Preminger Ford and Kubrick

...Over the years, Preminger has picked up a reputation as a serious director...

...Too few people really know what a book Lolita is, and Nabokov has more than respected his own brilliance...

...The sadness with which the book left you moved in and out of the hilarity...

...The slapstick of the uncontrollable folding bed, played against Humbert's sexual anxiety, and the image behind the credits— Humbert's hand holding Lo's foot very gently, painting her toenails— are also memorable...

...What changes there are seem unavoidable and much slighter than I thought possible...

...The eroticism, the range of suggestion, the sense of the unreality of the real, and the precise vision of the "eerie vulgarity" of both nymphet and the society that formed her have been successfully worked into the movie...

...The theme is intact, the depravity present, and the plight of the truly cultivated man caught up in an insanely vulgar world remains moving...

...Unfortunately, though, these qualities are not sufficient for the film medium...

...I have not liked a Ford picture since My Darling Clementine, and that was about 20 years ago...

...If the current respect for Preminger is mildly puzzling, the nearly religious reverence that is felt for John Ford is astonishing...

...He has had to be somewhat devious, yet he has gotten most of what was vital to his book into the film...

...What entertainment there is comes from watching the cast at work...

...It is a thoroughly boring movie...

...Hollywood is full of craftsmen who cannot make good films...

...His devotees claim that he is a craftsman, but there isn't much in his recent work to back that up: little bits here and there, maybe, enough to make up an hour of quality out of 15 years work...

...Preminger has photographed Washington with his usual care, and he has paid attention to the outward details of Senate procedure...

...an actionless, colorless, humorless embarrassment that is atrociously acted...

...It looks as if it was conceived, written, cast and shot in a week, and Jimmy Stewart, Edmond O'Brien, even Ford, must have known it...

...Other scenes are nearly as good: the business in the motel lobby, with Quilty smirking in the foreground as Humbert and Lo check in with the desk clerk, a Mr...

...Mekas, and even Dwight MacDonald, have recommended his latest film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and one of the papers called it "the best since High Noon...

...With the phony aura of expose removed, Advise and Consent is a harmless enough entertainment...

...In addition, I liked the way Kubrick has lighted the film...

...But there is much more to be said for Kubrick...

...By the way, John Wayne appears to be laughing through most of his scenes...

...Franchot Tone, Henry Fonda, Pidgeon, Lew Ayres, Peter Lawford and George Grizzard are particularly good...

...There is more class in any single scene of Lolita than there is in all of Advise and Consent and Liberty Valance spliced together...

...The truth is that Ford has been making bad pictures for so long that it makes me wonder if he has ever been better than he is now...

...Swine...

...Only its lack of pretension keeps it from being like one of Stanley Kramer's overblown productions...

...But Preminger has used his physical bulk well, like a prop...

...Kubrick is alive to all of the script's implications, and he is up to Nabakov's boldness...

...Mason, as Humbert, and Shelly Winters, as Lolita's mother, do better work than they have ever done before...

...Preminger has taste, strength and a certain sophistication, even a kind of style...

...a Western with less feeling for the West than one finds in any given episode of Gunsmoke...

...These changes violate nothing, however...

...But those who watched Spartacus with novocained sensibilities ought to see Lolita as soon as possible...

...Finally, I liked what I have to call the perfection of Kubrick's casting...

...or the scene in which Humbert, drunk, soaks in a steaming tub while vacuous neighbors pelt him with condolences for his dead, detested wife...

...and, in a bit part, Burgess Meredith acts his way through Preminger's cartoon to suggest the movie it might have been...

...All he was able to do was win the Pulitzer Prize and titillate the thousands who "always knew that kind of thing went on down there...

...I liked, too, Kubrick's use of a horror movie at a drive-in to show Humbert's role in the Hayes household, Humbert's hysterics on reading Charlotte's confession of love (James Mason's greatest moment), the portrait, (mean eyes, pinched features), ashes and legend of the late Mr...

...It is one of the most satisfying Hollywood movies since the same director's Paths of Glory, four years ago—though it isn't completely Kubrick's, the way that one was...

...Also, the film begins where the novel ended, with the shooting of Clair Quilty...

...I liked the really shocking double-entendres and the steady outpour of euphemistic poop that makes up so much of the American vocabulary...

...Much of the credit belongs to Vladimir Nabokov...

...Thus, the pathos would have been destroyed if a scene as anarchic as Quilty's murder had come at the end...

...Lolita is played by a girl named Sue Lyons, who can look like Little Nell one minute and freeze you in the next with a leer that drips with lascivious awareness...

...They are all veterans, and most of them give the kind of performances you would expect them to give...

...And as Quilty, the walking catalogue of depravity, Peter Sellers is superb, an antic serpent handling dialects that range from Cocktailese to Ruritania-Dutch...

...Preminger has made his movie less cheap by making the politicians less identifiable with actual persons...

...His opening scene is a masterpiece of surrealism, with Quilty's incessant flow of ping-pong balls hurtling at Humbert, Humbert's absurd involvement in the game, Quilty's incredible attempt to stall the shooting, the horror of his becoming sober, and the bulletridden portrait...

...But I can hardly see one favorable thing that can be said for Valance...

...There are moments when his films come startlingly alive, such as the break from Acre prison in Exodus, but they are due mainly to the heaviness of his work in general...

...If he is, it is the closest thing to an honest performance he has ever given...

...A lot of people, in and out of the press, thought that Kubrick had sold out by making Spartacus, and that he would be doing it again by attempting Lolita...

...Hayes, "a great human being...

...Lolita is not 12, but more like 14 or 15...

...I hate to think of the mess that might have resulted if anyone else had done the screenplay...

...I liked the fountain pens glittering in the vest pocket of Dr...

...Watching his use of shading and illumination, I realized how neglected that basic skill of the cinema has become...

...It gets very dull as it runs on too long, and it is packed with silly talk, but it isn't shoddy...

...In fact, it may be that he is too good...

...A recent look at The Informer was not encouraging: To be genteel, it seemed dated...

...The film is a more professional job than the novel, since Allan Drury was unable even to master the Book-of-the-Month Club style sheet...

...Advise and Consent reveals this weakness more than any movie he has ever done...

...The minor roles are filled by relatively unknown actors, and all of them, down to the smallest parts, are talented and inspired...

...I can't say that Stanley Kubrick has gotten that much better, only that he is still very good, the best U.S...

...Yet the New York Film Bulletin (a bad translation of Cahiers du Cinema), Jonas Mekas and the New York critics in general speak of him with awe...

...director working today...

...That isn't the Majority Leader...

...Charles Laughton makes screen history by being no good at all, grunting over a Southern accent that is barely intelligible, let alone convincing...

...While I have never confused the gentlemen of the Senate with those of the Franciscan Order, I respect them just enough to have been annoyed by Drury's cheap treatment...

...In one scene Laughton is filmed standing against an outline of the Washington Monument, and for a minute you get the silhouetted impression of the trylon and perisphere...

...that's the nice Mr...

...Similarly, while treachery abounds, and blackmail, extortion, suicide, perversion and character assasination are prominent plot elements, it is all rather fight going...

...Corruption takes place, and one always knows exactly who is debasing whom...

...Still, his Senators look remarkably like movie stars, and no matter what landmarks you see, you cannot really believe that the city is a real capital nor the sessions the workings of a real government...

...The hilarity came from the prose, not the theme, and without the prose the movie had to build the pathos with great care or else forfeit the point altogether...

...If Humbert's passion for her is less perverse, it is certainly no less forbidden, and Lolita herself is no less grotesque, unless you regard sexual sophistication among 14-year-old girls as routine...

...Lolita is funny, pathetic, shocking, delicate, gross and constantly excellent...

...If it is worse than the general run of Ford's later movies, it is not much worse...

...a myth with no sense of the mythic...

...Occasionally, in his lunatic soliloquies, he chafes against the fine, firm style that Nabokov and Kubrick have so beautifully achieved...

...There is little physical contact on the screen, but we are given the sense of it, which is equally as good...

...His great courage and his role in the maturity of Hollywood subject matter aside, I don't see where he has earned it...

...Zempf, nee Quilty, and the way Kubrick has created the whole atmosphere of motel society with so much economy...

...Craftsman," incidentally, is the automatic tribute commonly paid to most of our older directors...

...Walter Pidgeon...