Lolita 4K 1962 Ultra HD 2160p

Humbert Humbert forces a confrontation with a man, whose name he has just recently learned, in this man's home. The events that led to this standoff began four years earlier. Middle aged Humbert, a European, arrives in the United States where he has secured at job at Beardsley College in Beardsley, Ohio as a Professor of French Literature. Before he begins his post in the fall, he decides to spend the summer in the resort town of Ramsdale, New Hampshire. He is given the name of Charlotte Haze as someone who is renting a room in her home for the summer. He finds that Charlotte, widowed now for seven years, is a woman who puts on airs. Among the demonstration of those airs is throwing around the name of Clare Quilty, a television and stage script writer, who came to speak at her women's club meeting and who she implies is now a friend. Those airs also mask being lonely, especially as she is a sexually aggressive and liberated woman. Humbert considers Charlotte a proverbial "joke" but decides to rent the room upon meeting Charlotte's provocative daughter, Dolores Haze - more frequently referred to as Lolita - who he first spots in a bikini tanning in the back yard. He is immediately infatuated with Lolita, with who he becomes obsessed in a sexual manner despite her age, she being just into her teens. He will also learn that Charlotte has the exact same feelings for him. While Charlotte does whatever she can to be alone with Humbert, Humbert does the same with Lolita. As the summer progresses, Humbert, based on the circumstances, decides to enter into a relationship with Charlotte just to be near Lolita. In that new arrangement, Humbert has to figure out how to achieve his goal of being with Lolita with Charlotte out of the way. As things begin to go Humbert's way, he is unaware that Charlotte is not the only thing standing in his way between him and Lolita, that other thing being Lolita's possible interest in other boys, and other members of the male sex, young or old, who may have their own designs on Lolita.

User Review

First of all, in the interest of fairness, I should note that I have a habit of writing revised reviews of films whose opinions I’ve changed in the recent past. Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” is just such an example. I like to think that, like the creator of this story himself, I’ve come to realize over time that while the film is good, it’s far from a perfect adaptation of a novel that comes close to the concept of “perfect.”

Kubrick had a habit of adapting books however he saw fit. Take, for example, the master’s better-known and later work—*The Shining*, based on the horror novel of the same name by Stephen King: The director altered the portrayals of many characters, shifting the focus away from the supernatural abilities of the boy Danny Torrance and toward the madness of his father, Jack; he cut many scenes that many consider key and completely changed the ending. The result is a brilliant horror film by Stanley Kubrick and a not-so-great adaptation of Stephen King’s work. These are two completely different things. The same goes for “Lolita.

The film feels less like a movie and more like a fairly good stage or television production: the plot seems extraordinary (especially by the standards of the time), and the cast is impressive, but somehow everything turned out so disjointed and rushed that it becomes obvious why Stanley later berated himself for “Lolita. This disjointedness stems from the strict censorship of the 1960s, which explains the chaste scenes (almost like a family comedy) that the novel itself cannot boast of. Lolita, played by Sue Lyon, looks sexy, but, as many have quite rightly pointed out, she’s older than the character is supposed to be, and Humbert’s (Mason) attraction to this girl—who is far from being a nymphet—is no more striking than any other 50-year-old man ogling an adult magazine featuring 18-year-old beauties. Another minor drawback is the fact that Kubrick largely focuses his attention in vain on the dim-witted playwright Clare Quilty, even if he is brilliantly portrayed by Peter Sellers; he appears so frequently in the film that even a viewer who hasn’t read the book—or even knows the definition of “deduction”—will be able to confidently predict the ending, who is to blame, and so on.

Due to the censorship that prevailed everywhere and the sexual revolution that was still in its infancy, the 1962 version of “Lolita” is in many ways inferior to Adrian Lyne’s version, which was released 35 years later. Which, frankly, will surprise few people: the The 1997 “Lolita” has long been languishing in the long line of other erotic dramas that straddle the line with pornography, ranging from “The Night Porter”—where Charlotte Rampling, in a Nazi uniform, displayed her alluring, truly Aryan breasts—to the widely watched “Basic Instinct.”

The 1962 "Lolita" is Kubrick’s "Lolita". It is a unique blend of Kubrick’s signature dark humor, the grotesquely contrived sentimentality of typical melodramas of that era, and traditional tragedy. The fact that the plot is based on Nabokov’s beloved novel is only recalled after the name of the iconic British film director is mentioned. This is a film BASED ON THE BOOK, and if viewed exclusively in that light, the most flattering description one could give “Lolita” is “pretty good—worth watching.” Although, if we were to forget about Vladimir Vladimirovich (the author) for a moment, Kubrick’s “Lolita” could still be passed off as something that aspires to the title of a masterpiece. Though that’s a debatable claim.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (79.2 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: FLAC 1.0
#French: Dolby Digital 1.0
#German: Dolby Digital 1.0
#Italian: Dolby Digital 1.0
#Spanish (Latino): Dolby Digital 1.0
#Spanish: Dolby Digital 1.0
#Portuguese: Dolby Digital 1.0

Info Subtitles

English SDH (PGS), Arabic (PGS), Bulgarian (PGS), Chinese (Hong Kong / Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional) (PGS), Croatian, Czech, Danish (PGS), Dutch (PGS), Finnish (PGS), French (Metropolitan) (PGS), German, German SDH (PGS), Greek, Hebrew (PGS), Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Italian SDH (PGS), Japanese (PGS), Korean, Norwegian (PGS), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian) (PGS), Portuguese (European) (PGS), Romanian, Russian, Spanish (Castilian) (PGS), Spanish (Latin American) (PGS), Swedish (PGS), Thai, Turkish.