Lolita 4K 1962 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Humberto Humberto, an immigrant from Europe who had recently arrived in Ramsdale, New Hampshire, devised a cunning plan amid a whirlwind of emotions. He intends to marry Charlotte Hayes. That way, he’ll always be able to be close to his beloved—Charlotte’s charming daughter!

Review 4K Movie

First, I watched the 1997 film "Lolita". Then I read the novel. Finally, I watched the classic film adaptation of the sensational novel—"Lolita" (1962). What was happening in America in the early ’60s? The Hays Code: Kisses were limited in duration, marital infidelity was portrayed in a negative light, sarcasm or jokes directed at clergy were prohibited, and much more. How could a film about the cohabitation of an adult man and a 12-year-old girl be made under such circumstances?

Let’s start with the fact that there’s not a trace of “nymphs” in the film. Over the course of the entire two and a half hours of screen time, this enigmatic word is mentioned only once—and even then, only in passing. The actress is 15 years old, but she looks every bit of 18. There’s no boldness about her. There’s no youthful vigor (after all, in the book, Humbert was attracted specifically to skinny, boyish-looking girls). She’s just an ordinary teenager, somewhat provincial. Lolita looks her worst at the end of the film, in the role of a wife and future mother—the 15-year-old actress seems unnatural, although in the 1997 adaptation everything is much more bleak.

I was quite satisfied with all the other characters.
Shelley Winters is magnificent as Charlotte, the mother—it couldn’t have been better. A slightly ditzy, plump woman, soft as cotton candy or jelly. It’s even a shame that her role was cut short so quickly.

The villain Quilty, played by Peter Sellers, is something else. In the novel, this character is given less attention, but in the film, we’re presented with a true antihero. Although Kubrick (and Sellers himself) endowed Quilty with such charisma and charm that he seems like the only sane person there. He’s not the frail old man from the 1997 film adaptation—a pathetic lecher and impotent man. No. He’s a young, eccentric playwright, a bohemian, and an adventurer. How could Lolita not fall in love with him? She couldn’t.

Humbert Humbert turned out to be a very complex character. Or rather, he’s quite different from the original. He’s pathetic. He suffers from his obsession with the young Lolita. He picks fights with her and is jealous of her. He’s obsessed with her. He’s tormented by paranoia. All of this is in the novel. But the emphasis is different. Kubrick’s version lacks the seducer that Nabokov described. Here, we have only an aging pervert, a highly moral hypocrite, and a possessive man. You don’t empathize with him. And Quilty, by comparison, looks like nothing more than a “man of the arts.”

Humberto’s insane actions in the film seem more justified, for we are dealing with a mentally unstable person.

And Lolita’s motivations are perhaps more logical—from the very beginning, she presents herself as an unambitious small-town girl. In the novel and the 1997 film adaptation, her “settling down” (marriage, pregnancy) runs counter to the image of the “fatal nymphet.” The first—and so far only—Lolita seems to have nothing in common with her dim-witted mother. Kubrick, on the other hand, by showing the grim denouement of grim events right at the beginning, leads his characters by the hand so logically that it’s almost boring.

It’s cold. The film is very cold. Lolita freezes in the car in the middle of the desert under the scorching sun, much like a viewer getting goosebumps while watching a “spicy” road movie. There are no kisses. There aren’t even any hugs. “Don’t you know this game? Well then…” and the screen fades to black. The director turns the page, and the screen lights up again. And so it goes every five to ten minutes. There’s suspense—that is, tension. But not Hitchcockian suspense. It’s more like a silent nervousness, the knowledge that everything will end terribly, and it simply cannot end any other way.

A gun kills a man right at the beginning of the film, and fifteen minutes later we’re shown how this six-shooter killer lies there calmly on a dresser, completely unaware that in four years’ time it will fire, taking the life of a stranger who happens to cross its path. What’s the point of killing Quilty? Yes, he took Lolita away, stole her from Humbert. But isn’t it obvious to the protagonist that Lolita would have left him anyway, with or without Quilty? Anger, resentment, selfish and futile revenge (and is there any other kind of revenge?), jealousy—Humbert certainly came to a bad end.

A prude pedophile and a bohemian adventurer—these are the main characters of Kubrick’s “Lolita”. The girl herself (or rather, “young woman”) was merely “passing by” these two ambiguous characters. There is no infernal quality in this “Lolita”, not even a hint of mystery. Kubrick isn’t interested in young girls.

Far more interesting to him is the old-fashioned European pervert Humbert, ready to do anything to get what he “deserves”—or at least moral compensation.
Or Quitley—a rebellious, infantile hippie of the ’60s, with his free love and complete irresponsibility for his actions, who has little or no grasp of “reality.”