Search - Nelson Riddle :: Lolita: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1962 Film)

Lolita,Light of My Eyes

05/29/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Nelson Riddle's extraordinary score for Stanley Kubrick's 1962 masterpiece is a truly jewel in the film music world. As being an arranger for the music of Frank Sinatra,Nelson delivers beautiful and delightful pieces,filling the score with irony and sensuality. You can feel that when you hear "Lolita Ya Ya",one of the most wonderful themes for a character in film history. Nelson says everything with this track: ingenuity,beautiful,pleasure. All of that just to make us want our own Sue Lyon."

The Ya Ya is addictive!

Candace Scott | Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA | 07/12/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Kubrick's classic film also provided audiences with one of the catchiest tracks in film history, the famous Lolita Ya Ya, which will stay imbeded in your brain for weeks, if not months. The viewer first hears the catchy refrain when Humbert initially spies Lolita in the Haze's backyard, and it's repised when Humbert is in the bathtub, following Charlotte's wonderfully fortuitous death from being hit by a car. What luck!This soundtrack also contains various spoken dialogue from the film, including the classic encounter between James Mason and the quirky Peter Sellers: "Are you Quilty?" Mason intones with that beautiful rich, mellifulous voice. Another interesting piece is the Latin-influence Cha Cha where Shelley Winters vainly tried to seduce the wary Hum. The songs are enhanced if you have recently seen the movie again and they stand alone quite nicely. A lovely soundtrack, dominated by the classic Ya Ya. To the uninitated, a word from the wise: once you are hooked on this silly song, you will listen to it to the point of nauseum. So beware!"

Riddle, Kubrick, And LOLITA

Erik North | San Gabriel, CA USA | 09/24/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Though it seems tame by today's standards, director Stanley Kubrick's film of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial book "Lolita" was an extremely risque film when it was released in 1962; and its story about the unconventional relationship between a middle-aged professor (James Mason) and a pre-teen "nymphet" (Sue Lyon) helped break down the censorship barriers that still existed in Hollywood back then.



One way to give this unconventional (and in the end, tragic) love story a resonance was for Kubrick to go out and get Nelson Riddle, the famed arranger for Frank Sinatra's classic 1950s albums, to compose the music score (this after Hitchcock's favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann, turned the director down over being forced to use a love theme composed by Bob Harris, the brother of Kubrick's producing partner James B. Harris). Riddle had more than a little film score experience already (e.g., his score for the original OCEAN'S 11 in 1960), but working on so unconventional a film as LOLITA, and with an iconoclastic director like Kubrick, provided him with a significant challenge.



As can be gauged by the finished result, remastered here by Rhino, Riddle's work on LOLITA is among the finest of his entire career. Besides the Rachmaninoff-influenced love theme, Riddle's score incorporates pretty much every style of music he'd ever be associated with: Latin mambo (the quirky "Shelley Winters Cha-Cha"); big-band; teenybopper pop (the slightly chintzy but outrageously infectious "Lolita Ya-Ya", with the "ya-yas" provided by Sue Lyon herself); and even some nods to Herrmann's work with Hitchcock ("The Strange Call"). Kubrick had insisted to Riddle that there be no hint of depravity in the score, since the film itself was already pushing the envelope in so many ways, and Riddle delivered on the goods. It is a shame that this aspect of the film wasn't rewarded with an Oscar, or at least a nomination.



Up until his final years, when he worked with rock icon Linda Ronstadt on a trilogy of classic American pop songs, and after his work with Sinatra, LOLITA was arguably Riddle's finest work in any of the fields he immersed himself in. This is a score that is to be treasured, quirks and all."