Lolita is a good movie which might have been much better. For the title role, Stanley Kubrick discovered a teen-age television actress named Sue Lyon whose moods, accent, facial expressions, and body movements seem to me remarkably authentic—quite different from the cliches we usually get in such roles...

One can understand why Kubrick, as a businessman, didn’t want to offend the bluenoses. But he is also an artist, and he missed a chance to challenge the worst aspect of our movie censorship: its disapproval of the erotic and its tolerance of the sadistic. Thus he dared to do Quilty’s murder right out of the book, but he gives us no comparable love scene. In fact, sometimes one thinks that the only way to get real sex past the censors is to combine it with sadism; rape seems less objectionable to them than seduction, perhaps because it is less enjoyable.

Kubrick began flashily by making glacial copies of Ophuls's tracking shots and Aldrich's violence. Then became a recruit to intellectual commerce by following the international paths of glory of another K, an older Stanley who also saw himself as Livingstone, but whose weighty sincerity turned up trumps at Nüremberg, whereas Stanley Junior's cunning look-at-me tactics foundered in the cardboard heroics of Spartacus without ever attaining the required heroism. So Lolita led one to expect the worst.

Surprise: it is a simple, lucid film, precisely written, which reveals America and American sex better than either Melville or Reichenbach, and proves that Kubrick need not abandon the cinema provided he films characters who exist instead of ideas which exist only in the bottom drawers of old scriptwriters who believe that the cinema is the seventh art.

The surprise of Lolita is how enjoyable it is: it’s the first new American comedy since those great days in the forties when Preston Sturges recreated comedy with verbal slapstick. Lolita is black slapstick and at times it’s so far out that you gasp as you laugh. An inspired Peter Sellers creates a new comic pattern — a crazy quilt of psychological, sociological commentary so “hip” it’s surrealist...

Quilty — rightly, in terms of the film as distinguished from the novel — dominates Lolita (which could use much more of him) and James Mason’s Humbert, who makes attractiveness tired and exhausted and impotent, is a remarkable counterpart. Quilty who doesn’t care, who wins Lolita and throws her out, Quilty the homewrecker is a winner; Humbert, slavishly, painfully in love, absurdly suffering, the lover of the ages who degrades himself, who cares about nothing but Lolita, is the classic loser. Mason is better than (and different from) what almost anyone could have expected.