Lolita (1962)

SYNOPSIS

The novel that remains an unquenchable controversy as adapted for the screen by its author, Nabokov. While the novel, though once banned, is accepted in most quarters as a masterpiece, this film version by Kubrick is hotly debated. A professor (Mason) who takes rooms in a widow's home conceives a distracting obsession with her teenage daughter, eventually marrying the grasping mother (Winters) in order to remain close to Lolita (Lyon). The triangle results in murder and humiliation. Lyon seems a bit too knowing as the object of obsession, and Sellers's Quilty seems to have dropped in on his way to Mars, but the overall effect is as absorbing and repellent as a slow-motion car crash. The 1998 remake by Adrian Lyne starring Jeremy Irons renewed the controversy with an even closer reading of the novel and its resultant inability to find a U.S. release until the Showtime cable network stepped forward.

(Source: available at Amazon AMC Classic Movie Companion).