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Article: Who's abusing Lolita now? A new film version of Nabokov's masterpiece is likely to be a travesty of the scandalous but tender original Nabokov's brilliance prepared the way for a new generation of expressionistic p rose The message of the book is that art promises everything and changes nothing
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- January 4, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1995 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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First the bad news: Adrian Lyne is to make a film of Vladimir
Nabokov's Lolita. The novel is 40 years old this year. Perhaps, in
general, that is too early to be sure. But I do not think so. Lolita
is one of the great works of art of our age. Lyn e is not one of the
great film-makers.
The book was first filmed in 1962. That version was directed by
Stanley Kubrick, scripted by Nabokov and starred James Mason, Shelley
Winters and Peter Sellers, a constellation of talent that resulted in
an honourably good movie - "a wild, marvellously
enjoyable comedy" the critic Pauline Kael wrote - that
nevertheless fell far short of the book.
Lyne made his name with those glossy, abysmal porno-shockers ...