Screenwriter · Producer

James B. Harris

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Lolita

Stanley Kubrick · 1962

Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 Lolita is a black-and-white arthouse drama adapted from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel under strict Hays Code restrictions. Starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert and Sue Lyon as Dolores Haze, it reframes the story as a tragicomic romance, avoiding explicit content through irony, voice-over, and visual indirection. Filmed largely in England despite its American setting, it features Peter Sellers in multiple roles and a jazz-inflected score by Nelson Riddle. Though commercially successful and critically well-received, it sacrifices the novel’s psychological and linguistic complexity for viability — making it less a faithful adaptation than a record of constraint.

13:00

The Killing

Stanley Kubrick · 1956

Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 heist film follows Johnny Clay’s meticulously planned racetrack robbery, told in fractured chronology and executed with clinical precision. Built on Jim Thompson’s dialogue and Lionel White’s novel, it privileges structure over psychology, showing how small, unscripted human actions — a drunken appearance, a dropped horseshoe, a burst suitcase — derail even the most rigorous plan. With Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, and Elisha Cook Jr., it delivers lean, unsentimental noir grounded in craft, not catharsis.

13:00

Dr. Strangelove

Stanley Kubrick · 1964

Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, adapted from Peter George's thriller novel Red Alert, follows a rogue American general's order for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and the frantic, mostly useless efforts of the President, his aides and a visiting RAF officer, all three played by Peter Sellers, to call it back. Shot entirely at Shepperton Studios on Ken Adam's cavernous War Room set for $1.8 million, it grossed $9.4 million, won three BAFTAs, and is now ranked among the American Film Institute's greatest and funniest American films.

13:00

Paths of Glory

Stanley Kubrick · 1957

Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film, adapted from Humphrey Cobb's novel based on the real Souain corporals affair, follows Colonel Dax as he leads a suicidal attack demanded by his superiors and then defends three of his own men, chosen at random, against a court-martial for cowardice. Shot in Bavaria because its portrayal of the French military barred it from filming, or release, in France for fifteen years, the film starred Kirk Douglas, whose production company financed it on a budget reported near $935,000, and drew acclaim that only grew once France finally allowed it to screen in 1972.