Lolita (review)

Reviews 247 became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate, at the moment of clinging contact. (231) For all his other achievements, Irons never manages to decipher the secret of those "somehows" or find tiieir proper auditory counterparts. Consequentiy, in a performance of a novel so concerned with resunecting Lolita's lost voice, we end with Irons saying the few words that Lolita does speak in the book as if he were imitating Peter Sellers imitating a mixture of Gaby Hayes and Walter Brennan in the inimitable second scene from Kubrick's Lolita. And that, despite Irons's stunning recreation of Humbert's voice, is unnerving and seriously mars this performance because it impoverishes Nabokov's Lolita by making the book more Humbert's than it really is. Richard Corliss. Lolita. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Review by Zoran Kuzmanovich. With a view to preservation the British Film Institute has compiled a list of 360 films which represent the key achievements in the history of cinema. BH has also invited autiiors, film critics, and historians to write short companion pieces to these films. The final goal of the BFI Film Classics is a series of "authoritative and highly readable guide[s] to the great films of world cinema." All that seems clear, well-intended, even commendable. BFI's timely gesture has already produced fine little volumes by Salman Rushdie (The Wizard of Oz), Laura Mulvey (Citizen Kane), and Peter Wollen (Singin' in the Rain). What is unclear is the logic by which Kubrick's Lolita made the list of the world's great films, and that lack of clarity puts much 248 Nabokov Studies of Corliss's enterprise in doubt. Corliss himself seems to have recognized the oddity of Lolita's inclusion on that list, for his guide to Kubrick's Lolita opens with a 99-line poem "Pale Film" which begins witii I was the shadow of a monarch seen Through the false window of the movie screen and concludes eulogistically, tiiough still pointing back at its first line, much as "Pale Fire" does: And here lies V.N.'s work through movieland: A butterfly in the projector beam. It floats, then flits away, as in a dream Of monarchs who find freedom in a cage With horizontal bare—lines on a page. To readers, not to viewers, falls the task Of tiptoeing into the cage to ask: Who was that monarch? What did he mean? Without answering his own question, Corliss proceeds to annotate his poem with fifty snippets of information devoted primarily to Kubrick and Nabokov and, for good measure, adds twenty-five illustrations, four-fifths of which are stills from the film's most memorable moments. The information pertaining to Nabokov is readily available to Nabokov scholars since virtually all of it seems culled from Field, Appel, and Boyd. It is not always possible to see who has provided what information; Corliss does not use footnotes. Less easily accessible are bits of information about the social and legal climates sunounding die book and the film, descriptions of ways in which actors editorialize on screen, analyses of several kissing scenes from Kubrick's Lolita, and a zany commentary on James Mason's henpecked Humbert: "He cooks, he shops, he frets; he is (only this noble, obsolete term will do) a wife." An equally jejune Reviews 249 provocation is Corliss's sketch for an alternative, dream version of a Lolita film to be directed by Kubrick, Minelli, and Sirk. It would star a younger Sue Lyon, James Mason would still be Humbert, Patricia Neal would portray Charlotte, and Lenny Bruce would take over from Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty. As if infected by the low double-entendres of Kubrick's film, in glossing his poem, Corliss rarely lets an opportunity slip without some effort at the kind of punning that his regular job at Time Magazine apparently does not permit: a lecherous suburbanite is a "Daddy Long Leg"; "Speak Lo when you speak love"; "There is nothing a nypholept could teach her. She is already taut"; "Lolita, from book to film, was a wet dream...