SOURCE: “Pistols and Cherry Pies: Lolita from Page to Screen,” in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1984, pp. 245-50.

In the following essay, Burns accounts for the positive critical reassessment of Kubrick's Lolita.

It is a commonplace of criticism that good novels often make bad movies, and that cheap “action” books make good ones. The paradox derives from the contrast between pictures and words. “With the abandonment of language as its sole and primary element,” says George Bluestone, whose well-known study Novels Into Film is a springboard for this essay, “the film necessarily leaves behind those characteristic contents of thought which only language can approximate: hopes, dreams, memories, conceptual consciousness. In their stead, the film supplies endless spatial variation, photographic images of physical reality, and the principles of montage and editing. … That is why a comparative study which begins by finding resemblances between novel and film ends by loudly...