Lyne’s film dramatizes this memory, which adds an underpinning of vulnerability to Jeremy Irons’ performance as Humbert, whereas Kubrick’s omits it entirely, a change from the book that’s comparatively minor, but telling.

Any consideration of Kubrick’s Lolita needs to account for how he had to deal with strong regulations governing what what he could show and imply. Kubrick would later say that had he known how stringent the rules would turn out to be, he probably wouldn’t have made the film, which could account for why it’s his loosest. Lolita frequently plays like Kubrick couldn’t use crucial footage, and used the editing process as a comb-over to hide that fact. The board wanted basically all traces of pedophila scrubbed from the film—an impossible request, given the source material. There’s a moment in the book (and Lyne’s film) when Lolita is leaving for a summer camp and she kisses Humbert on the lips to say goodbye. The action is both mischievous and innocent (she understands it’s an act of rebellion against her Humbert-smitten mother, but not why, and she wouldn’t be able to understand Humbert’s reaction even if she knew it), and it hints at the complexities the character will later reveal. In Kubrick’s film, the kiss is changed to a chaste hug, one Humbert receives like any awkward stepfather might. The Annabel anecdote, which both humanizes Humber and underlines his sexuality, would’ve been unthinkable in this context.

Throughout Kubrick’s film, things are implied so tangentially that it’d be easy for viewers to watch it and not realize the full extent of Humbert’s crimes, let alone the harm he does to Lolita. James Mason is pretty flat in the role, suggesting little in the way of desire, while Sue Lyon conveys little anguish or flirtation. In tweaks that crucially alter the story’s key dynamic, Lolita’s age was heavily downplayed; Lyon was partially cast for how developed her body was. In her famous introduction, Lolita comes off as poised and confident, not innocent or vulnerable, which sets the film down a completely different path.

Since Kubrick couldn’t make a film about his actual subject, Lolita basically became a comedy of manners, with moments of slapstick sitting uneasily alongside the main story. The film’s biggest change involves the Quilty character, a role much expanded in the film, where he is depicted by an overtly comic Peter Sellers. Sellers arguably plays multiple characters in the movie, as Quilty stalks Humbert and interacts with him in a variety of disguises, something that does not happen in the book. (The screenplay is credited to Nabokov, but wound up very different than the author’s own draft.)

On a thematic level, the disguises have value. There’s a scene in the book where a school psychiatrist urges Humbert to let Lolita experiment with boys—painfully ironic advice, given to whom it is directed, but well-intended. Having Quilty pretend to be the doctor, on the other hand, underlines the predatory aspect of how society sexualizes young girls. In Nabokov’s world, Humbert and Quilty are something of an aberration, but in Kubrick’s, insidious forces are everywhere, always disguising themselves as harmless (Quilty’s other big disguise is another supposed protector—a policeman). It’s an interesting idea that’s largely tempered by the broadness of Sellers’ performances. In Dr. Strangelove, the two would find the perfect marriage of broad comedy and dark themes, but here the balance eludes them, and pretty badly. Sellers is by far the most entertaining part of the movie, but he also kind of ruins it, given how his sporadic appearances rupture the elegiac tone attempted elsewhere.

It’s difficult to imagine what Kubrick would have created were he not censored, but as it stands, the story isn’t honest about its subject. There’s more tension and unease in the paperback’s cover than there is in the entirety of the film, the famous tagline of which—“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”—can basically be answered with: They didn’t, really.

Lyne’s film is franker about its subject matter. There’s never any doubt about the nature of Humbert’s desires, the depth of his depravity, nor what transpires between the two (in one queasy scene, Lolita removes her retainer before undoing the drawstring of his pajama bottoms).

The only thing it doesn’t really do is convey how Humbert hurts Lolita, which may speak to how there are just certain parts of this story that can’t be put onscreen; the unfilmable parts are the ones most crucial to its meaning and impact. The film includes sex scenes, though they’re fairly tasteful, under the circumstances, suggestive and not explicit (nudity in a case like this is probably a legal and moral issue as much as an artistic one). One rape scene is heavy on dissolves, fades to black, and Lolita’s heavy breathing—there’s little sense of the emotional or physical pain inflicted on her. The scene is followed by a transitional bit, and then a moment where she’s seen crying on a couch. The design of the first scene and existence of the second—which confuses how much time has elapsed—mutes the connection of the rape to the weeping. Part of this is due to Dominique Swain’s performance—she’s fine, but it’s hard to imagine any young actress pulling this character off, save for a Taxi Driver-era Jodie Foster—but mostly the character is inconsistent, especially since those three scenes are immediately followed by a moment when she charges that Humbert is “depriving me of my civil rights,” before seducing him in exchange for a higher allowance. She comes off as complicated in the book but random in the film, even when accounting for how a victim of this type of abuse would be emotionally volatile.

Again, the genius of the book is how Nabokov has it both ways. Lolita is both manipulated and—in Humbert’s view—manipulative, while Humbert is both predator and tragic figure. Both films close with him murdering Quilty (an event foreshadowed in their opening scenes), the gunshots a kind of punctuation, ending the story. While this crime also occurs in the book—which is eventually revealed as taking the form of Humbert’s jailhouse confessions—Nabokov looks on a little further. The final passages, as with all that had preceded them, are both disquieting and disturbing, as Humbert make one final act of devotion to Lolita.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Start with: The impact of the book’s final lines say it all, really, illustrating the tightrope of sympathy Nabokov walked throughout his most famous work. Inevitably, neither film can live up to it. Lyne’s version may help some lazy literature student pass a test without doing the reading, but it isn’t comparable. Kubrick’s is mostly of interest to completists: Lolita is probably his worst, and while that means it’s one of his few non-masterpieces, it’s a poor introduction to him (or Nabokov).