Lolita

Lolita (1962) is Stanley Kubrick's pitch-black comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM. A European professor, Humbert Humbert, rents a room in a sleepy New England town and becomes fixated on his landlady's teenage daughter, Dolores.

To stay close to the girl, Humbert marries her mother, Charlotte. James Mason plays the obsessive with a velvet voice that hides cold scheming. Sue Lyon, seventeen at the time, gave the title role a sly knowingness that sent the censors into a panic. Shelley Winters is Charlotte, oblivious to the man she has let into her home. And Peter Sellers builds the slippery Clare Quilty out of a dozen disguises at once.

Kubrick brought Vladimir Nabokov's banned novel to the screen by leaning on suggestion rather than anything explicit, which is exactly why the posters teased, "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?". Nabokov wrote the screenplay himself, though barely a third of his draft survived to the final cut. The black-and-white film runs over two and a half hours and rides on dialogue, not display. Stream Lolita (1962) online on iFILM.