seamlessly in the writer’s hands, a fact noted by many critics and reviewers. It is exactly these qualities that make the film versions of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick’s - 1962 and Adrian Lynne’s - 1997) inferior in many ways. As one critic noted, “Few novels are both as sad and as amusing as this one, with Nabokov mixing and managing both tragedy and comedy perfectly. Nabokov’s prose is so rich and his presentations so carefully thought-through that the book proves superior to the films at every turn” (Complete 2). This analysis will now compare and contrast Nabokov’s novel with Kubrick’s film of the same, a film that Nabokov originally wrote the screenplay for only to have it butchered by Kubrick and others. The analysis will demonstrate that great works of literature are seldom translated into great works of film primarily due to the constraints of filmmaking in general.
Kubrick’s black and white version of Lolita is immediately less compelling and shocking than the book because the age of Lolita has been upped to fourteen. Sue Lyons looks more like a high school cheerleader than the barely pubescent teen in Nabokov’s novel. This is one constraint of film – greater censorship than literature is confined to. This one act seriously undermines the impact of the original novel. Further, Kubrick felt a masterpiece like Lolita was not good enough obviously, because he changes the timing of events in the book in the film adaptation. For example, in the beginning of the book we encounter the serious passion Humbert once had for a barely pubescent girl named Annabel Leigh, something the film makes barely a mention of. This is a critical blunder because the scenes between Humbert and Lee in the novel are used as Humbert’s primary motivation and primary reason for lack of control in his seduction of Lolita. The passages describing it are some of the most beautifully passionate and erotic ever written without des...