The movie drew respectable reviews, and today it sounds like a fascinating period piece, replete with mini skirts and go-go boots, and with cinéma-vérité party scenes featuring real-life London hipsters such as David Hockney. Richard Burton was set to star but was fired a few days into shooting, for inebriation, and was replaced by Nicol Williamson (himself no teetotaler). This finally happened in 1969, thirty years after the novel’s release, when Tony Richardson directed an adaptation that moved the story’s setting from nineteen-thirties Berlin to the swinging London of the sixties. Nabokov, at the time a penniless Russian exile in Berlin, admitted that he wrote the book with an eye toward a screen sale.

With its intimations of illegal sex, murder, and marital infidelity, the book seems made for the movies-and it was.

Nabokov was trading in movie-friendly, noirish suspense long before “Lolita.” His 1938 novel, “Laughter in the Dark,” (about which I wrote in an earlier post) is a lurid love triangle involving an amateur film producer, a would-be film animator, and an underage aspiring actress. (The 1997 film version, by the director Adrian Lyne, deaf to the novel’s humor and everything else, was a slow, sodden, sombre slog-an embarrassment.) Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 1962 movie version, starring James Mason as Humbert, compressed all of this into two hours, and also captured the novel’s tone of suave irony-which makes “Lolita” as much a satiric indictment of mid-twentieth-century American mores as it is a study of a pervert. Take “Lolita_,”_ with its tale of the Humbert Humbert, who marries the mother of the twelve-year-old girl he covets and plots his new wife’s murder, only to see her die accidentally under the wheels of a car minutes after she discovers his secret diary of pedophilic lust, whereupon he embarks on a cross-country road trip with his orphaned stepdaughter, all of it culminating in an extended murder scene when Humbert tracks a shadowy pursuer who stole the girl away from him. The axiom that great novels make bad movie adaptations has not been entirely true for Vladimir Nabokov, whose books depend to a surprising degree on plot-heavy narratives (not to say cravenly pulpy story lines) that lend themselves well to the screen. Nabokov was trading in movie-friendly, noirish suspense long before “Lolita.” Photograph by MGM Studios / Archive Photos / Getty

Mary by Vladimir Nabokov