Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers: Lolita and Dr. Strangelove

After the bruising experience of Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick emerged with greater commercial leverage and a clearer sense of the kind of filmmaker he wanted to be. Relocating his creative base to the UK, he found an unlikely collaborator in one of Britain’s most brilliant, elusive and eccentric screen stars: Peter Sellers.

Entering the 1960s, Sellers was on the cusp of becoming a major international superstar. The actor and comedian was already a household name in Britain thanks to his riotous flights of fancy alongside Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe on The Goon Show, and he had steadily built a screen career in movies like The Ladykillers, I’m Alright, Jack, and The Mouse That Roared.

He gained wider recognition co-starring with Sophia Loren in The Millionairess — “She’s a lot different from Harry Secombe,” he quipped — and his first case as the hapless Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther cemented his reputation as a truly global comic icon. But not before he got a chance to demonstrate his chameleon-like abilities in two films for Stanley Kubrick.

As has been well documented elsewhere, Sellers was a deeply troubled individual with a wide range of hang-ups and quirks that made him increasingly difficult to work with even as he reached the peak of his fame in the mid-’60s. Suffering from poor health, the actor was stricken with anxiety even as his flamboyant lifestyle and glitzy marriage to Britt Ekland thrust him further into the media spotlight.

Always seeking something he apparently lacked in his personal life — he got into spiritualism and Eastern religions looking for answers — Sellers was a mercurial performer who only felt comfortable when he was in somebody else’s skin. In interviews, he claimed enigmatically that he “didn’t exist”. On The Muppet Show, he famously told Kermit the Frog that he did not exist, adding that there used to be a “me”, but he had it surgically removed.

Such an insecure comic genius might seem like a strange ally for a filmmaker as notoriously controlling and obsessively detailed as Stanley Kubrick, but their collaborations were surprisingly harmonious. Sellers’ unpredictability proved to be just what the director admired. According to Alexander Walker, a film critic and close friend of Kubrick:

[Stanley] was always in awe of people who could give him performances, particularly performances that were not in the script, who could add something to a character that even Stanley had never anticipated. [Sellers] was like a jazz musician playing a riff. You couldn’t anticipate what he would do. Stanley loved that. Stanley put people through 101 takes in order to get a variation in a way they played the role. With Peter Sellers, you only had to put him through three takes, and it got a different kind of interpretation every time, each one funnier.

After dealing with Kirk Douglas’s supersized charisma on Paths of Glory and the Technicolor spectacle of Spartacus, Kubrick had a new kind of ego to manage as he returned to black-and-white for his next two films, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. And despite the monochrome palette, it was Sellers who provided plenty of colour.

Lolita (1962)

After the critical, if not commercial, success of Paths of Glory, Kubrick spent several months developing a western for Marlon Brando. That project eventually became One-Eyed Jacks, but Kubrick left before production and Brando ultimately directed the film himself. The upside was that Kubrick now had time to start working on one of his own dream projects: adapting Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial and supposedly “unfilmable” novel, Lolita.

Playing gun-for-hire on the massive box office success of Spartacus had its benefits for Kubrick. He now had more creative leverage than ever before and decamped to England, where he would make all his subsequent films. While he believed Nabokov’s novel was a masterpiece, he knew turning it into a motion picture would be a challenge considering the subject matter: namely, a middle-aged professor’s sexual obsession with the young daughter of his landlady.

Kubrick hired Nabokov himself to write the screenplay, which, according to the Russian author, became “an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion on how to cinemize the novel… by midsummer, I did not feel quite sure whether Kubrick was serenely accepting what I did or silently rejecting everything.”

As it turned out, the latter was very much the case. Nabokov produced a bloated 400-page screenplay which Kubrick and producer James B. Harris — also The Killing and Paths of Glory — spent two years whittling down into a filmable script. By the end, only an estimated 20 percent of Nabokov’s original work remained.

Among various other changes, Kubrick jettisoned much of Humbert Humbert’s back story and expanded the role of his rival, Clare Quilty, to provide more room for Peter Sellers to do his thing. Ironically, despite Nabokov’s claims that the whole process was a waste of time, he still received full screen credit and gained an Oscar nomination for his efforts.

To pre-empt problems with censors, Kubrick downplayed the book’s eroticism in favour of sexual innuendo and made Lolita older than Nabokov’s 12-year-old character, casting 14-year-old Sue Lyon in the role. The casting and marketing of Lyon now sit uneasily within the film’s legacy. Later scholarship has reframed Lolita not only as a difficult adaptation of a controversial novel, but also as part of a wider Hollywood history of the sexualisation and exploitation of young performers.

Kubrick’s alterations also changed the chronology of the book, beginning at the end. We first meet Humbert (James Mason) as he enters the mansion of eccentric playwright and playboy Quilty (Peter Sellers) with the intention of shooting him dead.

We then flash back to find out why. Humbert is a scholar who arrives in New Hampshire to spend the summer ahead of taking up a teaching position at a college. He’s searching for a place to stay, but he is initially put off by the crass banter of widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) when he views her room to rent. He’s about to make his excuses and leave when he spots Haze’s daughter Dolores, nicknamed Lolita, sunbathing in the garden.

Taking the room, Humbert unenthusiastically woos Charlotte in order to spend time with Lolita, who instinctively notices the rakish new lodger noticing her and flirtatiously returns his attention under the nose of her mum. Humbert hastily marries Charlotte to remain in the house, but his new wife discovers his true intentions when she reads his diary. Crisis is averted for Humbert when Charlotte runs into the street, totally distraught, and dies in a car accident.

Now Lolita’s legal guardian, Humbert picks up Dolores from summer camp and embarks on a road trip, neglecting to inform the girl that her mother has died. Humbert finally acts on his obsession, but he soon discovers that he is not the only predator with designs on her. Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of her mother’s, has admired the girl from afar and follows the scandalous couple across the country in the hope of luring Lolita away from Humbert.

Lolita is an odd movie. While never less than entertaining, it’s pretty baggy at two-and-a-half hours long and we never get to see what makes any of the characters tick. That’s partly down to the first-person structure of the source material itself.

While Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon are both good in their roles, Charlotte Haze was always the overbearing stooge and Lolita the idealised sex kitten from Humbert’s perspective. His self-absorption never allows them to be real people. Furthermore, the wraparound structure — presumably introduced to add an element of mystery for viewers who didn’t already know the story — strips the film of any suspense or dramatic thrust.

James Mason weaponises his debonair charm expertly and it’s a hoot watching his face as Humbert becomes increasingly crestfallen, winning the object of his desire but then becoming her worried and nagging single parent, too. But shorn of his back story and Nabokov’s rich prose, we don’t get any psychological insight beyond Mason’s grave frowns and polite grimaces.

Then we have Peter Sellers as Quilty. He’s ad-libbing and riffing like crazy, enjoying himself with funny voices and even providing a glimpse of what was to come in his next movie with Kubrick. At one point, he shows up as Dr. Zempf — possibly Quilty in disguise — a dubious child psychologist with milk-bottle specs and a comedy German accent.

It’s a gonzo turn that might otherwise seem flippant for a film about two sexual predators chasing the same girl, but it adds a level of heightened absurdity to the proceedings. Kubrick’s film handles the most disturbing elements indirectly, filtering them through innuendo, absurdity and Humbert’s self-deceiving perspective. That choice makes Lolita fascinating but uneasy: a black comedy whose evasions are part of both its style and its problem.

And that approach would balloon into potentially planet-killing proportions in his next collaboration with Sellers…

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

As the Cold War approached its most dangerous moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Stanley Kubrick became increasingly fascinated with the prospect of global nuclear conflict. He immersed himself in books on nuclear strategy, including Herman Kahn’s influential treatise On Thermonuclear War, and landed on one that seemed particularly suitable for a feature film: Peter George’s novel Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom.

George’s book was deadly serious, focusing on how alarmingly easy it might be for one person to trigger armageddon, and Kubrick began adapting it for the screen in a similar vein. However, the more he researched mutual assured destruction and the opposing yet erroneous notion of a winnable nuclear war, the more ludicrous it all seemed to him.

That’s when he struck upon the idea of turning it into a nightmare black comedy. He teamed up with satirical writer Terry Southern — later the author of The Magic Christian — to flesh out the screenplay, elevating the rash and monstrous behaviour of the characters to grotesque proportions. The change of direction resulted in Kubrick’s first incontestable masterpiece, zooming out from the intimate perspective of his previous anti-war pictures to assume a more cynical standpoint: no fail-safe is foolproof as long as silly old human beings are involved.

Having parted ways with producer James B. Harris, Dr. Strangelove was purely Kubrick’s baby and he needed to find new financial backing. Perhaps understandably, the concept was a tough sell. Yet Columbia Pictures believed Peter Sellers was the reason for Lolita’s success despite its distasteful subject matter, and the studio agreed to a $2 million budget as long as Kubrick gave the comic actor at least four roles.

They got three. We first meet Sellers as Group Captain Mandrake of the RAF, a stereotypical stiff-upper-lipped English officer who is perturbed when the air force base commander, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), goes insane and issues the code for American bombers to commence a nuclear attack on Soviet targets.

With the base locked down, news of the unauthorised pre-emptive assault spreads to gung-ho General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in the United States, who reluctantly tears himself away from his secretary to brief President Merkin Muffley (Sellers) on the situation. From the War Room in the Pentagon, Muffley tries to formulate a solution but, with minutes ticking away, Turgidson suggests committing to an all-out attack to catch the Commies “with their pants down.”

As the situation becomes ever more desperate, it is revealed that the Soviets have recently built a Doomsday Machine as a nuclear deterrent. If triggered, it will render the surface of planet Earth uninhabitable for almost a century. After General Ripper takes his own life, Captain Mandrake manages to retrieve the secret codes and the bombers are recalled just in the nick of time — all but one, under the command of Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens). With the plane’s radio receiver damaged, his crew proceeds to the target, resulting in three truly astonishing moments.

Whooping and hollering, Kong rides a nuke like a bucking bronco, sealing the fate of mankind. It’s one of the most memorable visuals in the film. Back at the Pentagon, wheelchair-bound former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (Sellers) has a plan: a select group of men could inhabit deep bunkers with a coterie of sexually desirable women to rebuild the human race — an idea that doesn’t sound too bad to the guys in the War Room. With his alien hand syndrome suggesting at least part of his body is still loyal to his old boss, Strangelove suddenly rises to his feet with the immortal final line: “Mein Führer! I can walk!”

Smash cut to a montage of nuclear mushroom clouds set to Dame Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” Almost nobody would be meeting anyone else ever again in the event of a thermonuclear war, and the irony of that song choice is a chillingly beautiful way to end the film. Thankfully, Kubrick decided to cut a climactic pie fight in the War Room, which would have almost certainly diluted the impact of these iconic images.

Sellers creates three wonderfully distinct comic characters in Mandrake, Muffley and Strangelove, and deservedly received his first Oscar nomination, though the award went to Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady. Perhaps it was beneficial that Columbia Pictures didn’t get their wish for a fourth Sellers role. He had originally been expected to play Major Kong too, but the Texan accent — and the sheer workload of playing four parts — proved a step too far.

Dr. Strangelove is a movie stacked with larger-than-life characters. Aside from Sellers, you have Sterling Hayden scowling menacingly as General Ripper and George C. Scott mugging wildly as the gum-chomping Turgidson. Although Slim Pickens still gives a comic performance as Kong, he’s the most realistic of the bunch, a good ol’ boy just trying to follow orders and save the American way of life. Sellers might well have gone big with the character, perhaps capsizing the film in the process.

After two films running far longer than two hours — Spartacus and Lolita — it’s remarkable how much detail Kubrick crams into around 95 minutes with Dr. Strangelove. The dialogue is honed to a fine point despite its improvisatory rhythms, the black-and-white photography is simply gorgeous, and the scenes swing with metronomic precision from air base to War Room to Kong’s plane as the dire situation spirals out of control.

Like all the best satire, Dr. Strangelove has remained as sharp and relevant as ever over the decades since its release. Indeed, on the 63rd anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 2008, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament screened the film to highlight the risk of human error causing nuclear annihilation.

Unlike Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet’s rival project also released in 1964, Kubrick’s ultimate masterstroke was making a comedy about such a terrifying subject. As a result, Lumet’s sober, serious-minded film has never lodged itself in popular culture in quite the same way, while Dr. Strangelove may well be the most beloved movie ever made about nuclear war. We can laugh at the absurdity while relishing the filmmaking and the performances, but its rewatchability also ensures that we never push the danger to the back of our minds.

For collectors, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove also mark a fascinating shift in Kubrick’s poster history: from the provocative, heavily coded imagery of early-’60s adult drama to one of cinema’s most enduring satirical campaigns. You can explore our current original Stanley Kubrick movie posters here.

Next up: Stanley Kubrick goes off-world to create one of the greatest science fiction films of all time.