We're celebrating the centennial of Shelley Winters each night for a few more days. Here's Eric Blume...
Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Lolita lands right in the middle of Shelley Winters’ two Oscar wins (The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue). Her balls-out performance in the first hour of this movie contains some true humdinger acting. She comes to the table to play and win here.
Obviously, especially when viewed within the context of today’s sensibilities, Lolita is a problematic picture. That's especially true since Kubrick plays each scene with his sympathies clearly in line with our leading man, Humbert Humbert (played, superbly, by James Mason), and actively against Winters, who plays mom of young Lolita, and who falls in love with HH...
Here’s the thing: Lolita is the tale of a middle-aged man who falls in love with a 14-year-old girl while finding revolting the mother figure his own age. This narrative is of course beyond creepy, and was back when Nabokov originally wrote the book. But Kubrick’s choice for us to sympathize with our male lead actually pays great dividends: it’s more disturbing to watch when the director wants you to lock into this casual monster. Kubrick finds a streak of wicked black comedy for this piece, such as the look of abstract terror on Mason’s face when Winters tells him she’s sending Lolita away to camp, and he will be left alone with her. It’s spectacular, macabre drawing-room comedy tailor-made to make you feel super uncomfortable.
There’s an awful and magnificent scene when Mason reads a letter from Winters, where she claims her undying love for him and begs him to stay with her. Mason layers on a fit of the cruelest laughter imaginable as he reads it, cackling over her florid prose with escalating giggles that show his near-sociopathic but genteel superiority. He’s able to humiliate Winters without her even being in the scene. It’s very sophisticated storytelling, mercilessly executed by Kubrick and Mason, with no apologies.
The downside of this, of course, is that our Shelley has to work double-time to explain her character to us and gain some respect…and she SHOWS UP. Yes, Winters’ Charlotte Haze comes pulled from Shelley’s turned-harridan-too-soon bag of tricks, but this is no lazy contribution. Kubrick may not be very interested in Charlotte’s complexity, but Winters builds a full and rich character here, initially leaning heavily on her character’s desire to live a “European” lifestyle, which is part of her trigger for falling so quickly and hard for Mason, who to her is the definition of suave culture, outlining one of the sweet ironies of the piece since, of course, he is actually the definition of an animal.
But Winters moves from her long opening scene (where she is, in turn, breathy, pushy, needy, smart, and unrelievedly horny) through an arc that finds her unravel to a woman full of rage and pity. She throws herself fully and embarrassingly into an awkward seduction scene where she tries to show HH “the new dance moves”…Winters shows us that she never thought she’d get one more chance with a man, and that this is her last one. Simultaneously, in just a few small scenes with Sue Lyon as Lolita, she has the courage to commit to the anger and resentment of not being able to connect to this petulant teen. In her final scenes, Winters finally makes the connection on why she is really threatened by Lolita, seeing her become a woman before she needs to become one. And her big moment, when she reads HH’s diary and how he truly feels about her, her heartbreak bursts through Kubrick’s limited view of her. You see a woman who has been trying to do the best for everyone realize the world’s myopic view of her. She transforms into a child herself, with no choice but to simply run away. And on top of that, she finds comedy in the character's obnoxiousness and need to be over-the-top!
Evidently Kubrick didn’t enjoy working with Winters, whom he found “difficult”, and while we’ll never know the true dynamic there, all we’re left with is the final product, and ultimately they were an inspired match. While his focus lay elsewhere, Winters knew how to bring Charlotte Haze to full life, and their evident clashes together give the character verve and dimension, and in the big moments, he got out of her way. Winters’ gutsy, careful work here is really worth a revisit.
Thank you for attending TFE's Shelley Winters Centennial!
Nathaniel on The Starlet in A Double Life (1947)
Eric on The Pro in Lolita (1962)
Nathaniel on The Champ in A Patch of Blue (1965)
Claudio on The Actor's Actor Bloody Mama (1970)
Baby Clyde on The Old Crone Pete's Dragon (1977)
Glenn Dunks on The Memoirist "Shelley II" (1989)