Nabokov was trading in movie-friendly, noirish suspense long before “Lolita.” Photograph by MGM Studios / Archive Photos / Getty

The axiom that great novels make bad movie adaptations has not been entirely true for Vladimir Nabokov, whose books depend to a surprising degree on plot-heavy narratives (not to say cravenly pulpy story lines) that lend themselves well to the screen. Take “Lolita_,”_ with its tale of the Humbert Humbert, who marries the mother of the twelve-year-old girl he covets and plots his new wife’s murder, only to see her die accidentally under the wheels of a car minutes after she discovers his secret diary of pedophilic lust, whereupon he embarks on a cross-country road trip with his orphaned stepdaughter, all of it culminating in an extended murder scene when Humbert tracks a shadowy pursuer who stole the girl away from him. Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 1962 movie version, starring James Mason as Humbert, compressed all of this into two hours, and also captured the novel’s tone of suave irony—which makes “Lolita” as much a satiric indictment of mid-twentieth-century American mores as it is a study of a pervert. (The 1997 film version, by the director Adrian Lyne, deaf to the novel’s humor and everything else, was a slow, sodden, sombre slog—an embarrassment.)

Nabokov was trading in movie-friendly, noirish suspense long before “Lolita.” His 1938 novel, “Laughter in the Dark,” (about which I wrote in an earlier post) is a lurid love triangle involving an amateur film producer, a would-be film animator, and an underage aspiring actress. With its intimations of illegal sex, murder, and marital infidelity, the book seems made for the movies—and it was. Nabokov, at the time a penniless Russian exile in Berlin, admitted that he wrote the book with an eye toward a screen sale. This finally happened in 1969, thirty years after the novel’s release, when Tony Richardson directed an adaptation that moved the story’s setting from nineteen-thirties Berlin to the swinging London of the sixties. Richard Burton was set to star but was fired a few days into shooting, for inebriation, and was replaced by Nicol Williamson (himself no teetotaler). The movie drew respectable reviews, and today it sounds like a fascinating period piece, replete with mini skirts and go-go boots, and with cinéma-vérité party scenes featuring real-life London hipsters such as David Hockney. Unfortunately, the film has since been removed from distribution, has never been shown on television, and is unavailable anywhere, including in MOMA’s rare-film archives. (A planned 1986 remake, with Mick Jagger in the role of the demonic Axel Rex, ran aground after a ten-day table read of the script when Rebecca De Mornay, cast as the sex-kitten seductress, clashed with the director, Laszlo Papas, and fled the production. Maryam d’Abo—soon to be cast as a Bond girl in “The Living Daylights”—was hired to replace De Mornay, but the production crumbled and was abandoned).

Nabokov seemed also to have had the movies in mind when he dreamed up “King, Queen, Knave,” his second novel, first published, in Russian, in 1928. Like “Laughter in the Dark,” it tells the story of a racy love triangle, this time with a tinge of incest. Franz_,_ a twenty-something rural yokel goes to work at his uncle’s Berlin department store and is pulled into an affair by his lubricious aunt. Soon, they’re scheming to murder the blithely unsuspecting uncle/husband. Again, Nabokov had to wait many decades, until his post-”Lolita” success, to see the novel made into a movie; the film version of “King, Queen, Knave”—directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring David Niven and Gina Lollobrigida—was released in 1972. But trying to force Nabokov’s exquisitely controlled satire of bourgeois materialism and conventionality into a slapstick would-be youth comedy was a grave error. The movie is a sloppy, slapdash affair that badly squanders its source material (and its actors), and it serves as a reminder of all that could be bad about early-seventies movies. Everyone involved seems desperate to appear young and with-it. You can see for yourself—the entire movie has been uploaded to YouTube.

Six years elapsed before another Nabokov novel hit the screen, and it was, again, one of the dark-comic masterpieces from the author’s sojourn in Berlin in the nineteen-thirties: “Despair,” a novel whose plot seems tailored to a high-concept, one-sentence Hollywood pitch: “Man meets his double, swaps identities, and kills him for the insurance money.” Like “Lolita_,”_ the story features a highly unreliable narrator, Hermann Hermann, who also happens to be the main character—which poses real challenges to any filmmaker. Fortunately, the director was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, working from a script by the equally gifted Tom Stoppard and starring the superb Dirk Bogarde as Hermann. Fassbinder retained the Nabokovian humor but introduced his own astonishing touches, like the moment when Bogarde’s Hermann, the owner of a chocolate factory during the rise of the Nazis, stares down into a pile of baby-shaped chocolates in a bin, his eyes growing wide with premonitory horror at what suddenly seems to be a heap of corpses. Stoppard, meanwhile, provided a script that more than matches the source author’s word play, and hints at Hermann’s creeping departure from reality, as when Hermann, obsessing over his insurance scam, mishears the word “merger” as “murder.” “Merger, murder,” Hermann says, shrugging, as if they’re all the same. Of all the Nabokov movies, this is the only one to rival Kubrick’s “Lolita,” and it is still in circulation, in libraries and on Amazon.

There were, in the late nineteen-nineties, a few foreign-language adaptations of Nabokov short stories, and of his first novel, “Mary.” But the most recent English-language adaptation was the 2000 John Turturro vehicle “The Luzhin Defence.” The director, Marleen Gorris, and the screenwriter, Peter Berry, made an admirable attempt to bring the novel’s story of a recessive chess genius to life, but they were encumbered by the same problems that Nabokov himself faced with the novel: trying to make interesting and sympathetic a character who is wrapped up, to the exclusion of all else, in a recondite game. That a young woman (played by Emily Watson) would fall in love with this solipsistic and frankly unappealing character is no more believable in the movie than it is in the book, which is one of Nabokov’s rare misfires.

By now, filmmakers have mined all of Nabokov’s movie-friendly novels—with the possible exception of “Glory”, which offers semi-autobiographical glimpses into Nabokov’s years at Cambridge in the early nineteen-twenties (catnip, perhaps, for period-loving “Downton Abbey” watchers). But the adaptation I’m still waiting for is “Pale Fire,” which pretty much everyone agrees is unfilmable. The idea of a movie version was first suggested to me back in 1985, when I was interviewing David Cronenberg, who discussed his fantasy of adapting the book. The basic framing of the novel—a madman’s scholarly notes to a long poem—would present immense formal difficulties. But the crazed commentary of Charles Kinbote (who believes himself to be the exiled king of the fictional Zembla) is thick with movie-ready palace intrigues, teams of regicidal assassins, revolution, and a late-night escape from a castle through underground tunnels. And the “real life” layer of the story ends with the highly cinematic scene of an escaped convict murdering the poet John Shade, whom he mistakes for the judge who put him away. Come to think of it, is Cronenberg available?