was about 11 or 12, he handed me a bigger book than I'd ever read before. It was The Grapes of Wrath. And I can hear his voice today (I often do) saying, "Read this, Boy. It will teach you everything you ever need to know about compassion." He never called me anything but "Boy" or "The Boy," in the third person. And I was his boy, but he made me a man.
Have to re-read the book. And re-watch both movies, although I must admit I always preferred the earlier one -- it had more of an edge, I felt, and I don't like Jeremy Irons very much. But I love Peter Sellers, and I think Sue Lyons is the more convining Lolita. However, your point about Nabokov's screenplay leaving out essential parts of his book is something I missed... That's why I'll have to read it again, and then I can make up my mind 😉.
I love that someone else is interested in these versions of “Lolita.” I used to teach a course on the book, the screen adaptations, and how the Lolita archetype persists in cultural representations. It was one of the most enjoyable courses I taught during my years of university teaching. I don’t agree about the remake being better than the Kubrick, though. I’m going to look for a link to something I wrote that will interest you!!
Yes, please, I'd love to see it, so please send me a link. The reason I think the second is better is that the screenplay is so much better because Schiff leaves in the inciting incident in Humbert's past. AND he lets us know what happens to both at the end. And Frank Langella is so deliciously evil as Quilty that he really deepens the story. But whichever film one likes best, it's Nabokov himself who is so extraordinary. Every single character in this book is virtually perfectly drawn in an archetypal sense, so their motivations don't come under any real question at all. I am amazed that Nabokov wrote this story, and I will always be stunned that somebody made it in the 1950s--not that the 1997 remake was any less difficult to get into any theater anywhere on or TV. ... So glad I found you. And yes, please send it right along, or post it here so we can all see it!
I mean ... Post it on your own page so we can all see it! I'll then cross-post it here.
My main problem with the second is the way Lolita is portrayed. Not at all like a fifty’s teen—which Sue Lyon actually captured perfectly. And it’s too dreamy a movie, lacks Nabokov’s biting wit (which Kubrick perhaps overplayed!)
Ooooooh. I can definitely see your point. I would have loved to see Jeremy Irons with Sue Lyon!! ... And yeah, it is dreamy. But, sap that I am, I kinda liked that! I think also there may have been the same problem with Schiff's film that Guillermo del Toro--I wrote my dissertation on the myth and psych stuff in his Spanish-language films--had with Ivana Baquero. He wrote a 10-year-old girl character and cast Baquero, who was tiny. When she showed up on the first day of shooting, he nearly had a heart attack because she wasn't a CHILD anymore, she was preteen. GdT said he could see her growing EVERY DAY. Of course, maybe that was just hysteria (!) -- and I can certainly have compassion for that! -- but I can also see it in Swain. She looks fully like a teen, not a preteen nymphet. Lolita is supposed to be 12 when Humbert meets her, and Swain looks far older, and even Lyon does, too.
The thing is though that a 12 year old in those days (I know, cause I was a pre-teen myself when Kubrick’s movie came out) tried to look like Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee. I suppose it you were going to update it she’d be much less curvy than Sue Lyon, but that’s because the hourglass isn’t in style the way it was then, when 12-year-old girls tried to look like mini-women. In an updated Lolita, we’d want a Zendaya type.
But Humbert? Hmmmmm…..
Um, I find Jeremy Irons sexy in this film. I found James Mason about as sexy as a bag of wet potato chips. Oh, I know. He's got the PIPES, but, Lordy, he's drab. But I still think the problem with the original film is that the inciting incident is cut out, so there's no hint of how much pain Humbert is in from "the wound [that] wouldn't heal."
Lovely review, Morgaan. Thanks. I've seen the original several times, and read the book, but never the '97 version. I'm a Kubrick fan of longstanding and I suppose I didn't want my admiration tarnished, even a little. I'll fix that now.
I'm proud to have read all ten banned books! re: The Grapes of Wrath: I lived for long stretches when I was a young boy with my grandfather, who was a widower. We lived in the same house he'd built in the New Mexico Territory well before statehood, alongside the wagon trail he'd followed west from Tennessee, which became the original roadbed of Route 66. Our adobe and frame house consisted of four rooms built atop what was originally a half-dugout, characteristic of early plains dwellings. We had no running water and only got electricity when I was about five. There was a water pump in the front yard (called the door yard in them days) and another out back behind the kitchen. The toilet was a two-holer reached through the chicken yard, about 50 yards in back. There was a large rooster who patrolled the yard, just waiting to chase me to and from the outhouse. He scared the bejesus outta me. He always referred to us as a couple of old bachelors, even when I was just a kid.
We used to take long walks together through the mesquite and piñon speckled hills round about the place. The nearest house was the better part of a mile distant. There were mazes of sand hills that had been formed by dirt blowing westward from Texas and Oklahoma in the 30s, and catching around the bases of the mesquites. Grandfather would poke around in the sand hills and show me the artifacts abandoned there - a rusted-out blue enameled coffee mug, a busted fan belt, a tattered and yellowed bible in a box once. He explained to me that California bound dust bowl refugees traveling on 66 would camp the night in those little pockets of shelter provided by the very dust they were escaping and sometimes come sheepishly to the door, asking for a little milk for their babies (he always kept a few cows) or to fill a flax water bag at the pump.
When I was about 11 or 12, he handed me a bigger book than I'd ever read before. It was The Grapes of Wrath. And I can hear his voice today (I often do) saying, "Read this, Boy. It will teach you everything you ever need to know about compassion." He never called me anything but "Boy" or "The Boy," in the third person. And I was his boy, but he made me a man.
Thanks for giving me cause to remember that.
Have to re-read the book. And re-watch both movies, although I must admit I always preferred the earlier one -- it had more of an edge, I felt, and I don't like Jeremy Irons very much. But I love Peter Sellers, and I think Sue Lyons is the more convining Lolita. However, your point about Nabokov's screenplay leaving out essential parts of his book is something I missed... That's why I'll have to read it again, and then I can make up my mind 😉.