Lolita

Lolita (1962)

In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film Lolita, his first attempt at black comedy — an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel about a middle-aged college professor who becomes infatuated with a 12-year-old girl.

Kubrick toned down the screen adaptation to remove much of the eroticism, making it into "an epic comedy of frustration rather than lust," as film author Adrian Turner writes. Kubrick was deeply impressed by the chameleon-like range of Peter Sellers and gave him one of his first opportunities to wildly improvise, filming him with three cameras and vastly expanding his role as Clare Quilty.

Stylistically, Lolita marked "the turning point from a naturalistic cinema to the surrealism of the later films," according to critic Gene Youngblood.

According to social historian Stephen E. Kercher, the film "demonstrated that its director possessed a keen, satiric insight into the social landscape and sexual hang-ups of cold war America." The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.