James Mason perfectly captures Nabokov's Humbert Humbert's (aka the "Professor") delusional obsession with sexy American twelve-year old Dolores Haze (aka "Lolita") in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaption of Nabokov's famous novel ("Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins"). He plays his landlady Charlotte Haze's (Shelley Winters) fascination with Humbert Humbert's erudite European sophistication (a dryly funny parody of Nabokov himself) in order to groom young Lolita for the darkly illicit plans he has for her future. Their eventual road trip together is like nothing in contemporary literature or film. Only Luchino Visconti's film version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1971), with Dirk Bogarde playing Mann's elderly aesthete Gustav von Aschenbach, compares in unveiling the hollow inner emotional life of the classic sexually-repressed European intellectual.

Kubrick has taken other novels (some famous, some not so famous) for his films, in each case varying the genre: Anthony Burgess' famous dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange; Arthur C. Clarke's less-known 1951 short story The Sentinel for Kubrick's sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey; Gustav Hansford's little-known short story about US Marine recruits The Short Timers for Kubrick's (subtly antiwar) film Full Metal Jacket; and the mostly unknown psychological study of the 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler for his final film Eyes Wide Shut. In each case, Kubrick's film is lucid and compelling, and true to the spirit of the novelist's story, even if the film varies in significant ways from the underlying novel.