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He drapes the sheet over his shoulder like a toga. He’s hungover. And still drunk. Slurred words spill out: “Lissen lissen le’s have a game a li’l lovely game of Roman Ping-Pong like two civilized senators.” (He picks up a paddle and ball and hits one across the table at the mystified, appalled, murderous Humbert.) “Roman ping?” (Silence from Humbert, who fails to hit it back.) “You’re s’posed to say ‘Roman pong!’ ”

Quilty adjourns to a chair and a leftover drink into which an anonymous partygoer has stubbed out an old smoke. “Quilty!” barks Humbert in exasperation. “I want you to concentrate. You’re going to die. Try and understand what is happening to you. . . . Think of what you did, Quilty, and think of what is happening to you now.”

At which Quilty turns into a frontier spinster: “Heh heh! Say, tha’s a, tha’s a durlin’ little gun you got there! Tha’s a durlin’ li’l thing! How much a guy like you want for a durlin’ li’l gun like that?” As written, Quilty is what a later generation would call Humbert Humbert’s worst nightmare, but that phrase fails to capture the fact that even Humbert’s unconscious could never conjure up the black anarchy of a Goon.

At the close of the scene Quilty stumbles up the stairs and hides behind a massive portrait of an elegant woman. Humbert shoots it up. “Oh, that hurt,” says Quilty.

An extended flashback follows, extending all the way to the film’s penultimate scene: Humbert arrives in mild Ramsdale, sees his nymphet sunbathing in the backyard of a possible lodging, and immediately moves in. Humbert marries the little sexpot’s mother, Charlotte, in order to remain close to the girl. Charlotte gets run over by a car. Humbert begins sleeping with Lolita and travels with her around the country, all the while being pursued by Lolita’s wraithlike suitor, Quilty, with whom she ultimately vanishes.

In the novel, Quilty appears as in a haze. Nabokov inscribes him mainly in shadow form—wordplay, oblique references, appearances in absentia. In the film, he’s more present, but in nebulous, desultory ways. Peter Sellers is his perfect embodiment.

He turns up at the high school dance wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses—the kind that became a standard feature of Peter’s own early-sixties look—and performs a finger-snapping, eyebrow-arched Latin-lover dance with an evil-looking mystery woman (Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram of her creator). Only after Charlotte prompts him by whispering the details of their afternoon tryst in his ear does Quilty remember, whereupon a chipmunky beam dawns: “Did I do that? Did I? . . . Yes, really great fun, lissen, lissen, didn’t you, didn’t you have a daughter? Didn’t you have a daughter with a lovely name? Yeah, a lovely—what was it now?—a lovely lyrical lilting name like, uh—”

“Lolita!” Charlotte cries.

“Lolita, that’s right! Diminutive of Dolores, the tears and the roses. . . .”

Charlotte is thrilled. Overcome with excitement, she proclaims: “Wednesday she’s going to have a cavity filled by your Uncle Ivor!”

Later, after Charlotte’s messy demise, Quilty accosts Humbert on the porch of an old hotel. At once insinuating, nervous, bold, tic-y, sly, and fast-talking, Peter’s Quilty threatens the paranoid Humbert by his ever-shifting and inexplicable demeanor, not to mention by his very presence, which is more or less an absence, since Humbert has no idea who this man is or what he wants.

In another scene, Humbert arrives at home and turns on the light. There sits Peter: “Good eev’neeng, Doktor Humbardtz!”

Peter/Quilty has now turned into Dr. Zemf, “ze Beardsley High school zychiatrist.” With hair greased back and yet another of Peter’s cherished paste-on mustaches gracing his upper lip, the horrifying doctor describes the troubled schoolgirl and her various neurotic symptoms: Lolita, he notes, “chews gum, vehemently! All ze time she is chewing zis gum!” And she “has private jokes of her own, vich no one understands so they can’t enjoy them mit her!”

Backstage at Lolita’s play, The Hunted