570
PAULINE KAEL
going to look a gift horse in the mouth? Critics, who feel decay in
their bones.
The reviews are a comedy of grey matter. Doubts may have
remained after Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s ex cathedra judgment that
Lolita
is "willful, cynical and repellent ...
It
is not only inhuman; it
is anti-human. I am reluctantly glad that it was made, but I trust it
will have no imitators." Then, "for a learned and independent point of
view,
Show
invited Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned theologian,
to a screening in New York and asked him for an appraisal." The
higher primate discovered that " . . . the theme of this triangular
relationship exposes the unwholesome attitudes of mother, daughter,
and lover to a mature observer." This mature observer does however
find some "few saving moral insights"-though he thinks the film
"obscures" them-such as "the lesson of Lolita's essential redemption
in a happy marriage." (Had any
peripheral
redemptions lately?)
Bosley Crowther, who can always be counted on to miss the point,
writes that "Mr. Kubrick inclines to dwell too long over scenes that
have slight purpose, such as scenes in which Mr. Sellers does various
comical impersonations as the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason's
trail." These scenes "that have slight purpose" are, of course, just
what make
Lolita
new, these are the scenes that make it, for all its
slackness of pace and clumsy editing, a more exciting comedy than the
last American comedy,
Some Like It Hot.
Quilty the success, the writer
of scenarios and school plays, the policeman, the psychologist; Quilty
the genius, the man whom Lolita loves, Humbert's brother and tormentor
and parodist; Quilty the man of the world is a conception to talk about
alongside Melville's
The Confidence Man.
"Are you with someone?"
Humbert asks the policeman. And Quilty the policeman replies "I'm
not with someone. I'm with you."
The Quilty monologues are worked out almost like the routines
of silent comedy-they not only carry the action forward, they comment
on it, and this comment is the
new
action of the film. There has been
much critical condescension toward Sellers, who's alleged to be an
impersonator rather than an actor, a man with many masks but no
character. Now Sellers does a turn with the critics' terms: his Quilty
is a character employing masks, an actor with a merciless talent for
impersonation. He is indeed "the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason's
trail"-and he digs up every bone that "Mr. Mason" ineptly tries to
bury, and presents it to him. Humbert can conceal nothing. But our
horror is split by laughter: Humbert has it
coming-not
because he's
having "relations" with a minor, but because, in order to conceal his
