There are so many great moments in film that came from the imagination of Stanley Kubrick. Many of them are in, and are about, colour – the saturation of bright red blood that pours from the lift in The Shining, or the myriad of lights at the end of 2001. But before he created any of those images Kubrick made two black and white films that concentrated on dry wit, the darkest kind of humour, and owed a great deal to the manic brilliance of Peter Sellers. They were Lolita (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1964).

After butting heads with Kirk Douglas on the epic Spartacus (1960), Kubrick turned to a much smaller project; Vladimir Nabokov’s screenplay of paedophilic obsession based on his own novel, Lolita. It’s the story of a professor, Humbert Humbert, who lusts after the twelve year old daughter of his landlady. In Kubrick’s hands this all-consuming passion becomes a love-triangle, with the character of Quilty, a playwright who mirrors Humbert, being given more importance. The subject matter is so dark, but this is a pitch-black comedy, with Lolita moved to her teenage years (it’s no less repulsive as a tale of abuse of power but was thought to be more acceptable to the audience at the time, and easier to cast). This promotion of Quilty to a major role had everything to do with the casting of Peter Sellers.

Kubrick requested Sellers for the role, finding his ability to improvise fascinating. And so Quilty became a loose cannon, turning up unpredictably and saying whatever came into his head. James Mason, as Humbert Humbert, looks entirely uptight and uncomfortable in their scenes together, which is absolutely right for the character. At one point Sellers plays Quilty playing Doctor Zempf – a German psychologist who looks a lot like the forerunner of Dr Strangelove – and you get the feeling there are layers of improvisation, secrecy and tragedy taking place. I’m never quite sure if Quilty really fits in this film. He is decadent and absurd, and I don’t believe he could possibly be interested in Lolita. He seems too self-involved.

I think Lolita has some brilliant elements, and they are the elements I associate with all my favourite Kubrick movies. The mise-en-scène, for instance; in the opening scenes, when Humbert drives to Quilty’s house and finds him wrapped in a sheet, drinking champagne and playing ping-pong, every object in that cluttered house (which reminds me of Xanadu in Citizen Kane) looks very interesting, and absolutely right. And there’s the way the camera moves with the actors, making involved observers of us at a distance, keeping us emotionally separate. We are never asked, in any moment, to empathise with Humbert Humbert. And yet we don’t detest him either. We observe him and his choices, and the way his reality crumbles.