But it later emerged that his draft was considered overlong and unfilmable by the director and by producer James B Harris. It was adapted from Nabokov's novel by the author himself. The film Lolita (1962) has long been accused of adopting too breezy a tone in its depiction of a story that involves a middle-aged professor grooming and raping his pre-teen stepdaughter. Is this where the misunderstanding of Lolita can be traced back to? Memorable for its 'come-hither' quality and flippantly daring tagline – that overlaid the film with a smug defiance in the face of strict censorship laws – it's this image that has come to define the long-debated film which turns 60 this month.
On the infamous poster for Stanley Kubrick's adaptation, a 1962 ' black slapstick' comedy, as critic Pauline Kael called it, a young girl peeks at us over a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, sucking on a lollipop, accompanied by the sentence: 'How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?' The photograph, taken by Bert Stern, is hazy and soft-focus. This troubling pop culture legacy, that propagates throughout music, fashion, photography and beyond, feels worlds away from the tomboyish, unselfconscious girl described in Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel of the same name. Simply uttered on its own, the word Lolita conjures up a certain collective image: an 'underage' girl who is aware of – and deliberately overt with – her own sexual attractiveness, developed beyond her years.
