Lolita has everything it needed to be as brilliant and beautiful as the novel, except great direction. Vladimir Nabokov’s screenplay is a model of adaptation—resourceful, economical, light-bodied.
The most evocative aural and visual descriptions in Lolita are in the manner of classic Forties films noirs, with their oppressive rain-washed nightscapes and their desperate, driven men—seemingly decent people who have irreparably committed themselves to their dreams, passions, or obsessions, and are suddenly crimina
One of the more diverting aspects of Lolita, the most controversial best seller of the century, has been the considerable speculative curiosity about the private life and personality of Vladimir Nabokov, the virtually unknown university professor who now, at the age of sixty-one, finds himself world famous as the author of this nettlesome novel.
Although passed without cuts, Lolita was rated “X” by the British Board of Film Censors when released in 1962, meaning no one under 16 years of age was permitted to watch.
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