Lolita (1997) on Netflix
Humbert Humbert, a European professor, comes to the United States to teach. He rents a room from the widow Charlotte Haze because he is drawn to her fourteen-year-old daughter, Dolores.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.8/1075,769 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1947, Humbert Humbert leaves Europe for New Hampshire, where he has taken a post teaching English literature. He takes a room at the home of the widow Charlotte Haze only after catching sight of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Dolores, during a tour of the house; he nicknames her Lolita. He is drawn to girls of about her age, whom he calls nymphets. He dislikes Charlotte, yet he marries her because it is the only way to stay near the girl. Dolores leaves for a summer camp, and Humbert lives in the house as Charlotte's husband, keeping his feelings for the girl hidden.
Cast
- Pat Perkinsas Louise
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lolita (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Unable to land a US distributor, the film debuted on the cable network Showtime in August 1998, with a brief Lyne introduction and a following-night Q&A, before getting only a limited American theatrical run that September solely to qualify for awards.
- Against an estimated $62 million budget, the film earned just $19,492 in its US and Canadian opening weekend and only about $1.15 million total in that market.
- Schiff was hired to write the screenplay as his first movie script, after the film's producers had rejected commissioned screenplays from the more experienced screenwriters and directors James Dearden (Fatal Attraction), Harold Pinter and David Mamet.
- An early draft of the script had Dolores Haze at twelve years old, as in the novel, before the age was changed to fourteen; to accommodate this the story's timeline was compressed to three years instead of the novel's five, with the ending moved to 1950 instead of the original 1952.
- Showtime held exclusive US distribution rights for five years until 2003, and the film went unreleased on American home video or television afterward, only reaching Tubi in 2024 and Hulu in 2025.
- Schiff said Kubrick's film might better have been titled Quilty, since the director had allowed the character of Quilty to “take over the movie”.
