I discussed this approach with Nabokov at the very outset, and he liked it.

In a 1970 interview with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick makes the following statement: According to the director, this major structural upheaval was made in agreement with the novelist as they were working on the screenplay together in Hollywood. Still more importantly, Kubrick reshuffles the chronology of the original narrative, in which the confrontation and murder of Quilty only appeared towards the end. This sequence, which stages the duel between Humbert Humbert and his doppelgänger (literally 'double-goer' in German), Clare Quilty, is in my own opinion, one of Kubrick's most successful instances of creative rewriting.Ģ Much has already been said about Peter Sellers' clownish antics, his protean improvised impersonations, as well as the brilliant trouvaille of the Roman ping-pong game, that blow out of proportion the parodic dimension which Nabokov had originally injected into the scene in his novel. This shimmer reflects the doubts that first arose in my own mind when I started noticing certain puzzling aspects of duality in the opening sequence of Kubrick's Lolita. But my analogy will stop here, for the wink at Hitchcock's film essentially serves the purpose of making the word 'doubt' shimmer behind the word 'double'. One could also trace similarities between some of the ingredients in Lolita's plot and those we find in Shadow of a Doubt (1943): both films present the uncommon relationship between a teenage girl and an older relative, and are set in typically peaceful small towns, with a main male character who skillfully conceals his dark crimes behind the amiable mask he parades before society. Were I to refer to Hitchcock, I think I would rather discuss his affinities with Nabokov, with whom he almost collaborated and shares, among other things, a liking for cameo appearances, two of which were included in his screenplay (once under the guise of Vivian Darkbloom (Nabokov 1974, 146), whose anagrammatic function is pointedly marked, and once as a butterfly hunter giving Lolita and Humbert a brief taxonomic lesson (Nabokov 1974, 128)) but are absent from Kubrick's version.

1 Contrary to what the title may suggest, this paper does not deal with a comparison between Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock.

Shadow of doubt 1995