Though it keeps much of Lolita’s pain offscreen, it doesn’t exactly use her slightly raised age to excuse Humbert’s fixation, nor does it feel like a powder-keg provocation ahead of its time. Yet rewatching Lolita today, in a world that is gradually becoming more attuned to sexual abuse and terms like “grooming” (an adult gaining a younger person’s trust in order to eventually draw them into an abusive or otherwise inappropriate sexual relationship), it’s not the movie’s level of permissiveness that jumps out. To be clear, Humbert does prey on his stepdaughter, offscreen, and Lolita refers to their trysts with a blithe tartness. That movie also supposedly cost $60m, an impossible-seeming figure for this material in 2022.) A 1997 film version was more sexually explicit, while still attempting to maintain some safeguards: Lolita remained 14, rather than 12, and was played by Dominique Swain, who was older than Lyons at the time of filming. (Not all of the alterations are confined to production-code-era morality. If this sounds singularly unpleasant to watch, Lolita is even younger in the book, while less attentive modern viewers less versed in Hollywood innuendo could conceivably come away from the movie uncertain if Humbert ever acts on his predatory urges. In the film, middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) becomes sexually obsessed with 14-year-old Lolita (Sue Lyons), the daughter of his landlady-turned-wife Charlotte (Shelley Winters). The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita movie being made near-contemporaneously with the novel was worked into the ad campaign, some of its posters adorned with a cheeky question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Good question, relatively simple answer: by ageing up the title character slightly, and relying on innuendos and implications to keep the most explicit material offscreen.
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