Like a lot of movies that attain a certain fascination because they've become so hard to see (this got a very brief initial release, then was never released to home formats), Tony Richardson's film of the Nabokov novel is of course interesting as a bucket-list curiosity. But it's not actually very good. Swtiching the setting from the novel's mid-30s Germany to modern England blunts the original social commentary, and helps turn this from a misanthropically cruel, ironical comedy into a not very interesting story of a man who falls for a venal pretty girl, and is then ruined by her and her secret lover. That plot is basically unchanged from the novel, but there's nothing sophisticated or ambiguous about its telling anymore.
Nicol Williamson (who replaced Richard Burton after filming started, because Burton kept showing up late and drunk) is too young for his role, Anna Karina too old, but even if you throw out the novel's character conceptions (in which the female protagonist's shameless amorality seemed linked to her extreme youth) , these actors don't create interesting new ones. (Williamson at least gives a hardworking, serious performance; Karina is out of her element working in English, and isn't handled in a fashion to get by on charisma alone in a role you'd love to have seen Louise Brooks circa 1930 do.)
Jean-Claude Drouot is generically handsome and wooden as the lover, like an actor who'd have been cast as the lead in a cheap Europudding James Bond knockoff at the time--providing little to fill out a character whose actions turn from the merely mercenary to the flabbergastingly perverse. There's the required "Swinging London" nightclub scene with a band (I haven't been able to figure out who they are) and "psychedelic" effects. But otherwise the film seems rather divorced from its own time as well as the one it was originally set in.
This isn't a truly bad movie, but there's neither real conviction or wit to it, so the story is ultimately meaningless--these people mean nothing to us, nor do they illustrate any larger ideas. Like the very different and almost equally hard-to-see "King, Queen, Knave" a couple years later, this is a Nabokov adaptation that pretty much misses entirely the tone and value of the source material, and doesn't come up with anything worthy to replace it.
Nicol Williamson (who replaced Richard Burton after filming started, because Burton kept showing up late and drunk) is too young for his role, Anna Karina too old, but even if you throw out the novel's character conceptions (in which the female protagonist's shameless amorality seemed linked to her extreme youth) , these actors don't create interesting new ones. (Williamson at least gives a hardworking, serious performance; Karina is out of her element working in English, and isn't handled in a fashion to get by on charisma alone in a role you'd love to have seen Louise Brooks circa 1930 do.)
Jean-Claude Drouot is generically handsome and wooden as the lover, like an actor who'd have been cast as the lead in a cheap Europudding James Bond knockoff at the time--providing little to fill out a character whose actions turn from the merely mercenary to the flabbergastingly perverse. There's the required "Swinging London" nightclub scene with a band (I haven't been able to figure out who they are) and "psychedelic" effects. But otherwise the film seems rather divorced from its own time as well as the one it was originally set in.
This isn't a truly bad movie, but there's neither real conviction or wit to it, so the story is ultimately meaningless--these people mean nothing to us, nor do they illustrate any larger ideas. Like the very different and almost equally hard-to-see "King, Queen, Knave" a couple years later, this is a Nabokov adaptation that pretty much misses entirely the tone and value of the source material, and doesn't come up with anything worthy to replace it.
