Lolita (1962)

Dir. Stanley Kubrick

Starring: James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers

After two films involving rape (one of which also had traces of incest and another where general promiscuity formed a backdrop) it was refreshing to sit down and watch a comedy about paedophilia… 

The film, of course, is Lolita. Here director Stanley Kubrick (of The Shining) bases his version upon the original novel of Vladimir Nabokov, but somehow manages to turn a tale of a predatory professor infatuated with underaged “nymphets” into a knockabout romp. Much as he did with his next picture, Dr. Strangelove, he turns an unsettling premise into something amusing and well-executed. In fact Peter Sellers pretty much does the same German accent in both. 

Humbert Humbert (James Mason, best known to me as the suave villain in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest) comes to the New Hampshire resort of Ramsdale for a break prior to taking up a position at an Ohio college. Blowsy landlady Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) persuades him to stay at her house. He says he was persuaded by the promise of her “famous cherry pie”; in reality the cherry pie that made his mind up was the sight of her young daughter Dolores (Sue Lyon) – also known as ‘Lolita’ – sunning herself on the lawn. Over the course of a summer the frustrated and lovelorn Charlotte increasingly throws herself at Humbert. He, however, has eyes only for the precocious Lolita. She, he thinks, hs a “mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity”. She struts around confidently, seemingly aware of the appeal she holds for Humbert. Faced with the prospect of never seeing the object of his infatuation again he marries Charlotte. Charlotte discovers his true feelings for the two women in the Haze household. Luckily for Humbert her death removes an impediment. It is now just him and his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. 

And that’s the way he wants it. He wants Lolita all to himself. But he is just one of her admirers. In a panic he takes her off on a road trip around America, fearful that someone is following them. And then she vanishes. It takes him four years to find her again and to track down the man who took her from him. We know this from the very first scene, which shows Humbert shooting Peter Sellers’ sozzled playwright Clare Quilty. The rest of the film is told in flashback, Humbert explaining how he came to be in Quilty’s mansion brandishing a revolver across the ping-pong table. 

A grown man’s fascination with a fourteen-year-old might strike the viewer as distasteful. However, this is the cleaned-up version: in the original novel Lolita is twelve-and-a-half. It is never made explicit that they have commenced a sexual relationship – though her whispered comments about a “game” suggest that they do. Humbert comes across as much more sympathetic, even though he is a monster in many ways. He thinks about murdering his wife, and does not mourn her when she does die. He lies repeatedly and exhibits a fierce jealousy where Lolita is concerned. He is an intellectual snob and is incredibly cruel in his judgements upon other people. However the viewer sympathises with him against the social-climbing Charlotte who fills her bedroom with reproduction prints, drops French phrases into conversation and is at pains to stress that she lives in West Ramsdale. He is also played for a fool by Quilty.

Quilty barely appears in the novel, but here he allows Peter Sellers to revel in his comedic talents. In one scene he is a barely-dancing hipster, in another a fake German psychiatrist, in another a baffled drunk. They are hardly the same person. But he too is clearly just as unpleasantly infatuated with Lolita as Humbert Humbert. One can only wonder at the nature of the “art films” he wanted the young girl to star in… Thinking back to the first scene Quilty seems to think of the pursuit of Lolita as a game – a game which Humbert lost. “You’re a sort of bad loser Captain. I never found a guy who pulled a gun on me when he lost a game. Didn’t anyone ever tell ya? It’s not really who wins, it’s how you play.” Ostensibly he is talking about ping-pong; the undertone is that he is referring to Lolita. But he, the voracious Mrs Haze, the awful Farlows (who talk about swapping partners at the dance while hinting that they are “extremely broad-minded. In fact, John and I, we’re both broad-minded…”), all provide comic relief – albeit a very black comedy. There are sexual double entendres – when Charlotte tells Humbert that she goes “as limp as a noodle” when he touches her he drolly comments “yes, I know the feeling.” In bed with Charlotte he stares over her shoulder at a picture of Lolita. She talks blithely about sending her daughter to boarding school and then comments, presumably about his waning ardour, “You’ve gone away again.” In comparison the scene where Humbert tries to unfold the cot is very low slapstick. In the background the music warrants an entry all of its own, changing from swooping orchestrations that would seem to belong in a more conventional love-story to the hip-swinging cha-cha-cha of the Lolita Ya Ya. But I suppose one’s willingness to laugh at Lolita depends on how easily you can see Humbert’s pursuit of Dolores as pathetic rather than creepy.  

Child Pawn

What have I learnt about New Hampshire?

Desirable places like Ramsdale make a lot out of their “good Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Scotch stock”. Obviously history and culture is important to the townsfolk. The snobbishness of insisting that they live in West Ramsdale is lovely. To an outsider I doubt anyone would think that Ramsdale was large enough to have a western side (which, of course, is where the better  class of people live). But it's notable that the state contains restful and peaceful resort towns so good that they would be recommended to visiting professors as a pleasant place to spend the summer.

One might think that towns there would be “provincial” – especially if one has seen Peyton Place – but the Farlows are keen to point out that there are some “extremely broad-minded” people about. Sex seems to be on everybody’s brains.  

Can we go there?

Although the film was set throughout America, mainly in Ohio and New Hampshire, filming was completed much closer to ‘old’ Hampshire. Stanley Kubrick, as was his custom, shot the film in England. Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, just north of London, was used for the bulk of the shooting, though other locations did creep in. These include the nearby Hilfield Castle, which provided Clare Quilty’s decrepit ‘Pavor Manor’ and a house on Packhorse Road in Gerrard’s Cross which doubled for the Haze residence in West Ramsdale. 

Overall Rating: 3/5

The Rules of Attraction (2002)

Dir. Roger Avary

Starring: James van der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel

If you ever find yourself uttering the line “I only did her because I’m in love with you!” you know you’ve fucked up. And The Rules of Attraction is full of fucked-up fuck-ups who fuck up their lives over the course of the film. It’s quite impressive, to fuck up quite so badly when you’re not yet 21. 

The film introduces us to the wealthy students of a prestigious east-coast university. This is a place where the student body is privileged and entitled, the sex is drunken, the gays are predatory, every night is a debauched party and everybody is on drugs as a matter of course. We see the story through the eyes of three people in particular – virginal Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), louche gay Paul (Ian Somerhalder from Lost) and the empty “emotional vampire” that is Sean (brother of American Psycho’s Patrick) Bateman (James van der Beek from Dawson’s Creek). At times we even see the same scene from each of their perspectives. And this is right. Because if the film is about anything – other than meaningless sex and the ingesting of vast amounts of narcotics – it is about how everyone is alone in life. 

You can see it in the way the characters talk at cross purposes to each other. They don’t seem to have any friends. Sean meets Victor (Kip Pardue) and Mitch (Thomas Ian Nicholas) socially in a café. But they don’t like each other; in fact they seem to despise each other. They have the minimum of small talk. Their relationship is purely transactional. Victor and Mitch want Sean to get them coke; Sean needs money to give his dealer. Ergo they have a mutual interest. Sean and Lara (Jessica Biel) sleep with each other. It is not because they care, it is purely because they are horny and available (well, it is the ‘Dress to Get Screwed’ party!). And in Sean’s case because Lara has told him that her room-mate Lauren, the object of his affections, won’t be coming. So he sleeps with her to imagine he is with Lauren (who of course then walks in on them, prompting the utterance quoted above). But as this episode shows, they may all be alone, but they don’t have to like it. They are all searching for something. In one key scene Lauren and Sean are shown going about their lives separately in split-screen – right up until the moment when they meet. At that point the two separate scenes become one. They have made a connection. In that one moment a spark has been lit. 

2 Become 1
(They need some love like they've never needed love before...)

This is the one attempt that looks like it might work. Paul is trying to find some semblance of intimacy with someone, but he always picks the wrong horses (or, potentially the right horse, but just too soon). He is just too self-centred (he is frustrated by an associate OD’ing because it will make him late for a date). Lara sleeps her way through college. Lauren believes that Victor is her boyfriend. Victor pinballs around Europe bouncing off the random people he encounters, letting them steer him to the next city, the next party, the next drug, but none of them have names. When he returns it becomes apparent that he does not even remember who Lauren is. And there is the poor girl (Theresa Wayman) who sends Sean love letters (letters which he believes are from Lauren). The letters make him feel like a champion, but he has not even noticed the girl who writes them. In the end they all end the film as they started it: alone. Maybe sorrier, unhappier and with a few more illusions shattered, but still fundamentally alone. Lauren tells Sean plainly: “Nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.” 

But mainly it is about the drugs and the sex and a cast of generally rather unpleasant characters. Bullingdon Clubbers, the whole lot of them, swanning around with their sports cars and coke habits and lack of empathy with or awareness of other people. These are people who think that faking suicide is a good way to get a reaction from others. They are certainly all raving monomaniacs, and possibly even psychopaths by the dictionary definition of the term. And no surprise – the film was adapted from a novel by Brett Easton Ellis. Sean Bateman is the brother of American Psycho’s Patrick. Try and find a character to care about. Go on, I dare you. 

What probably surprised me the most was the performance of James van der Beek. For the past twelve years I had always referred to him as ‘James van der Chin, from Dawson’s Chin’ – on the belief, I guess, that he had a massive chin. He doesn’t. His chin is hardly noteworthy (though he does have a massive forehead). But I suppose I had written him off as an actor because he found fame on an American teen soap. But his performance here is amazing. He throws all that fluffy teen-heartthrob stuff away to portray a really nasty character. He comes across as a malevolent Frankenstein’s monster: the ‘emotional vampire’ he claims to be, leaching off others to find any kind of humanity at all. His performance encapsulates the film. Both performance and film are interesting, but not particularly enjoyable.

What have I learnt about New Hampshire?

Firstly, a caveat. The great state of New Hampshire is not mentioned once in the film. All one knows of the location of the fictional Camden College is that it is somewhere in the north-east of the US, not a million miles away from New York. It is only in the novels of The Rules of Attraction and Less Than Zero that Ellis specifies that Camden is in NH. 

That being noted we can ask ourselves the question Why New Hampshire? Ellis went to Bennington College in neighbouring Vermont, and says that Camden is built upon fragments of his own college days. So we can assume that both states have colleges that cater for over-privileged brats. We do not get much sense of a surrounding town – it is a campus university. There is a clear town and gown divide, with the townsfolk believing that the students are all rich (not a bad assumption as it turns out). University life revolves around social events: the Edge of the World Party, the End of the World Party, the Dress to get Screwed Party. Even a Pre-Saturday Night Party Party. This procession of parties marks the change in the academic year just as surely as the change from warm summer nights to golden Fall to a snow-bound winter. 

Can we go there?

As stated above, Camden was based upon Brett Easton Ellis’s own college days at Bennington in Vermont – the Commons Lawn at Bennington is known as “the end of the world”. None of the filming was done in either Vermont or New Hampshire. California’s University of Redlands, halfway between LA and Palm Springs, provided the backdrop for Camden College. The Bekins, Grossmont and Fairmont dorms were used for filming.

Kip Pardue, as Victor, was lucky enough to get a whirlwind tour of London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Venice, Florence, Rome and Dublin out of his part. Well done him!

Overall Rating: 2/5

Peyton Place (1957)

Dir. Mark Robson

Starring: Lana Turner, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Lee Philips

Peyton Place is one of those picture-perfect New England towns, the sort you have probably always dreamed about. The wooden shopfronts are immaculate, the streets clean and tidy. From the wooded hills you can gaze out over the glittering New Hampshire lakes. The townsfolk are courteous and everybody knows everyone else’s name. 

And everybody knows everyone else’s business. And if they don’t know it, they guess at it. And they gossip about it. And there are always secrets which need to be kept. Dark and terrible secrets which, if revealed, can tear apart families and lead to imprisonment or even death. 

Budding high school writer Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi) introduces us to Peyton Place. It is the summer of 1941. Much like American innocence was to be fractured by the sudden coming of war so is the innocent friendly face of Peyton Place that she sees smashed by the experiences of the next six months. Sex is the serpent in this Garden of Evil. The buttoned-up townsfolk loom own on all prurience. Allison’s swimming trip with her friend Norman (Russ Tamblyn) is noted and commented upon and the story spreads. But really this is just the catalyst for a series of terrible revelations. It turns out her prudish mother Constance (Lana Turner) was not always so prudish. Allison is the illegitimate offspring of a married New York business man with whom Connie had an affair. No wonder Connie watches over her daughter like a hawk and runs away from the advances of new school, principal Mike Rossi (Lee Philips). Worse still is the life of Allison’s best friend Selena Cross (Hope Lange). Living in the tarshacks on the poor side of town, she is raped by her drunken stepfather Lucas (Arthur Kennedy) and becomes pregnant by him. She miscarries – with a little help from the kindly Dr Swain (Lloyd Nolan) – but when her father next appears she kills him in self-defence and buries the body. When this emerges she is put on trial for murder; the only thing that can save her is the true nature of her relationship with her stepfather, but that is the one thing she dare not reveal lest it tarnish the future career of her boyfriend. Illegitimacy, rape, incest, murder, suicide, poverty – these are the real problems hidden away in Peyton Place, yet everybody is more afraid of scandal and gossip.  

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Rumour!

Yet for all that, the film pulls its punches. Grace Metalious, author of the novel upon which the film was based, was apparently horrified by it for completely diluting her story. It had already been diluted once before publication (in the first draft Seelena was raped by her father, not step-father). So we are left with a film with three stages. First, we have idyllic little Peyton Place. When Allison and Norman climb up to Road’s End to look out over the lake it does seem as though the place is a little spot of perfection. Then we have the heart of the film – Lucas raping Selena, Nellie committing suicide, Allison leaving home, Selena murdering Lucas. And then there is the denouement. Allison’s transformation into a ‘bad girl’ merely consists of her getting a job in New York and taking up smoking and drinking. Dr Swain saves Selena (twice). The townsfolk gladly sign up for the US armed forces at the first chance they get. Constance and Mike finally get together. Mr Harrington (Leon Ames, Judy Garland’s father in Meet Me in St Louis) takes in his son’s widow. Allison and Constance make up. The townsfolk applaud Selena upon her acquittal. It seems as though everyone has seen the error of their ways and become better people for it. What a lovely little town! That was not what Metalious intended. She intended Peyton Place to be reactionary and morally bankrupt, a town so mired in its prejudices and intolerance that it was beyond salvation. What we get instead is a collection of characters with their own individual weaknesses and pettiness but who are, when it comes to the crunch, profoundly moral and good. Screenwriter John Michael Hayes took the source novel, its characters and some of its dramas and sanitised it for public consumption under the Hays Code. 

Metalious’s original novel was, I think, closer to the truth about the prurience of the American small town. And do you know why I think that? It is because, upon its release in cinemas, Peyton Place did respectable trade. But a few months into its release takings suddenly picked up dramatically. Why? Because Johnny Stompanato, the mobster boyfriend of star Lana Turner, was murdered by her daughter. The case made headlines and shone a light upon Turner’s current film. Peyton Place benefited from the great American public flocking to have a gawp at the woman whose daughter murdered her lover. Peyton Place  was truer than the studios thought. 

What have I learnt about New Hampshire?

The New Hampshire depicted is the New Hampshire of 1941, but some assumptions can be made. New Hampshire is a land of small, well-kept towns that certainly try to act appropriately. There are nicely-sized houses, clean shop-fronts, neighbours who look out for one another, and one large employer in town – in this case a textile mill – that strives to convey an impression of concern for its employees. The scenery is beautiful. But there are dark shadows. There is a class divide (even if Allison and Selena on one hand and Constance and Nelly on the other don’t make it apparent). Mr Harrington sounds at one point like Mr Stamper in Splendor in the Grass as he outlines his opposition to his son’s relationship with Betty. There are shacks on the edge of town where people live in poverty. There are alcoholics and rapists but the townsfolk prefer to look the other way and gossip about less serious matters. This gossip is the key ingredient. I have talked in the past about a small town morality, and the Peytonians enjoy besmirching people’s reputations. 

Can we go there?

There is no real-life Peyton Place. Metalious was a New Hampshire native and drew elements from several towns in Belknap County near Lake Winnipesaukee – and several real-life news stories – to construct her novel. It hit a nerve. Upon her death the townsfolk of Gilmanton, where she lived, almost refused to bury her in the church cemetery. Mentioning the novel around that lake district in east-central New Hampshire might not be a good idea, even today. 

By contrast you can mention the film all you like in Camden, Maine. The film was shot in Camden (just one year after Carousel was also filmed there), and the town was very fond of the association. The film premiered in Camden before it went on national release, and even today they celebrate the film and hold an archive devoted to its production at Camden Public Library. The Library have also prepared a map showing locations which featured in the film. These include Main Street, home of Constance’s Tweed Store and the Labor Day parade, the Smart House on Chestnut Street which was home to the MacKenzies, the Dean Fisher residence on Harbor Hill where Dr Swain looked after his wife’s flower garden, Mount Battie (where Allison and Norman went up via ‘Road’s End’ to look out over the town and lake), the various churches shown, the ‘Peyton Place Arch’ and the actual Whitehall Inn.

Overall Rating: 2/5 

Week 30: New Hampshire

"B. B. King just turns on
 The New Hampshire boys, Steve and Joe..."
 - 'New Hampshire',
 Sonic Youth

And so we travel from the big city glitz of Las Vegas to the quieter charms of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire is the filling of the Vermont and Maine sandwich up in the north-east corner of the U.S. I suppose I always think of the three interchangably as being home to hills, lakes and forests. Maine, of course, is bigger and wilder than the other two, as well as having a famous coastline. Vermont has no seashore, and New Hampshire has a mere sliver between Massachusetts and Maine. But it does have a naval port called Portsmouth. So maybe it is not too dissimilar to 'old' Hampshire.

Hampshire cannot lay claim to Manchester though. Manchester is New Hampshire's largest town; in fact its the largest New England city north of Boston. It still isn't very big; we're talking a town with half the population of the real Portsmouth. Wikipedia is silent on whether it is wonderful, or indeed whether it is full of t*ts, f***y and United. But it does have its place in the news. Every American Presidential candidate spends a lot of time in New Hampshire because its primary election is one of the first in the season. The good burghers of Manchester must be used to having high-powered politicos clogging their streets and trying to be folksy.

But away from that folksiness there must also be a New England literary tradition. The three films I have lined up this week are all adaptations of novels (by Grace Metalious, Brett Easton Ellis and Vladimir Nabokov). They are:

• Peyton Place (1957)
• The Rules of Attraction (2002)
• Lolita (1962)

Just having a quick flick through them now it looks like we are in for a bucket-load of sexual promiscuity, two rapes, a tinge of incest and some paedophilia. It looks like Steve and Joe aren't the only ones getting turned on up in New Hampshire!