Cinema
Novelists' Cinema
By ISABEL QLJIGLV
shock occkoonfv et hn et ownhaol les ebnussei business, verbal sefgoty shockingness, there are few) is going to come down with a bump. For Stanley Kubrick, while making an extremely adult film--in the sense that It is aimed at adults, that the whole tone, the acting, the attitudes, and above all Nabokuv s own brilliant script are adult—has almost entirelY neglected the advertisers' meaning of the word, and there are no visual shocks in the sense of 'daring scenes. And the only visual shock that could he expected to have much effect these outspoken, peephole days, the sight of a child with a middle-- aged man we know is her lover, has been vitiated entirely by the use of James Mason, a very sPild and attractive example of middle age (if inclee he qualifies for it at all), as Hum, and of Site Lyon, a girl of seventeen who looks, well, full)/ twenty and often more, as Lo. Even allowing for the social sophistication of the Arneriee,An young, this girl isn't remotely a at the beginning; nor are any of her c011‘ _year-Ow twelve temporaries. Early in the film there is a &Ile' at which Lolita is surrounded by her saw° friends, strapping youngsters all between, pef., haps, fifteen and twenty: no more twelve-Yea' old than Ginger Rogers in that long-ago hi,f11., to get on a half-ticket. v, when she wore pigtails and a sailor hat One of the oddest things about the novel is di way Humbert somehow manages to establish,' and to make you accept, that twelve was Lolitas prime, a time of perfection from which her later d adolescence was all a process of coarsening a.1! t decline. At one stage he compares her, by point, at fourteen, with the way she was wite"0 he first knew her, her whole texture then ,.% spoilt, so crude, compared with the earl exquisiteness (and Nabokov's visual cunrIlno, is so great that one sees just what he nica.lito At seventeen, well, by then she has grown inse a hag, impossibly aged but still adored becanta:
however old and ugly, she is still the same Lolita
.,0 Of course the film tries something of the kind by making the seventeen-year-old girl into n k" spectacled slut who looks thirty; but the visubo subtleties, the subjective view of the child w maybe isn't half as pretty as Sue Lyon is, °I., at least not such an obvious eye-catcher, are But if you can forget that it isn't much like the book in its main theme, the film has enor- mous qualities. Kubrick, with Nabokov's gor- geously witty, tight script (how such a prolific, sprawling writer has been cut and concentrated, and with such excellent cinematic effect, is mysterious and remarkable), has made a film that is hugely entertaining, taut and to the point all through its 153 minutes. It has visual wit to match Nabokov's verbal wit, acting to match both and beyond, and somehow manages to get across the tragedy not just of Humbert's obses- sion and incongruity, but of Lolita's as well. For a moment, near the end, the film actually gives a hint, as Humbert in the book suddenly comes to feel it, of the spiritual aches he has aroused in Lolita by having not a single care about her mind.
Because of Nabokov's collaboration the film Is weirdly similar to and, because of basic altera- tions in the plot and the whole business of casting, weirdly different from the novel. Quilty, Hum's rival, in the novel a shadowy figure, has been drawn full-scale to accommodate (there is no other word for it) Peter Sellers on a histrionic spree. This almbst topples the film right over and would certainly have done so if James Mason didn't give such a magnificently intelligent per- formance as Humbert; not so much Humbert the sensualist as Humbert the bewitched, obsessed with his eyes wide open, Humbert who looks so nearly normal and so nice and is much in demand by women of his own age, whose wasted, disastrous tenderness Lolita answers with another 'plop' from her bubble-gam. Sue Lyon, within the limitations of her age and appearance, catches the ruthlessness and sexuality—hardly the childishness; Shelley Winters has a terrifying go at Lo's culture-vulture mom. The small parts stick in one's head, some of them glittering with good direction. As indeed the whole film does. Tragi-comedy is always rare; in the cinema, con- sidered almost gruesome: this is it, a rare bird and exhilarating.
Accattone ('X' certificate) is yet another film about Roman pimps and prostitutes, but no one should be put off by the thought of its many predecessors and their sentimental crudity or crude sentimentality, or by the story (bad boy, reclaimed by love of pure young girl, killed on motor-bike during first flush of reform), which sounds quite beyond hope. It is the first film directed by the poet and novelist Pier Paolo Paso- lini, whose novels in Roman dialect are, I would say, untranslatable: the terrible efforts of the film's subtitles to turn its talk into Cockney show just how.
In Accattone Pasolini has set himself the diffi- cult job of making a situation that creaks with banality seem not just true and pathetic, which would have been hard enough, but tragic and terrible. And he manages it. He even manages to make the accompanying music by Bach seem apt and beautifully to the point and not in the least pretentious. Accattone is an extraordinary film: I never saw the essence of unhappiness,
pure misery, so exactly distilled as it is in the face of a youth (a non-actor) called Franco Citti, who makes Accattone grow from a commonplace, self-pitying lout to a figure of tragedy; in the barrenness of its urban scenery, the starkness of its sunlight, the pitilessness of its figures, the
whole circular hellishness of character, circum- stances and situation. Just why everything is so circular, why no one can ever break out (of him- self, as much as anything; of social pressures, too), is part of the tragedy, which as always is a mixture of character and circumstance, with character the more vulnerable. There are moments when Pasolini lapses from pity into, as it were, self-pity, identifying his view too closely with that of his hero: these are false and creaky, but few. The film has a grandeur that, again, is rare.
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