Kubrick’s career-changing relocation from New York to London in 1961 was occasioned by his work with Vladimir Nabokov on the script for Lolita, a story fittingly concerning the fish-out-of-water exploits of a British intellectual on American soil. One of the director’s more indelible creations, Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is a borderline sociopathic writer who, before accepting a professorship at an Ohio college, decides to summer in New Hampshire with a lonely widow (Shelley Winters) and her pubescent daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon). Finding humor and hypocrisy in both the cosmopolitan and suburban mind, the film studies Humbert’s increasingly consuming infatuation with Lolita and his efforts to conceal that obsession from the wider society—a lose-lose situation that Kubrick treats first as black comedy, then as paranoid tragedy. Featuring masterfully staged dialogue scenes and exquisitely photographed impressions of small-town America, Lolita also marked the director’s first collaboration with Peter Sellers, here playing the mystifying oddball architecting Humbert’s downfall.