Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita
“ENOUGH OF WAR FILMS. They’re death at the box office. Poison,” said MGM’s head of production, Dore Schary, to the twenty-seven-year-old Kubrick in 1956.1 Kubrick and Jimmy Harris were trying to get MGM interested in making Paths of Glory, Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel about the French army in World War I. Paths of Glory was one of the few books that Kubrick had read during high school. He devoured Cobb’s saga sitting in his father’s waiting room while Jack Kubrick saw his patients. Kubrick wasn’t drafted during the Korean conflict because he was married, but Harris was a vet, and now the two wanted to make a movie about war.
Schary wasn’t biting. He had been on the hook at MGM for the box office failure of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. War movies were verboten in Schary’s lexicon, but he was impressed by The Killing. Though the movie had flopped, losing the hefty sum of $130,000 for United Artists, it made several reviewers’ top ten lists. So Schary told Harris and Kubrick, “We have a room full of properties we own. There must be something in there you boys want to do.”2
Kubrick and Harris were now under contract at MGM, thanks to Schary, and they had forty weeks to produce a feature film. They started rifling through MGM’s junk heap of old novels and screenplays. When they got bleary-eyed from long hours of reading, they would play ping-pong or watch a movie in one of the studio’s screening rooms.
One day Kubrick found a gem: Burning Secret (1911) by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer who committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 after fleeing the Nazis. (“We talked a lot about two writers, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig,” Harris remembered.)3 Burning Secret tells the story of a beautiful Jewish woman who goes on vacation with her twelve-year-old son while her husband remains back at home in the city. A baron staying at their hotel seduces the mother, and the boy eventually discovers the secret affair. Shocking, subtle, and above all suspenseful, Zweig’s novella is perfect movie material. (In fact, it had already been filmed twice in Germany, in 1923 and 1933, and would be made again by Kubrick’s assistant Andrew Birkin in 1988.)
In the end, Kubrick never made Burning Secret. MGM canceled Dore Schary’s contract in 1957 when his latest pictures turned out to be big losers. When MGM found out that Harris and Kubrick were working on not just the Zweig script but also Paths of Glory, they too were fired, for breach of contract.
Kubrick enlisted Calder Willingham, the prickly, talented southern novelist, to write the Burning Secret screenplay with him, and they seem to have worked on it for the better part of a year. The script was thought to be lost, but a copy of the script, dated November 1956, recently turned up in Gerald Fried’s archives. Kubrick did with Burning Secret what he did four decades later with Schnitzler’s Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut: he relocated it to America and removed nearly all traces of Jewishness, much as Arthur Miller removed Jewishness from Death of a Salesman. (There is a fleeting glimpse of a knish bakery in Eyes Wide Shut, but that’s about it.) “He takes a Jewish story and turns them all into goys,” as Kubrick scholar Nathan Abrams puts it.4 The married woman is no longer a voluptuous Jewish beauty but a 1950s American housewife named Virginia. Her husband is called Roy, her son Eddy, and the baron becomes a distinctly nonaristocratic seducer named Richard. The hotel is in the Appalachian Mountains.
“Some of the Burning Secret dialogue seems to have found its way into Eyes Wide Shut,” Abrams reports. “Not word for word, but the essence: the seducer makes the same pro-adultery arguments that Sandor does”—the handsome Hungarian that Nicole Kidman dances with in Eyes Wide Shut, in a spellbinding scene straight out of Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953).
Burning Secret is one of a long list of unmade Kubrick films. The Kubrick archives contain his script taken from Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark (1932), along with a World War II drama, The German Lieutenant, about a last-ditch German mission behind enemy lines (written with a former paratrooper, Richard Adams). There is also I Stole Sixteen Million Dollars, based on the 1955 memoir by Baptist-minister-turned-bank-robber Herbert Wilson. Kubrick wanted to make a movie from H. Rider Haggard’s hoary Viking epic Eric Brighteyes (1890), a book he loved deeply. And he planned to make Zweig’s stunning Chess Story (1941), which might have been the first great film about chess, given Kubrick’s passion for the game.5
Zweig’s Burning Secret resembles King’s The Shining (1977) and Louis Begley’s novel Wartime Lies (1991), the basis for The Aryan Papers, another movie Kubrick never made. In all of these a child decodes the dangerous adult world, then takes on the responsibility of a grown-up. Here is a key to the Kubrick universe. His films have the aura of the kid who has spent his time thinking and tinkering, trying to get things exactly right—a skill you need in both chess and photography. But when the grown-up world looms and boyhood hobbies yield their place to the facts of life, which include not just sex (as in Lolita, another movie about a child) but war and mass death, then you grow up fast.
If Stanley Kubrick had made only Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss, and The Killing, he would be known as a minor noir director, less significant than Jacques Tourneur or Jules Dassin, but interesting nonetheless. With Paths of Glory (1957), his next movie, Kubrick vaults into the pantheon. Paths of Glory is sometimes called an antiwar movie, but war is merely the setting for the director’s inquiry into what men do for success and power. The film mostly shies away from battlefield gore, unlike Hollywood’s most famous World War I movie, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Kubrick’s battlefield scenes are lucidly designed, and—a rare thing in a war movie—they convey clarity, not chaos, as critic Gary Giddins notes.6
Like The Killing, Paths of Glory deals with plotters. Here the plot requires sending masses of men to their deaths. At the beginning of the film, General Broulard, played to polished, insidious perfection by Adolphe Menjou, entices another general, Mireau (George Macready) to try to take the Anthill, the Germans’ bastion. The attack is clearly futile: everyone knows the French soldiers will simply die in no-man’s-land. Colonel Dax, played by Kirk Douglas, protests that the assault on the Anthill is useless, but he goes along with it.
Dax’s men, pinned down by enemy fire, don’t even make it out of the trenches. And so Mireau demands that some of Dax’s soldiers be executed for cowardice. Three are chosen: the eccentric Private Ferol (Timothy Carey), Corporal Paris (Ralph Meeker), and Private Arnaud (Joseph Turkel). The long, drawn-out scene in which the three men face the firing squad is one of Hollywood’s most wrenching depictions of capital punishment, comparable to the gas chamber death of Susan Hayward in Robert Wise’s I Want to Live (released a year after Kubrick’s film, in 1958).
Paths of Glory had greater star power than The Killing, since Kirk Douglas played the hero. Douglas, much more expensive than Hayden (he was to earn $350,000 on Paths of Glory), was fresh from Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956), which had done poorly at the box office despite critical plaudits. But Douglas had a long track record as a moneymaker. In early 1957, Douglas told Harris and Kubrick that he was ready to start on Paths of Glory if they agreed to make a deal with his company, Bryna Productions (named after Douglas’s mother, so that he could put her name in lights). Harris remembered that Douglas’s agent, Ray Stark, “killed us with that deal. He just buried us. He was a tough agent and we were desperate.”7 Harris and Kubrick agreed to make five pictures with Bryna.
United Artists didn’t want Paths of Glory. The studio predicted correctly that a downbeat movie about corrupt generals would do badly at the box office, and also that it would be banned in France. But Douglas was a shrewd negotiator. He pushed through Paths of Glory by threatening to pull out of another project, The Vikings, which promised to be (and was) a commercial juggernaut for UA.
Gerald Fried, whom Kubrick had known since high school, wrote the music for Paths of Glory, as he had for Kubrick’s three earlier features. Fried’s score is superb, with tense bouts of percussion punctuating the battlefield forays. The film’s director of photography was Georg Krause, who had worked with Elia Kazan, but Kubrick told Krause exactly what to do, as he had told Lucien Ballard, his cinematographer on The Killing. In fact, Kubrick operated the handheld camera himself, here used for Douglas’s unsteady-looking crawl across no-man’s-land. In his later movies, too, Kubrick always reserved for himself the handheld camera sequences, with their rough, jostling feel.
Kubrick once again enlisted the oddball character actor Timothy Carey, who shot the racehorse in The Killing. Carey returns in Paths of Glory as one of the three condemned men. In all his roles, Carey gives off a slightly psychotic vibe. He enraged Douglas, and frustrated Kubrick, by indulging in offbeat improvisations. The scene where Carey rips apart his last meal, a duck dinner, required five hours, sixty-four takes, and eighteen ducks. But in the end Carey succeeded brilliantly. He steals the show with his slobbering, sobbing breakdown as he staggers toward the firing squad, leaning on the shoulder of a priest (Emile Meyer, who usually played thugs). “You better make this good, Kirk Douglas doesn’t like it,” Kubrick shrewdly said to Carey before he filmed the scene, and the strategy worked.8
Paths of Glory was filmed in Geiselgasteig studios, near Munich. This was Douglas’s shrewd idea. Germany was an inexpensive place to make a movie in 1956, and Schloss Schleissheim, the vast château where the generals confer, was near the studio.
Like most war films, Paths of Glory needed a swarm of extras. Kubrick hired six hundred German policemen to play the French soldiers. When the director told them to move slowly and with great difficulty through no-man’s-land, they shared a joke: oh, we get it, he wants us to advance like Frenchmen!
Kubrick took a month to prepare Paths of Glory’s battlefield, and he was meticulous about the special effects. Erwin Lange, an old hand from UFA, the German film studio, designed explosions that would cast up torrents of debris and shrapnel, rather than the clouds of dust usually seen in Hollywood war movies.
In Geiselgasteig, Kubrick said, “I found the last sad remnants of a great filmmaker”: the “cracked and peeling” sets of Lola Montès (1955), Max Ophüls’s final movie. Ophüls, who was famous for his elaborate tracking shots and the sophisticated continental mood of his films, was Kubrick’s favorite filmmaker, he said in an interview just after Paths of Glory. He confessed he had seen Ophüls’s Le Plaisir (1952) “countless times.”9 On March 26, 1956, the day Ophüls died, Kubrick dedicated a key shot to his memory: the camera tracks in an Ophüls-like intricate curling web around Mireau and Broulard, who are chatting in the sumptuous castle that is army headquarters. This is the movie’s first scene, our introduction to the two generals, and Kubrick’s sinuous camera reflects their Machiavellian maneuvering.
The romantic, humane cynic Ophüls would have given his officers an air of old-world aristocracy. In Kubrick’s hands their dignity is too brisk to be impressive. Efficient and self-centered, Broulard and Mireau rule over a world in which ordinary men die en masse so that a general can score a promotion. Everything they do is a calculated dance, a self-serving game.
Paths of Glory gives war a stark, ascetic look. We never see the enemy, and there are no soldiers croaking out dying words. In an early scene, the battlefield is empty like the dark side of the moon, scarred by shrapnel and craters. The château seems equally cavernous and soulless, and the trenches lined with soldiers transmit quiet dread.
While Broulard and Mireau confer in their palatial headquarters, the camera winds around them, but when Dax strides through the trenches, it tracks boldly forward with him. (Jack in The Shining’s snowy maze will also get this “Don Juan” shot: the camera is in front of the actor looking back at him, and both are moving forward.) Kubrick, usually a stickler for such details, departed from historical fact and widened the trenches to six feet so that the camera dolly could fit.
Douglas’s Dax is straightforward, square-jawed, and solidly virtuous. When he leads the attack through no-man’s-land, the camera follows him in a steady tracking shot, threading past wounded soldiers. His outrage about the battle plan, like his later ardent defense of the three soldiers in a military trial, allows Douglas to proclaim his liberal ideals. He must have insisted on Dax’s righteousness much as he demanded—so the rumor goes—that his character had to appear shirtless in at least one scene (an early one, washing up in his quarters). Douglas thrusts and struts, gritting his teeth with frustrated heroism, in contrast to the serpentine Macready and Menjou, who specialize in hooded glances and suave insinuations.
Menjou and Macready are both exceptionally fine, never overplaying and never making their brand of corrupt evil seem too refined. Douglas, by contrast, overdoes it at times, as when he lets loose his fury at Broulard and calls him “a degenerate, sadistic old man.” Dax’s parting shot, “I pity you,” spoken from the heights of his moral superiority, misfires badly. Broulard in his own eyes is simply doing what generals do. After the execution he remarks, “The men died wonderfully”—for him it’s all an admirable spectacle. When Broulard realizes that Dax is not angling for a promotion by denouncing Mireau, but is instead genuinely indignant, he calls him an “idiot.” Gary Giddins remarks that in this scene the superb Menjou sounds “neither verbose nor practiced”: he is utterly genuine, and utterly corrupt.10 Broulard wins this one: this is his world and his war.
Kubrick’s practicality and shrewdness were evident in his dealings with the prickly Menjou. Kubrick had to trick Menjou to get him to appear in Paths of Glory. He told him that he would have the starring role and that Broulard was a “good general who does his best.” There was friction between the two on the set as well. One day Menjou, frustrated by the number of takes Kubrick wanted, threw a temper tantrum and told the twenty-nine-year-old director that he lacked experience “in the art of directing actors.” Calmly and quietly as usual, Kubrick said to Menjou, “It isn’t right, and we are going to keep doing it until it is right, because you guys are good.’ ”11 There’s a touch of boyish naïveté here that the young tyro Kubrick used to his advantage: “You guys are good,” said to a seasoned star like Menjou!
Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory, possibly with Adolphe Menjou in the foreground (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)
Kubrick cleverly managed not only Menjou, but also his star, Douglas. Kubrick had to be quite adroit in both serving Douglas’s wish to be the courageous hero of Paths of Glory and betraying him by suggesting an ironic frame around the story: the ironist is Menjou’s Broulard, who presages that later powerful cynic Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut. Douglas loved the finished film nevertheless.
At the end of Paths of Glory we learn that Dax’s men will return to the front. Everything will be futile as before; the executed soldiers are in the end forgettable, like all the war dead. In every meaningful way Dax has lost. Kubrick refused to grant Douglas his catharsis, the victory of humane ideals over the sinister higher-ups who oppress the common man. The oppressors, Mireau and Broulard, fit into the Kubrick universe, while Dax remains a naïve outlier.
This no-exit ending saves Paths of Glory from Stanley Krameresque liberal piety, along with the futility of Dax’s leading his men to slaughter on the Anthill, even though he knows full well that the battle cannot be won. The casual viewer will identify with Dax’s high-handed denunciations, not quite realizing that he serves the war machine just as Mireau and Broulard do. But Kubrick still drives his point home: because the war requires enormous bloodshed for minute or merely symbolic gains, all soldiers are expendable.
During the final minutes of Paths of Glory, a captive German girl is forced to sing in front of a group of French soldiers at an inn. The innkeeper pushes her on stage, bewildered and helpless. At first the soldiers taunt her, but she quickly reduces them to tears with her song.
Christiane Harlan, listed in the credits under her stage name Suzanne Christian, plays the girl. With her short blond hair and sympathetic dark eyes, she is frightened yet also comforting. The catharsis that Kubrick denies us with the terrifying execution of the three soldiers he gives us in the song, the poignant “Der Treue Hussar” (The loyal hussar), an old German favorite chosen by Harlan. (Louis Armstrong sang it in English on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956.) Harlan is both girlish and maternal, and as the only woman in the movie, she voices the sorrow that the men cannot themselves express.
Jimmy Harris remembered how Kubrick invented this final scene. “You know, the picture needs something more at the end,” he mused to Harris. “How about a German girl forced to sing a song?” “You’re gonna turn this into a musical?” the surprised Harris responded. “Anyway, how do we find the girl?” “I have just the right person,” Kubrick answered with a little smile. “Oh God, Stanley, oh no, how could you possibly suggest a girlfriend,” Harris exploded. “Okay, let’s shoot the scene, and if you don’t like it, we won’t use it,” Kubrick coolly said.12 As it turned out, Harris was as moved as everyone else when the scene was shot, and it stayed in the picture.
Harlan was in fact Kubrick’s girlfriend, just as Harris guessed. Kubrick first saw her one night on German television and was bowled over. A few days later he went to see her perform at the Kammerspiel theater in Munich. Fascinated, he then sought her out at a Red Cross benefit during Fasching, Munich’s rowdy carnival season. “He was not exactly a drunken ball person,” Harlan remembered: Kubrick was the only one there without a costume. “At a German carnival you get real retro drunks, the lowest of the low. There was a river of pee. He felt very scared. Stanley never forgot it.”13
The carnival tumult might have reminded Kubrick of Ophüls’s Le Plaisir, which features an uproarious masked ball filmed with stunning, swift fluency. There, a dancer boldly kicks up his legs, then faints and is revealed to be an old man who cannot keep up the youthful pace. Kubrick, led by his desire for Harlan, was a different kind of outsider at the revelry. Like the unmasked Bill Harford in the orgy scene of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick felt out of place and endangered in Munich.
Before her scene was filmed, Harlan was already living with Kubrick. Early the next year, 1958, she became his third wife. Stanley and Christiane stayed with each other for more than forty years, until the end of his life.
Harlan had one notorious relative, her uncle Veit Harlan, director of Jud Süss (1940), one of the Nazis’ most famous propaganda films. “Stanley and I came from such different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds,” Christiane told an interviewer. “I think it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic background for someone like Stanley. . . . For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown’s world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know.”14
Kubrick briefly considered making a movie about Veit Harlan and Jud Süss, a striking way of managing the disturbing fact that Christiane was connected, via her uncle, to the evil of Nazism. Without telling his wife, Kubrick also began a script about a ten-year-old German girl, similar in age to Christiane during the war, who sees Jews hunted by the Nazis. (“I was the little girl who moved in where Anne Frank was pushed out,” Christiane told an interviewer many years later.)15
Kubrick enjoyed Germany, Christiane remembered, though he was anxious about being there as a Jew so soon after the war. He especially liked her relatives, “a noisy, well-dressed crowd,” most of them theater and film people. (Her parents were both opera singers.) “They were showboats, and they looked and acted it, and I was a little embarrassed,” she recalled. “Stanley liked them because they were fun, real fun—my film star auntie was a Swede [Kristina Söderbaum], and boy could she drink you under the table, and she was a sweetie—he got on with her, and she sort of introduced him to everybody.” Christiane adds that Kubrick was glad that his future wife “wasn’t really that kind of person, I wasn’t a dance on the table type.”16
When I talked to her in England in the summer of 2018, surrounded by her paintings, Christiane, at age eighty-six, was still the woman Stanley Kubrick had fallen in love with. She is a warm, witty, fast-talking storyteller with perfect comic timing, whose mordant sensibility matched Kubrick’s own.
In late 1957 Kubrick returned from Germany to Los Angeles with Harlan and her three-year-old daughter Katharina from her previous marriage. “We both had been miserably married and decided never to marry again, we were all bitter and twisted,” Christiane said. “And then we married immediately, so it must be love.”17 (Stanley and Christiane married on April 14, 1958, in Las Vegas, though it wasn’t until 1961 that New York State issued his divorce decree from Ruth Sobotka.) In LA Christiane studied painting, drawing, and English at UCLA. She had always seen herself as an artist, despite her acting career, and after Paths of Glory she never acted again. But her paintings play a significant role in several Kubrick movies, including A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut.
After Paths of Glory “we were penniless in Beverly Hills,” Christiane recalled. Kubrick’s mother, Gert, who was “up on films,” was still buying his clothes. Before Spartacus, Kubrick made money playing poker. “I was a nervous wreck, I thought oh God I’ve landed in the Wild West, my husband makes money from poker to put dinner on the table.”18 Kubrick insisted that his cardplaying buddies, who included Martin Ritt, Calder Willingham, and Everett Sloane as well as Jimmy Harris and Vince Edwards, read Herbert Yardley’s Education of a Poker Player, a piquant autobiography containing much clever advice and some very exact probability tables. Kubrick made his poker gang write down the probability tables on notecards.
Meanwhile, Kubrick was having a dry spell with the studios. He told Michael Herr years later that “the way the studios were run in the fifties made him think of Clemenceau’s remark about the Allies winning World War I because our generals were marginally less stupid than their generals.”19 By the end of the decade Kubrick would carve out substantial independence from the studio system, but first he had to prove he could make money for them.
Paths of Glory opened on Christmas Day, 1957. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times panned it, but his dislike of the movie was nothing compared to that of the French government, which banned it until 1974. The French seem to have been particularly incensed by Gerald Fried’s use of the Marseillaise in his score. In the British sector of Berlin, French soldiers disrupted the screening by throwing stink bombs. Even worse, the Berlin Film Festival buckled to French pressure and refused to show Paths of Glory. Like The Killing, Paths of Glory failed to turn a profit.
Just when his finances were in a deep hole, the twenty-nine-year-old Kubrick attracted the notice of one of Hollywood’s top moneymaking stars, Marlon Brando. At the time Brando was under contract with Paramount for a western written by the young Sam Peckinpah, who had adapted Charles Neider’s novel about Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. Brando would play Billy, of course. Now he just needed actors and a director. Brando had liked The Killing, and early in 1958, after Paths of Glory, he pitched the western to Kubrick, who was quickly sold on the idea.
Kirk Douglas generously agreed to let Kubrick work with Brando, despite the director’s deal with Bryna. The risk for Kubrick was that, Brando being Brando, the star rather than the director would be running the show. But Brando’s box office magic would make it worthwhile, or so Kubrick thought.
Unfortunately, One-Eyed Jacks, as Brando called his western, hit a long series of snags. Kubrick hated Peckinpah’s script, and he persuaded Brando to bring in his old screenwriting partner Calder Willingham to revise it. The story conferences dragged on through the summer of 1958, moving to Brando’s home on Mulholland Drive after his wife left him in September. The stone-faced Brando, who clearly wanted more sway over the script, sat cross-legged on the floor and banged an enormous Chinese gong to cut off arguments.
In a letter Willingham wrote to Kubrick the following year, he recalled the miserable boredom of poker games with Brando and added that he still resented Kubrick’s playing along with the star’s ideas.20 The tedious routine of cards and talk finally ended in November, when Brando made it clear that he had no more use for Kubrick. Brando now wanted to direct One-Eyed Jacks himself. Meanwhile, he had hired Karl Malden for the movie for a staggering $400,000, and his shooting budget would be even more extravagant. One-Eyed Jacks nearly drowned in an ocean of red ink, but it eventually came out in 1961, and put the kibosh on Brando’s fledgling directorial career. Twelve years later, Peckinpah returned to his script and made what is probably his greatest movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
“I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando while he directed a movie,” Kubrick recalled about the One-Eyed Jacks script sessions.21 Meanwhile, Kubrick hadn’t made a movie in almost two years. But that was about to change. In February 1958, while he was still tangled up with Brando, Kubrick got an unexpected phone call from Kirk Douglas.
Douglas was playing the gladiator Spartacus, leader of the failed slave revolt that shook Rome. He had bought the story from Howard Fast, author of the novel Spartacus (1951), and he was using the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo as his scriptwriter. Universal had insisted on Anthony Mann as director, but after a week and a half on the set, it was clear to Douglas that Mann wasn’t working out. Mann had made the mistake of criticizing Douglas’s acting. He told Douglas he was wrong to play Spartacus at the beginning of the film as a “Neanderthal” and an “idiot.”22 So Mann had to go, and Douglas instantly thought of Kubrick as his replacement.
Douglas reached Kubrick in the middle of a weekend poker game and told him he’d have to start in twenty-four hours, early Monday morning. Fast’s Spartacus was already one of Kubrick’s favorite novels, so he didn’t hesitate.23 But directing a full-scale sword-and-sandals epic was something new for Kubrick.
After Spartacus came out, a journalist asked Kubrick whether it had been exciting to work with such a distinguished cast, which included, along with Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis, and Jean Simmons. Kubrick gave a sardonic wince: “Oh yes, I was given a beautiful dinner and a gold plate, you know.”24 Making the film was no party. The select club of actors that Douglas had assembled feuded constantly. When the bisexual Olivier wasn’t flirting with Tony Curtis, he was telling Laughton how to read his lines, and since Laughton was being paid only $41,000 to Olivier’s $250,000, Olivier’s advice stung.
For the first time in his career, Kubrick felt outranked by the eminences surrounding him. One day on the set he feared that his actors Olivier and Laughton were whispering together about him, only to discover that they were running their lines. Kubrick stayed in control of the picture, yet he faced more challenges to his authority on Spartacus than ever before.
Kubrick had trouble with the Hollywood veteran Russell Metty, his cinematographer. Metty wasn’t used to a director looking over his shoulder, insisting on a particular lens or camera angle. While Kubrick gazed through the camera, Metty made fun of the youngster by crouching behind him and pretending to peer through his Zippo lighter as if it were a viewfinder. Notoriously, Metty at one point growled over his coffee cup of Jack Daniel’s, “Get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off my crane.”25 But Kubrick, just thirty years old and looking even younger, kept his cool, and continued telling Metty what to do. Spartacus’s camerawork is rhythmic and artful, especially in the gladiatorial battles, and this is Kubrick’s achievement more than Metty’s.
Kubrick may have sidelined Metty, but he relied heavily on Saul Bass, who storyboarded the final battle and designed the gladiatorial school for Spartacus. Bass, known for his title sequences for Hitchcock movies, was a brilliant designer who favored geometric formations for the Roman armies. Bass came up with the inspired idea of having the slave armies roll burning logs at Crassus’s Romans.
The stolid, wholehearted epic feel of Spartacus mostly rules out Kubrick’s characteristic pessimism and black humor. But at times it does look like a Kubrick movie. When Crassus (Olivier) tries to seduce the slave Antoninus (Curtis) with a double entendre about liking both snails and oysters (a scene that Universal, fearing the censors’ disapproval, cut from the U.S. release), Kubrick shows the two men from a distance. He told Ginna, “The whole thing is shot in a long shot through a kind of filmy curtain which covers his bathtub, and the figures are only about half the height of the screen. And by doing this, I think we achieve the effect of somebody [the viewer] sort of eavesdropping from the next room.”26
The scene ends in a sharply pointed way. While Crassus gives a speech about the obligation to submit to eternal Rome, we realize that he is talking to himself: Antoninus has left to join the slave revolt. Kubrick’s devastating ironic touch is visible here as in few other places in the movie.
Kubrick also brought out superb acting in a scene between Douglas and Woody Strode, who played the Ethiopian slave Draba. The two men are waiting to fight to the death in front of Crassus and his entourage. In a silent and excruciatingly tense sequence, the camera alternates close-ups between them, shot-reverse-shot. Draba gives Douglas a cold, threatening smile, but then spares him during their battle. Instead of telling Strode what to do in the scene, Kubrick played Prokofiev for him, and the music helped Strode conjure up the Ethiopian gladiator’s monumental dignity. Kubrick sometimes liked to play music for his actors to guide them into a scene: it was, he said, “a device used, you know, by silent film actors—they all had their own violinists, who would play for them during the takes.”27
Spartacus was “the only film I wasn’t happy with,” Kubrick told the interviewer Danielle Heymann. “First of all I told Kirk, when he showed me the script, what I felt was not right about it, and he said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, you are so right,’ but nothing ever changed.” Swayed by Trumbo, Douglas didn’t in the end “change any of the things that were dumb.”28 At one point Douglas took Kubrick to see his psychoanalyst so he could better understand the star’s inner life. But that didn’t reduce their sparring over the film.
Douglas wanted a robust, plainly heroic Spartacus. In a letter to Stan Margulies, then a Bryna production aide, Douglas worried that Spartacus suffered too much in the script as it stood: his “joylessness” was a problem. “I think perhaps we err when we make Spartacus almost too-human with his doubts and fears,” Douglas added. Spartacus was doing too much “counter-punch[ing],” Douglas thought, and he worried that the hero wouldn’t “bring the crowd to its feet with a roar.” Douglas summed up: “Spartacus, I am trying to say, must personally convince the audience that this rebellion is good. . . . Merely to start the ball rolling, and to roll it as far as one man has power to roll it, is resounding, stimulating and joyful.”29
Douglas didn’t get his way entirely. Kubrick’s own downbeat sense of Spartacus as headed for failure is a key element in the movie. Spartacus is not really a joyful rebel. Though he glows with genial satisfaction when he gazes at the men and women he is leading, he is more often grim than exuberant. The slaves celebrate no victories, instead losing all their battles against Rome, and the revolt is continually shadowed by the defeat we know will happen in the end.30
Kubrick wanted Spartacus to be plagued by misgivings about the human costs of revolt, as he is in Arthur Koestler’s novel The Gladiators (1939), which he read during production. Ustinov supported Kubrick’s idea of a complex, doubt-stricken Spartacus. In a letter he wrote to Kubrick sometime during the production, Ustinov bluntly disagreed with Douglas’s plan to simplify the movie’s hero. He complained that Spartacus’s “doubts, his bewilderments have been sacrificied [sic] for the sake of activity, of crisp decision. Nothing is more boring theatrically than the man who knows what he wants and gets it.”31 Ustinov’s letter surely reminded the director that in a Kubrick movie the hero is nearly always confused, whereas Spartacus seems unusually clear-minded.
Ustinov also told Kubrick that the film should focus on the corrupt, labyrinthine nature of Roman politics, instead of portraying Rome as “proud . . . majestic and intractable.” (Kubrick, who was reading Sallust and Plutarch during shooting, must have agreed.) The film’s picture of political intrigue wasn’t working, Ustinov argued, because the Roman factions were “plot[ting] in platitudes.” Crassus was a disappointment to Ustinov because “his desire to understand Spartacus seems to have become fretful and constipated rather than mysterious and troubling, as it once was.”
The corruption that Ustinov attributes to Rome often appears when Kubrick depicts the world of the powerful, as in Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket. So Kubrick must have been sympathetic to Ustinov’s point of view. But Spartacus turned out much simpler than Ustinov wanted. The hero is not plagued by doubts, and his chief Roman antagonist, Crassus, instead of being an intriguing and repellent man of power like Broulard in Paths of Glory, merely spouts shallow conservative clichés about Rome’s eternal greatness. In a misplaced topical twist, Trumbo made Crassus at the end into a McCarthy-like figure, hunting “enemies of the state” and crowing, “Lists of the disloyal have been compiled.”
Kubrick, an adept handler of actors, was put to the test on the Spartacus set. In addition to battling with Douglas, he also had to soothe a very discontented Olivier. In June, Kubrick wrote to Olivier apologizing for not being able to come by for a farewell drink after the end of shooting. “I hope that when you see the finished film,” Kubrick wrote, “you will be less disturbed about certain things than [you] are now. In any case, I should like to thank you for the decent way you behaved about the things with which you were in such disagreement.”32
Spartacus at times displays a wholesome, populist tinge utterly uncharacteristic of Kubrick. Pauline Kael described Spartacus’s slaves as “a giant kibbutz on the move,” and so they are, with toddlers playing, men roasting meat, women weaving, and all caring for each other, a heartfelt antidote to Roman cruelty and decadence.33 This antihistorical hokum, supplied by Trumbo and Douglas, could not have been pleasing to Kubrick’s gimlet eye.
Kubrick could not subtly express irony at the hero’s expense in Spartacus as he had done in Paths of Glory. But he did bristle at one key crowd-pleaser. Kubrick disliked the movie’s most famous moment, the “I am Spartacus” scene, when Spartacus’s fellow slaves conceal his identity from the Romans by each declaring himself the man sought.
The movie’s final scene does look like genuine Kubrick. Spartacus and his rebellious slaves hang from crucifixes as far the eye can see. Varinia (Jean Simmons) shows her husband their baby and tells him, “This is your son. He is free, Spartacus, he is free, he is free.” Now comes what might be the film’s best moment: the tortured Spartacus, nailed to his cross, says nothing. Spartacus refuses the Hollywood ending that Varinia asks for. Rather than agreeing that his quest for freedom lives on in his child, he remains locked in the pain of defeat.
Kubrick had just become a father when he filmed this scene. Anya, Stanley’s first child with Christiane, was born on April 1, 1959 (another daughter, Vivian, arrived the following August, a few months before Spartacus was released). Kubrick remembered standing outside the hospital room wondering, “ ‘What am I doing here?’ and then you go in and look down at the face of your child and—zap!—the most ancient programming takes over and your response is one of wonder and joy and pride.”34 The dying Spartacus, another new father, has a despairing response instead. Kubrick was careful to cordon off his personal feeling about paternity from the finale of his movie.
While editing Spartacus, Kubrick, relieved that shooting was over, let off steam by making mild mischief. “Stanley used to draw all kinds of porno pictures on my shoes,” said editor Robert Lawrence.35 During breaks he played stickball in the Universal New York Street stage set, and in the editing room he liked to bounce a tennis ball against the wall, like Jack in The Shining.
Kubrick and his crew spent nine months of postproduction work on the sound for Spartacus. Kubrick was meticulous about the sound effects, demanding that each sound be “panned,” or placed, precisely right. Recording engineer Don Rogers remembered, “Every footstep, every bang, every crash . . . it took hundreds of hours to pan that stuff—it was incredible.”36 The work took place during the wee hours of the night, starting at 7 PM, with Kubrick arriving about 11 PM and the sound team breaking for lunch at 2 AM.
When Spartacus premiered in October 1960, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper complained that the movie was “written by a Commie,” but she had little effect on ticket sales. One night President Kennedy even snuck out of the White House in the middle of a snowstorm to see it, as part of a pitch for keeping movie productions in the United States.
Spartacus was made in Technirama, a widescreen process that involved running 35mm film horizontally through the camera. The panoramic visual splendor of the film, along with its blockbuster-style emotional cheesiness, spelled box office success. The movie trotted out many of the well-worn Hollywood tropes: righteous indignation (a Kirk Douglas specialty), solidarity with the underdog, the tenderness of budding romance.
Spartacus made a mint for Universal. But Hollywood spectacular would never again be Kubrick’s brand. His next project was by contrast a bold taboo breaker: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” the film’s trailer asked when it came out in June 1962. It was a good question. Nabokov’s shocking novel showcases a louche European, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, who preys on delectable prepubescent girls. Transplanted from Paris to Ramsdale, an American suburb, Humbert boards in the house of a chattering, self-absorbed widow named Charlotte Haze. Twelve-year-old Lolita, Charlotte’s daughter, proves to be the perfect nymphet, and helpless Humbert targets her avidly. Charlotte falls in love with Humbert, marries him, and quickly dies in a freak accident, leaving Humbert free to have his affair with Lolita. After she disappears and leaves him crushed, Humbert tracks down his nemesis Clare Quilty, who stole Lolita from him. The novel ends (and Kubrick’s film begins, in a flashback) when Humbert shoots Quilty.
Lolita was a succès de scandale in Paris and then in America, where it appeared in 1958. But it seemed far too controversial for Hollywood. It was, after all, a book full of sexual details, narrated by a charming antihero who glories in his affair with a twelve-year-old girl.
Harris and Kubrick bought the rights to Lolita in the fall of 1958 from Nabokov’s agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar. It wasn’t cheap: Harris-Kubrick shelled out seventy-five thousand dollars for the first-year option on the book, and promised another seventy-five thousand for screen rights. To finance this purchase, Harris and Kubrick sold the rights to The Killing to United Artists. Meanwhile, Nabokov’s novel had hit the New York Times best-seller list: it was number one by the end of September.
When Douglas heard that Harris and Kubrick were planning to film Nabokov’s novel, he shrugged off their obligation to Bryna. Douglas was sure that Lolita would never get made because censors would stand in the way, so he let the two men buy out their end of the contract in exchange for Kubrick agreeing to direct Spartacus.
Nabokov turned down the offer to write the Lolita screenplay, so Kubrick enlisted Calder Willingham, who had first told him about the book. Unhappy with the result, Kubrick wrote cuttingly to his old scriptwriting partner, “I hate to sound like old Marlon but you seem entrenched in your style of having the actors say what the scene is about”: Willingham, Kubrick charged, was “explain[ing] in dialog what should be acted out and left to the audience to discover.”37 Like every great film director, Kubrick wanted to tell stories in pictures rather than words, and he wanted his dialogue spare, even from the florid and eloquent Humbert. Willingham’s response was lacerating. Reminding Kubrick that he had brought Lolita to his attention in the first place, an idea, he said, that would make the director a rich man for life, Willingham called him vengeful and ungrateful.38
With Willingham gone, Kubrick was relieved to learn that Nabokov had changed his mind and agreed to write the script But the producer Martin Russ was not so sure, asking Kubrick, “Has Nabokov written for films? Does he have a knowledge of films and cinematic construction? . . . Do you intend to teach Nabokov this cinematic outlook yourself? Will he be taught?”39 Russ’s doubts were well-founded: Nabokov’s script reads more like a long, drawn-out riff on his novel than a conventional screenplay.
By the first day of March 1960 the novelist was already in Hollywood and at work on the screenplay, hunting butterflies in the morning and scribbling on his notecards in the afternoons. Meanwhile, Swifty Lazar introduced Nabokov and his wife, Vera, to some shining stars, including Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne. When Nabokov innocently asked Wayne, “And what do you do?” he answered humbly, “I’m in pictures.”40
“You couldn’t make it. You couldn’t lift it,” Jimmy Harris said years later about the four hundred–page screenplay that Nabokov completed in June.41 Kubrick warned the novelist that his script would make a seven-hour movie, so Nabokov delivered a shortened version in September.
In the end Kubrick so heavily revised Nabokov’s script that it was hardly recognizable. This was a good thing. Nabokov’s screenplay for Lolita begins with Humbert’s dead mother (“picnic, lightning”) rising into the clouds like Mary Poppins, holding a parasol. This kind of sardonic whimsy did not appeal to Kubrick. But he preferred not to tussle with the eminent author, so he kept his distance during Nabokov’s stint in LA. In the end Kubrick gave Nabokov sole screenwriting credit for the picture, reasoning that reviewers would be less likely to accuse him of mutilating a modern classic if they thought that Nabokov himself was responsible for the gaps between novel and film.
When Nabokov saw Lolita a few days before its official release at the end of May 1962, he “discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used.” Still, Nabokov was delighted by some of the movie’s inspirations, like the ping-pong match between Humbert and Quilty. But he watched the film with only “reluctant pleasure,” annoyed by Kubrick’s considerable departures from his screenplay.42
Casting Lolita took some time. David Niven wanted to play Humbert, but his agent vetoed the idea as too risqué. Another candidate was Laurence Olivier, who wrote to Kubrick in December 1959 that he couldn’t see how Nabokov’s “brilliant, original and witty descriptive powers” could be transferred to the screen.43 But he still asked for a first look at any script. Then Olivier’s agent, like Niven’s, said no: playing Humbert would hurt his client’s image. Finally, James Mason, who admired Nabokov’s novel, agreed to take the part. Mason had a few years earlier given a heartbreaking performance in A Star Is Born, as a fading middle-aged man who ends up playing second fiddle to the young starlet he loves—not unlike the Lolita story as Kubrick tells it.
With Mason cast, Harris and Kubrick had no trouble finding a distributor: Associated Artists, headed by an old school pal, Kenneth Hyman, and Hyman’s father, Eliot. (Warner Bros had wanted the film, but the studio demanded final say on creative decisions, which was too much for Kubrick to swallow.)
Harris and Kubrick decided to make the movie in England, where they could write off a substantial amount of the cost if 80 percent of the workers on Lolita were U.K. subjects. This was the start of Kubrick’s artistic exile to Britain, where it was so much cheaper to make movies than LA or New York.
Now Kubrick had to find his Lolita. Harris had told Kubrick they might be able to get Brigitte Bardot for the role, but her over-the-top sexiness was not what the director ordered. Kubrick presented Tuesday Weld to Nabokov, who nixed her (he had enlisted Nabokov’s help in casting the film). Then, in June 1960, Kubrick noticed a fourteen-year-old actress named Sue Lyon, who had appeared on TV and in commercials. “She was cool and non-giggly. . . . She was enigmatic without being dull,” Kubrick remembered about Lyon’s screen test. As for Nabokov, he was instantly convinced when he saw Lyon’s picture: “No doubt about it; she is the one,” he said.44 Nabokov also gave the nod to Shelley Winters, Kubrick’s choice for Charlotte Haze.
Lyon, who was accompanied by her mother to Elstree Studios, had a snappy wit both on and off the set. The Kubrick archives contain a funny letter from Lyon, who called herself “Head Pupil” and offered Jimmy Harris the job of “superintendent of Elstree School for Girls”: “Your salary will be ten (10) pieces of gum per week so you can cope with our excellent student body.”45
Kubrick molded Lyon’s performance. In some early notes he wrote, “Lolita—moods of naivete and deception, charm and vulgarity, blue sulks and rosy mirth, disorganized boredom, intense, sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed, goofing off—diffused dreaming in a boyish hoodlum way.” Later on he added that she should have “a certain quality of hardness,” “sulky, tentative and cagey.” She was to be “a willowy, angular, ballet school type,” “enigmatic, intriguing, indifferent and American.”46 Under Kubrick’s guidance, Lyon came to embody the multifaceted, sour-sweet American Lolita that the director envisioned in his notes.
Kubrick’s most brilliant stroke was picking Peter Sellers to play Quilty, turning Humbert’s nemesis into a major presence in the film. Kubrick was a fan of Sellers, then a rising comedian and film star, as well as a British citizen, which made him ideal for the movie because of the United Kingdom’s 80 percent rule. Egged on by Kubrick, Sellers injected a manic nervous energy into his role to counterpoint the rather slow-moving Humbert.
Kubrick saw Quilty as a mystery. Quilty’s presence in the story “should give us a kind of ‘Maltese Falcon,’ what’s-going-on type of suspense,” Kubrick wrote to Peter Ustinov, who had become friends with the director during Spartacus. “Every time we catch a glimpse of Quilty we can imagine anything, police, pervert or parent.”47
Kubrick started Sellers rolling by scripting much of the movie’s first scene, the flashback in which Humbert kills Quilty. “I am Spartacus,” Quilty, togaed in a bedsheet, tells Humbert. “Hey, you come to free the slaves or somethin’ ”? Elsewhere he relied heavily on Sellers’s miraculous gift for improvisation. “He was the only actor I knew who could really improvise,” Kubrick said later, adding that Sellers “is receptive to comic ideas most of his contemporaries would think unfunny and meaningless.”48
When we meet Quilty at the beginning of Lolita, Humbert has tracked the villain to his baroque lair and is about to shoot him. This is the end of Humbert’s story: Jimmy Harris claimed it was his idea to put it at the start of the movie, for a noirish touch. In this opening scene, Humbert stares down Quilty’s madcap performance. He gives him a cold appraising look, the look, he thinks, of judgment, as he tells Quilty he’s going to die very soon. But Humbert, unlike Lolita, cannot master a withering stare, and Quilty continues bopping through his nutty shtick. The doomed Quilty has Humbert’s number, allying him with his own perversion (he makes arty porno movies, we learn in the novel): “To attend executions, how would you like that?” he asks Humbert. “Just you there, nobody else. Just watching, watching. You like watching, Captain?”
The enigmatic Quilty that Kubrick and Sellers invented is cool as a cucumber, and hipper than anyone in the room. At the parents and teens dance with his dead cool beatnik sidekick, Vivian Darkbloom, Quilty steals a glance at his watch, and melds this gesture of chic boredom into his dance moves.
Kubrick wrote to Ustinov that “we shall treat psychiatrists with the same irreverence that Mr. Nabokov does in the book,” though Kubrick appreciated Freud, unlike Nabokov, who liked to launch jibes at the “Viennese quack.”49 The director spurred Sellers’s turn as the fussy, Teutonic Dr. Zempf (actually Quilty in disguise), who sits in shadow in Humbert’s house and expresses his therapeutic concern for Lolita. “Acute repression of the libido, of the natural instincts,” is his diagnosis. Sellers’s hand gestures describe an invisible melon (Lolita should be developing a well-rounded personality) as he emits a stiff man-of-the-world chuckle.
Kubrick and Sellers found a model for Quilty’s speech patterns in the jazz impresario Norman Granz; Kubrick even asked Granz to record parts of the Lolita script for Sellers to study. But Quilty also sounds like Kubrick himself, with his skittering, Bronx-inflected style of talk. As the critic Richard Corliss notes, there is a touch of Lenny Bruce too in Quilty. Sellers seems sweaty under the collar, nervous, quick, and defensive, caroming from one prickly verbal stunt to another.50
While working with Sellers on Lolita, Kubrick began his habit of writing down actors’ improvisations and making them part of the next day’s script. (In a Kubrick shoot the script was always being revised day to day.) “If a scene didn’t seem quite right,” Sellers remembered, “we’d read it from the script and pick out the parts which went best. Then we’d sit around a table with a tape recorder and ad-lib on the lines of the passages we’d chosen; in that way we’d get perfectly natural dialogue which could then be scripted and used.”51 In his later movies, too, most notably with Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick would make actors’ improvisations part of the script, rather than using improvised scenes in his final cut.
Encouraged by Kubrick, Sellers seems to be scrawling scurrilous graffiti across the tender love story of Humbert and Lo. Quilty is “always trying something on,” like Sellers himself, says the actor’s biographer Roger Lewis. “His endless re-creations also implicitly criticize the rest of us for being rigid and conventional, for being stuck with who we are.”52
In contrast to the boundary-busting Quilty, Humbert is a square standing in the way of Lo’s teenybopper fun. Kubrick’s Humbert, unlike Nabokov’s, is not a schemer. He doesn’t plot to ensnare Lolita. Instead Kubrick gives us Humbert the squirming sufferer. Mason plays the role with a wincing, put-upon look. His manner, like that of a man who has misplaced his glasses, is sometimes too detached to be truly affecting. But Mason signals genuine pain beneath his stylish, mildly disoriented exterior. Humbert’s cruelty, on abundant display in Nabokov, appears only briefly in the movie, when he reads aloud Charlotte’s helplessly ardent love letter. Here the chortling Mason, unable to stifle himself, lets loose with a guffaw, then a full-throttle whoop. Mason, happy as a cat, shines wickedly too in the bathtub scene that comes on the heels of Charlotte’s death. (Nabokov loved seeing Humbert in the bath with a glass of scotch balanced on his hairy chest.)
The novel’s Humbert is a godlike master of the higher sarcasm, a charming devil eager to get on our good side, like any conniving convict, by showing remorse for his sins. We need to beware of Nabokov’s hero most when he is humble Hum, expressing poignant regret for wrecking Lolita’s childhood. But the barbed tour de force that is Nabokov’s Humbert, with suave acrobatics walking the tightrope of his crimes, remains absent from the movie. Kubrick uses Humbert’s voice-over sparingly, and it is devoid of verbal pirouettes. Whereas the novel makes us revel in Humbert’s prowess with words, in Kubrick’s movie he is often tongue-tied.
Kubrick nearly omits what Nabokov stresses: this is a child rapist we’re dealing with. For the movie’s latter half Humbert is the desperate loser, pinioned by orderlies in a hospital, in a starkly lit, noirish scene, and raving about the disappearance of his stepdaughter. Humbert’s madcap rival Quilty steals the show, courtesy of Sellers’s comic genius—something that doesn’t happen in the novel, where Quilty almost seems a figment of Humbert’s imagination.
If Humbert is Quilty’s straight man, Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, is Humbert’s. Shelley Winters’s Charlotte is juicelessly zaftig. Whiny even when she cha-chas, puffy around the eyes, and vulgar in her pretension to culture, Charlotte seems an unstoppable kitsch express. We dislike this cloying, stupid woman who is so mean-minded toward her daughter, and are relieved when she gets killed.
Winters remarked that she felt lonely on the set, and guessed that Kubrick wanted this response from her, to reinforce Charlotte’s hopelessly pathetic stature. In fact, he was frustrated by her mulish obstinacy on the set. “I think the lady’s gonna have to go,” he mused at one point, but in the end didn’t fire Winters.53 This was the right decision: no one else could have played the Kubrickized Charlotte.
Kubrick reimagined Charlotte just as he did the rest of Nabokov’s characters. In the novel she is a Marlene Dietrich wannabe, less helpless than predatory, unlike Kubrick’s sodden hausfrau. In Kubrick’s movie, Charlotte’s motherly intrusiveness saps any possible sex appeal. Contrast Christiane Harlan Kubrick, who in her song at the end of Paths of Glory is both sexy and kind, fragile and nurturing.
Kubrick, even more than Nabokov, makes Charlotte unbearably clingy. Imagining Charlotte, he must have remembered Ruth the suction cup, the wife who fastened herself to him relentlessly in her effort to become essential to her husband’s work. In Lolita, Humbert gets to discard the burdensome, too-present wife in favor of a young girl, the ideal of his romantic imagination.
The choice between wife and daughter (or quasi-daughter) haunts Kubrick’s work. For decades Kubrick was possessed by but afraid to make Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1926), in part because it depicts a husband who strays from his spouse and is drawn to younger women, including several Lolitaesque nymphets. Christiane Kubrick turned out to be less of a creative partner for Kubrick than his youngest daughter, Vivian, his protégée. Vivian, who appeared briefly as a toddler in 2001, became a director at seventeen, with a documentary about the making of The Shining, and her father urged her to film a novel by Colette, a writer he much admired.54 But by the mid-nineties Vivian had fled from the pressure of her father’s ambitions for her. The Lolita story oddly foreshadows the relation between Kubrick and Vivian—granting, of course, the contrast between Kubrick’s proper paternal love and Humbert’s sexual abuse of Lolita. Lolita finally escapes Humbert and transforms herself into a grown-up he could never have imagined, just as Vivian fled from her father’s love in the 1990s and transplanted herself to Los Angeles and Scientology.
Long before Vivian, Sue Lyon was Kubrick’s daughterly disciple. Adept at following his direction, she delivers a wonder of a Lolita, insolent and insouciant. Her Lo is snooty, a little grubby, absentminded, and self-pleased: her majesty the teen. The ravenous Lo devouring a sandwich, prepared by a pampering Humbert, presages Clockwork’s Alex, another adolescent with a healthy appetite. During the tense argument between father and stepdaughter after the school play, Lyon is a bratty virtuoso of gum-chewing, her eyes shooting darts of disdain.
Lyon can be steely too. (Kubrick wanted his Lolita hard.) When Humbert visits the older Lolita, now pregnant and married, she bluntly rejects him. Here Lyon is coldhearted, nearly oblivious. In the novel Lolita also dismisses Humbert’s last-minute plea for her love, but still calls him “honey,” throwing him a scrap of feeling that is absent from Kubrick’s scene.
The toughness of the pregnant Lolita becomes, four decades later in Eyes Wide Shut, Alice Harford’s knowing confidence at facing down a man. Both films show the man’s fear of the woman, and in both, his blind insistence shows he doesn’t want to know her, but instead to have her. We don’t usually realize how Kubrick grasps the subtleties of male insecurity, because he is most often flamboyantly heavy-handed when he depicts men behaving badly. But in Lolita, as in Eyes Wide Shut, he is more finely shaded.
The first emergence of Lolita is one of Kubrick’s, and Lyon’s, finest inspirations. The flustered Humbert glimpses her sunbathing and recognizes his mythic nymphet, and then a smile ever-so-slowly dawns on Lolita’s face, not a smile of happiness or excitement, but instead a little cat and mouse, as if she has just dreamed up a winning move. A smile of prediction, really. Sue Lyon plays her first scene perfectly.
With that first sight of Lolita, Kubrick gives her the edge over Humbert, and she keeps it for most of the movie. We don’t often see in Kubrick the desperate, lonely Lolita, shuttled through motels across America in an existence as artificial as a drug addict’s. In the movie Lolita, not Humbert, has the upper hand, as she attracts, manipulates, and finally flees from him.
Kubrick feared depicting Lolita as a victim, probably because our sympathy for Humbert would have drained away. When Humbert tells Lolita about her mother’s death, the screen fades before we see this perplexed twelve-year-old take the news in. Yet Lyon implies her suffering with subtlety: she appears superbly blank and unreadable at times, hinting at what Humbert in the novel calls “that look I cannot exactly describe . . . an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity.”55 Somewhere beneath the surface of Lyon’s performance lurks Lolita the trapped animal, her feelings deliberately dead.
Kubrick’s Lolita is a symphony of emotions, swinging between Humbert’s possessive love and Lolita’s wish to escape him. “Lolita is really like a piece of music, a series of attitudes and emotions that sort of sweep you through the story,” Kubrick told Terry Southern. He used recorded music to get his actors in the right mood on the set, just as he had with Spartacus. Songs from West Side Story sparked Winters’s tears before Humbert, “and she would cry, very quickly, great authentic tears,” Kubrick said to Southern. “And let’s see, yeah, Irma la Douce, that would always floor Mason,” he added.56
Kubrick’s musical choices for Winters and Mason tell us something: his Lolita is less satire than sentiment. The movie mocks American suburban mores, but more significant, it celebrates the myth of romantic love. Kubrick’s Lolita is in fact about love rather than sex. There is nothing particularly sexy about Lyon’s Lolita, attired in a grown-up’s shlumpy nightgown. Instead, Kubrick delivers a straight-ahead love story, with Humbert the jilted party.
In a letter to Ustinov, Kubrick referred to Lionel Trilling’s essay on the novel, and remarked in Trilling’s vein that “Humbert’s love” is “in the tradition of courtly love: a love that is at once scandalous, masochistic and tortured.” He added that “the story will be told in the subtle style of realistic comedy. But it is a comedy in the way ‘La Ronde’ is a comedy; as ‘Le Plaisir’; as ‘I Vitelloni’ are comedies.”57 Ophüls and Fellini have a free hand with pathos, but their touch is delicate too, and Kubrick follows after them. Lolita is in the end a mélange of comedy, heartbreak, and suspense. It is, too, an American road movie: Kubrick sent a production crew to America to scour the landscape for suitable motels.
Kubrick wasn’t entirely happy with Lolita. He told an interviewer, Jeremy Bernstein, that the movie’s “total lack of eroticism spoiled some of the pleasure of it”—but if it had been erotic, he added, “the film could not have been made.”58 With a sexier Lolita the love story that Trilling saw in the novel would have been more exciting, and the sense of the forbidden pleasurably heightened.
It was a shrewd move for Kubrick to keep eroticism out of Lolita, and so avoid risking the furor ignited by Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956), with the magnetically sexy Carroll Baker beatifically sucking her thumb. Kubrick, who greatly admired Kazan, no doubt had this precedent in mind. Even the unsexy Lolita ran the risk of being condemned as sinful. In May 1961 John Collins of Christian Action expressed his fear that the movie “could lead to rape or even murder.”59 In the end the movie got a C rating—Condemned—from the Catholic Legion of Decency, which meant that Catholics who saw it would be committing a sin. Eliot Hyman of Seven Arts tried to sway the Legion’s Monsignor Little with a hefty contribution, but his morals remained intact.
Nabokov played with sex and morals in a way that Kubrick couldn’t. Nabokov’s novel is erotic only for about a hundred pages, the first third of the book. After that Humbert’s devastation of Lolita’s childhood stains any sexual delight the reader might take in the story. We gradually realize that Nabokov the magician has tricked us by promising the salacious but instead delivering a prolonged moral verdict against Humbert. When Nabokov said that Lolita was purely aesthetic and had “no moral in tow,” he misled us. The novel’s risk-taking pirouettes are half the story. The other is its lethal finger-pointing at Humbert the criminal.
Kubrick couldn’t trap the viewer the way Nabokov trapped the reader, by mixing moral responses with sensual and aesthetic ones. Alex’s antics in A Clockwork Orange excite and disgust the audience at once, but the censorship of 1962 made this kind of double edge impossible for Lolita. Geoffrey Shurlock, who oversaw the Motion Pictures Association’s Production Code, was particularly concerned about the scene where Lolita whispers to Humbert about a game she played with a boy at camp. Kubrick agreed to fade out on her whisper, cutting her next line, “This is how we start.”
Seven Arts made a deal with MGM to distribute Lolita. The film, which cost about two million dollars, grossed four and a half million in its opening run. Because Harris and Kubrick financed the film through a tax-sheltered Swiss company they had set up, Anya Productions (named after Kubrick’s daughter), they reaped a windfall.
The critics liked Lolita. Pauline Kael even said it was the first truly new American comedy since Preston Sturges. Kael had a point. Kubrick makes the mismatch between Sue Lyon and Mason as funny as that between Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in Sturges’s The Lady Eve, with Fonda the unworldly nerd felled by Stanwyck’s goddesslike charms. Like Stanwyck’s Eve, Lolita barely has to lift a finger, or a leg, for Humbert to lose his head.
But the reviews missed the movie’s key question about whether a man falls in love with an imagined or a real woman, a concern that will come to maturity nearly forty years later in Eyes Wide Shut. Lolita’s enigmatic, elusive, and illusory nature sneaks up on us gradually. Sitting on the Haze lawn, peering sardonically over her sunglasses, Lolita seems to us nothing more than a slightly plump, sardonic teen, as she gives this boring, obtuse grown-up a dose of her flirtatious contempt. Really, though, she is the cruel fair of courtly poetry, and every bit as unreal. If Lolita is a love story, then, it is also a portrait of delusion, that crucial Kubrick theme.
A week after their daughter Vivian was born in August 1960, the Kubricks went to England for the filming of Lolita, “with two babies and Katharina,” Christiane remembered. “We played rich people on the ship. There were posh cabins, a lot of old ladies using up their pensions.”60 After the shooting ended in March 1961, Kubrick and Christiane went on vacation: a five-day tour of the Normandy battlefields, clearly his idea rather than hers.
In 1962 the Kubricks were back in New York, on Central Park West at 84th Street, with Christiane taking painting and drawing classes every day at the Art Students League. “We went back to New York because we felt we had to,” Christiane said. But she found the city “a lousy place for small children.” She saw “police taking the children to schools. In the shops, roughs would slouch and sprawl across the doorways. . . . The women were harsh too. You just got elbowed out of the way by them.”61
What New York did have was a circle of friends including the madcap satirist Terry Southern and jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, who had given up music to produce movies and write short stories. Kubrick would develop his next two films, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among the freewheeling writers and artists of 1960s New York.
