note for kubrick quiz

Class:

Remimder: quiz will only cover films and readings (text, handouts) we've cover thurs far. NOT "2001" handouts from last week.


Once again, the novel "Lolita" is very very different from movie. It is structured as a mystery with the dead Humbert's memoir being read by his lawyer.

In book, we know that Humbert had committed a murder but don't know name of his victim. This changes, of course, in movie, as Humbert kills Quilty in the opening sequence. Book's closing passage is almost verbatim from movie's opening.

Other changes from page to screen:


1. First 34 pages are backstory about Humbert's youth in France, where at age 12 he meets Annabel, also 12, on the Riviera. In a very Poe-like way, he becomes fixated on Annabel, who dies shortly after their meeting: In a way, story, besides being about a lecherous dirty old man (pedophile), posits the idea of arrested sexual development. (Both book and movie are told by Humbert in the 1st Person.)

2. Lolita is younger -- 12, rather than Sue Lyon's 14 . ("Nymphets" are defined by Humbert as maidens "between the age of limits of nine and fourteen.")

3. Quilty is a marginal figure in the book, who is only glimpsed in the early passages.

4. No high school dance sequence in the book.

5. Enchanted Hunters Hotel is holding a religious retreat, not policemen's convention. Quilty puts in an appearance, but dialogue on the hotel porch is very different than in script (Sellers was encouraged to improvise "normal sort of guy" riffs.)

6. Humbert contemplates drowning, not shooting, Charlotte (Shelley Winters) in book. (Note: Winters dies from drowning in earlier movie "A Place in the Sun" so Kubrick and V. Nabokov obviously wanted to change this.)

7. There is no slapstick-y cot sequence in the book. Humbert methodically hatches a plot to drug Lolita and, once she is knocked out, climbs into bed with her. He tells reader that "it was she who seduced me." (Obviously, Production Code restrictions made it impossible to film Nabokov's hotel sequence.)

Once they begin their cross-country odyssey, Humbert describes Lolita: "A combination of naivete and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue sulks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat."