EDNOTE. I have extracted the Kubrick-Nabokov part
from this long and thorough survey fo Kubrick's career. The full text is avail
at
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 11:03 AM
Subject: Nabokov and Napoleon
Dear
Colleagues,
As we know so well, Nabokov disdained
despots of all varieties and he would certainly have regarded Napoleon as a
despot. Given this thread regarding Countess Marie Walewska, there was a tribute
to Stanley Kubrick in the English paper The Independent entitled, "The
Man Who Would Be King", which touches upon both Napoleon and Nabokov. I'm
enclosing the article for your perusal.
Regards,
Alphonse
Vinh
NPR
The man who would be king: Stanley
Kubrick, THE INDEPENDENT
Mahbub Husain
Khan
03/20/1999
THE INDEPENDENT
Copyright
1999 WorldSources Online, Inc., A Joint Venture of FDCH, Inc. and World Times,
Inc.
Orson Welles achieved greatness with his
first film Citizen Kane in 1940. As some critics say, if he had then died
at
the age of 25, he would undoubtedly have been mourned today as the
ultimate American film-maker. Stanley
Kubrick, when he died in London on the
7th of March having crossed 70, strived to achieve greatness in his
films,
but in some of them fell just short of it trapping them within the
limits of the merely perfectable. For Kubrick, the
cinema was a laboratory
for observation and experiment and his findings have revealed a mind of the
highest
intellect and provoked more critical debate than any American
director since Orson Welles. Interestingly enough,
Kubrick is one director
all of whose films I have watched at sometime or other, in cinema theatres or on
video, some
in Dhaka, such as The Killing and Lolita in Naz cinema and
Spartacus in Balaka.
............................................
By now he was only in his early thirties,
but Kubrick was clearly remarkable and when he said he would film
Vladimir
Nabokov's Lolita, with the author doing the screenplay, that was very earnest
and very showy. The book
was so literary as to challenge the movies. It was
also a dangerous, sexy sensation, a novel known all over the
world. The
result was not Nabokov, as Kubrick drastically rewrote the novelist's profuse,
poetic script. Nor was it
the love story it needed to be so much as a chess
match between Humbert and Quilty with Sue Lyon's Lo as the
trophy. Worst of
all, the book's wondrous evocation of motel Americana was lost in the decision
to shoot the film in
England. So the movie Lolita was not that great as the
book, but it was entertaining. I watched the recent version of
Lolita as I
was writing this piece and found Jeremy Irons's Humbert too wooden, Melanie
Griffiths is no Shelly
Winters, and Sue Lyon vs Dominique Swan, Peter Sellers
vs Frank Langella - no contest. Adrian Lyne could not
match this warm
creation of Kubrick's. Kubrick has made Lyon both touching and ordinary, while
James Mason's
Humbert is the richest performance in Kubrick's work, as well
as the most poignant example of the flawed intellect
that so intrigued the
director, to say nothing of Shelley Winters or Peter Sellers.
Copyright 1999 THE INDEPENDENT all rights
reserved as distributed by WorldSources,
Inc.
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