Lolita

Stanley Kubrick's got stones, you gotta give him that. Few would dare to adapt Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel about the love affair between a tormented pedophile and a precocious and flirtatious 12-year-old, and certainly not in 1962. Even fewer would hire Nabokov himself to write the screenplay and then change the story from underneath him. That boldness makes Lolita certainly an interesting entry into the director's canon, even if it's far from essential.

Kubrick opens the film at its end, when a crazed man (James Mason) breaks into the home of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). After a tense build-up filled with accusations that Quilty stole away his love, the man finally shoots him dead. We then flash back to four years earlier, when the man, Humbert Humbert, first arrived in America and moved to New Hampshire in order to be a guest lecturer at college. He finds a possible room to rent, let by Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), a sexually-longing widow who makes overt passes to Hum. He's all ready to decline the apartment because of this, but then he spots Charlotte's daughter Dolores, nicknamed Lolita (Sue Lyon). Only 14 years old, Lolita immediately grabs the attention of Humbert, who agrees to stay in the room in order to be near her.

As Humbert grapples with his sexual desires by writing them down in his diary, Charlotte falls hopelessly in love with her tenant. When Charlotte takes her daughter to a summer-long camp (much to Hum's agony, of course), she leaves her crush a note that says she loves him and he better be gone before she gets back because she can't take the pain. Unless, of course, Hum feels the same way. Seeing the opportunities in permanently staying in the same house as Lolita, he accepts.

Humbert and Charlotte's brief marriage sports some of the most darkly funny lines in the film. Hum clearly looks bored with his wife from the start, but she drags him into the bedroom desperate for sex. "When you touch me I go as limp as a noodle," she gasps breathlessly; Hum deadpans, "Yes, I know the feeling." At last, Charlotte discovers the incriminating diary, and runs from the house in anger and pain, only to be killed by a car. Charlotte's friends visit Humbert while he's in the bath and mistake his ennui and apathy for suicidal depression. The insurance man stops by to inform the widower that because his wife ran out into the street in the rain, her death is her fault and thus the company doesn't have to pay. "Technically, you're absolutely right" Humbert says dispassionately. "My, you're being so nice about this I'd like to offer to pay for the funeral service...It's the least I can do!" the agent beams.

The tone then abruptly shifts as Humbert goes to pick up Lolita and, in effect, we suddenly get a road movie. Humbert and Lolita travel from hotel to hotel as father and daughter while a sexual relationship develops. As this is 1962, the relationship is of course more implied than explicit, veiled in entendre and allusions. The two finally return home and Lolita must cope with her mother's death while returning to school. Whenever Lolita eats lunch with boys her age, Humbert bursts into jealous rages and even encourages her to leave school. It's a testament to the man's wretched state that he, a professor, actively strives to rob someone of her education. Of course, Lolita only sees it as an excuse never to have to study again, so she agrees, and the two set out on the road once more.

Along the way Humbert notices a car following them, and Quilty pops up all over the place in disguise, masking his own desire for Lolita while trying to pry information out of his makeshift rival. Lolita comes down with a cold and, when Humbert goes to pick her up from the hospital, he learns that his love has been kidnapped. The film flashes forward a few years when Humbert finally tracks her down, now a 17-year-old and pregnant with her husband's child. She reveals that Quilty kidnapped her, driving us back to the beginning.

There's plenty to like about the film, chiefly James Mason's tortured performance. Kubrick cuts out any of Humbert's backstory, so we have no context for his emotions. Therefore, it's up to Mason to make him something more than a two-dimensional pedophile, and he generally succeeds. Shelley Winters likewise excels as Charlotte: she's dense and foolish, but she has an honesty and a longing that makes her genuinely pitiable. I would have liked to seen her grapple with the revelation of who her husband really loved more, but Kubrick isn't one to focus on emotion.

Also, of course, the visuals are superb; it's almost redundant to mention the look of a Stanley Kubrick film, but every Stanley Kubrick film overwhelms with its crisp and perfect constructed imagery. Kubrick also manages to delve into the situation of Humbert and Lolita's love affair while never getting too lewd nor burying the themes too much in order to pass censors. Kubrick always had a taste for dark humor, but it's on display throughout here: What convinced you to take the room, asks Charlotte when Humbert agrees to the lease. As he stares at Lolita, he drawls "I think it was your cherry pies." If I have to explain that innuendo, you didn't listen to enough glam metal as a kid.

Unfortunately, the film suffers noticeably. Kubrick's condensation of the novel resulted in some strange gaps in narrative. Apart from not getting to know Humbert, we cut forward after Humbert finds that Lolita was kidnapped, removing out any real emotional anguish. Yet despite these cuts, the film is looooonng. At 156 minutes, it lacks enough emotional connection or interesting scenes to keep up the pace and to make the length worth it.

Most distracting is Quilty. Now, I love Peter Sellers. No, let me go back for a moment--I LOVE Peter Sellers. I'd like to find a way to resurrect him and make him President if I could; sure, he wouldn't fix anything but at least we'd go out laughing. But Quilty pops up far too much and adds nothing to the story. Apparently he's a background figure in the novel, barely appearing at all, and that's how it should have been here. Nevertheless, Sellers does steal a few scenes as he runs through the gamut of his accents as the ever-disguised Quilty, and he's entertaining even if he takes away from the main story.

Kubrick is trying to examine sexual relationships and how we often define ourselves by them, but this story requires a lot more emotion than he gives it. Kubrick always removed the human element of his stories, examining his subjects as impassively as a scientist monitoring rats, but there's a lot of anguish here that needs to come to the fore. Kubrick would handle just about all of the themes of this film far better in his swan song, the muted Eyes Wide Shut, which filtered sex through the frigidity of social propriety. Now, I believe, as with Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick never made a bad film; the worst thing I can say about one of his works is that I wouldn't want to watch it over and over again. And I'd only ever say that about this and Killer's Kiss. Not a bad track record, when you think about it.

Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

If you ask me what my ten favorite films are, chances are 9 of them will change every time I hear the question. But two films have stayed there without fail no matter how often I change things up' incidentally, both were directed by Stanley Kubrick. I have seen Dr. Strangelove at least 15 times, and each viewing offers up something I hadn't noticed before, a bit of visual irony or a line I missed, that makes the whole thing even funnier.

The finest piece of political satire ever filmed (and certainly the second best piece of satire of the 20th century behind George Orwell's Animal Farm), Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove paints a hilariously over-the-top yet terrifyingly plausible picture of nuclear holocaust, brought on by an exploitation of complicated and self-defeating "safeguards." The President is the only one with the authority to order a nuclear strike, but the military so feared the Reds and what they could possibly do that they created a number of preventative measures that would allow generals to take matters into their own hands if Soviets managed to incapacitate the President.

As the opening credits roll, Kubrick inserts shots of a nuclear bomber refueling in midair as a tanker locks into an intake valve in a sort of ballet. He plays on our romanticizing of war by making the shots strangely beautiful and serene. Then we go inside the bomber. An operator checks today's codes for their instructions; the orders come in and decode as Wing Attack Plan R. He contacts the plane commander, Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens), who dismisses it out of hand. No one would order Wing Attack Plan R. But the code checks out, and Kong rallies his men as he sets a course for a Russian target.

Meanwhile, back at Burpelson Air Force Base, Group Caption Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), an RAF pilot working on the American base, impounds radios on the order of base commander General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who also ordered the nuclear strike. Mandrake switches on one of the radios out of boredom and hears music on civilian broadcasts instead of news bulletins on a Communist attack. Mandrake reports this to Ripper expecting a recall of the bombers, only to find that Ripper knew perfectly well that nothing was wrong and ordered the bombers into Russia of his own volition.

The third and final location is the War Room. President Merkin Muffey (Peter Sellers) meets with his chiefs of staff to figure out what's going on and how to get the recall code to stop the bombers. The only general who ever gets a word in is Air Force General Buck Turgidson, commander of Strategic Air Command. He reads out Ripper's rambling, incoherent call to arms but does not want to "pass judgment" on whether or not Ripper's gone mad. He views the strike as opportunity to catch the Russians off guard. Instead of figuring out how to recall the planes, he urges the President to mount a full-scale attack; if those bombers drop their loads and Russia retaliates, losses will be astronomical, but if they send in every bomber in the fleet American losses will be "10, 20 million, tops" he says with a grin.

Kubrick uses these three main locations and the characters in each to put forward a vicious satire on Cold War politics and the general nature of war. When the Army sends soldiers to break into Ripper's base for force the code out of him, Ripper convinces his men that the attackers are Commies in disguise, and to shoot on sight. Mandrake tries to talk Jack down, and eventually learns that Ripper ordered the attack because he believes that Communists have fluoridated the water supply, and he blames this for his impotence. As a result, he ordered the attack to protect the "purity of essence," "essence" in this case of course being semen. Plenty has been said on the phallic nature of weapons and the need for males to mask inferiority, but Ripper is willing to end the world in shame.

But of course the War Room is where most of the comedy plays out; George C. Scott excels as Turgidson, and in many ways is representative of the film itself. He hams it up for the camera, but does so intentionally. Like the film, he makes OTT theatrics work almost as realism because he works within the logic of many Cold War generals: it's not his fault--or Kubrick's or satirist Terry Southern's--that the reality is so bizarre. When Muffey calls in the Russian ambassador to inform him of the situation, Scott goes wild. "Mr. President, he'll see the big board!" as he flails wildly. The second the ambassador arrives, Turgidson flies into a stream of insults directed at Communists and accuses him of trying to take photos of "the big board." Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky (supposedly a play on the Marquis de Sade), connects the President with Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov, and the resulting phone call is, in my humble opinion, the funniest scene in the history of cinema. When Muffey turns to his ex-Nazi nuclear expert Dr. Strangelove (Seller yet again), it sends the film into the comedy stratosphere.

What I see more and more as I rewatch the film is how brilliant Kubrick uses visual irony and juxtaposition between the three sets that compliment the tight script. Ripper launches the attack because of his impotence, and the base itself looks very sterile: white walls and harsh lighting, signify his inability to "perform." When soldiers attempt to take back the base, the two factions of Americans battle as a large sign reading "Peace is Our Profession" looms in the background. Conversely, the scenes on the bomber are not inherently funny; Kong and his men believe that the Russians have already attacked America, and they move forward into enemy territory under the notion that they're going to be heroes. Kong tells his men that they'll all get commendations out of this "regardless of your race, your color or your creed" as "When Johnny Goes Marching Home" softly but boldly plays over the scene. It rams home the tragic irony of these men's lives, that they are but pawns in a game they can never understand, not because they're stupid but because the people who invented the game never thought of its implications. Besides, if for no other reason it's worth it for that shot of Slim Pickens riding the bomb into oblivion.

The War Room itself is widely-celebrated, and deservedly so. Kubrick had the table at which the generals sit lined with the gree felt of a poker table. He knew the film was black and white, but he wanted the room to feel like a poker game, and indeed it does: apart from the table, lights pierce through cigarette smoke in the background, giving the place the feel of a seedy den. These men look at all the figures, and reduce lives to statistics: I've got 30 million megatons! I see your 30 million and raise you a doomsday machine.

Dr. Strangelove applies to nuclear war, but its vicious examination of the nature of war itself gives it a timeless quality that survived the fall of the Soviet Union. It reduces war to the exploits of men whose inferiority complexes drive them to kill. Even when a nuke sets off the Russian doomsday machine and it spells the end of mankind, Turgidson and the Russian ambassador still bicker, and the ambassador sneaks off to take secret photos of the War Room. Why on Earth would he do this? Does he not understand that the notion of politics no longer has any meaning? It's just his job; who knows if Americans will agree to a peace settlement as a band of specially-chosen survivors (including all politicians and military leaders, of course) flee to mine shafts, or vice-versa. Even at the end of civilization, man will look for any excuse to kill someone else.