Lolita

The writer's mind and the impossible object, "Freudian lingo." Stanley Kubrick's tenderest scene (imperious toenails painted behind the credits) segues into one of his most nightmarishly comical ones (out of the mist and into the disarrayed castle for the killing of the doppelgänger). Tour of America for Humbert Humbert (James Mason), pit stop in New Hampshire en route to Ohio, "should appeal to a European." The amorous widow (Shelley Winters) presides over the suburban trap, the bait is her teen daughter (Sue Lyon) bikinied and haloed in the garden. Nabokov served with Buñuelian calm, thus a loaded gun on the nightstand in the foreground and the matron on the phone in the background and between them the protagonist lost in darkening contemplation. Stuffed beaver in Camp Climax, at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel a Tashlin tussle with the fold-out cot, reverse seduction the morning after. "That was getting kind of smutty there." The New World's perilous rhapsody, staged in the antiseptic Old World as one of Kubrick's mellifluous perversities. The deviant intellectual is no match for the sullen nymphet, he proclaims his obsessive desire while she snaps her bubblegum, still in mythical costume from her school play. He loses control of the narrative to Quilty (Peter Sellers), the nemesis who's a blabbering cop and a Teutonic quack, a car on the road and a voice on the phone, above all a vacant girl's idea of "a genius." "I get so carried away, you know, being so normal and all." (His baleful verbal surrealism quakes the smooth cement of the mise en scène.) The fried-egg treat and the bullet-riddled painting, the domestic purgatory at the end of the journey. "Queer how I misinterpreted the designation of doom." Losey (Accident) and Rohmer (Claire's Knee) provide striking subsequent studies. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. With Gary Cockwell, Jerry Stovin, Diane Decker, and Lois Maxwell. In black and white.