Poor, Poor Charlotte, Who
Runs in Front of Cars
Poor, Poor Charlotte, Who
Go to TOC for this film ( (which has also a statement on purpose and manner of analysis and a disclaimer as to caveat emptor and my knowing anything authoritatively, which I do not, but I do try to not know earnestly, with some discretion, and considerable thought).
Rewinding James Mason to 1945 and the death of another Charlotte
Nabokov's Lolita was published in 1955. Stanley Kubrick's film of Lolita came out in 1962.
Last week I saw that someone had posted about watching the 1945 Gainsborough pictures flick They Were Sisters, which stars James Mason. They were beyond unimpressed with the film, and almost in passing mentioned that James Mason's wife, Pamela Kellino, was playing his daughter and that for about fifteen minutes he thought "she was his bit on the side." I went through some Gainsborough films back in 2020 and was surprised that I didn't recall viewing this one. When I looked it up on Letterboxd I found that I'd put it in my watchlist. I probably hadn't watched it as it was not yet on line, but now it was, a very poor copy uploaded to Youtube in 2021, which was after my brief Gainsborough spree.
The plot is three sisters marry and comparisons are made, who won and who lost. Lucy and William's marriage is a love match, they're happy, and happy to have nieces and a nephew who sometimes visit them. Vera, the beauty, married Brian, who was determined that one day she would love him, but not in a "I will force you to love me" way, he hoped this would naturally happen, and it didn't. Charlotte married the debonaire, manipulative Geoffrey. She is madly in love with him, and we know he doesn't love her so we wonder from the beginning why he pursued her and settled on marrying her when he didn't even need her money. The only answer seems to be that she will put up with anything he does, and he enjoys being nice then cruel then nice then cruel. The film starts with everyone marrying at around the same time, then many years are skipped and Vera has a young daughter, Sarah, and Charlotte has two daughters, Margaret and Judith, and a son, Stephen. The eldest daughter, Margaret, played by Pamela, who was twenty-nine, seems to be about seventeen or eighteen but oddly inexperienced except for being a fine secretary for her father. While my attention, for this piece, is on Margaret, the film's focus tends to be Judith, the younger daughter.
Soon enough, we learn that Geoffrey has a tight leash on his family. In particular, Margaret. When he calls them back early from visiting an aunt, Margaret is disappointed as she's met a boy and appears to have had her first ever date. Back at home, Geoffrey receives Margaret by getting her into his office, alone, away from the other children, where he looks her appreciatively over and tells her she has a long face for a holiday girl. She says she had a nice time and he pulls her to him, turning her around so he embraces her from behind, his arms fully enfolding her, as he half-buries his face in her hair, he tells her that now she's back she's going to have an even nicer time, "You may not know it, my pet, but you're taking up golf. Then you and I can work together during the week and play together on the weekend. How's that for an idea?" Margaret has the expression of one suffocating. "I haven't forgotten my little girl, because she was away," he says, then becomes upset when she's not enthusiastic. "You did want to come back, didn't you?!" He learns she had met a boy, then when he later collects the mail and sees the boy has written her, he throws the letter away.
Well, this made me sit up. Because the way that James Mason played the character brought Lolita to mind. His attentions didn't seem only fatherly.
Charlotte has taken to drink and her sisters begin to worry about her. Eventually, Lucy brings a doctor to see Charlotte, against Geoffrey's wishes. Because Geoffrey opposes it, Charlotte declines to see the doctor. However, after the doctor and Lucy leave, and Geoffrey bans Lucy from the house and from ever seeing his children again, Charlotte announces to Geoffrey she's leaving him. They argue, he slaps her, she runs from the room. Margaret comes down the stairs as her mother flees out the front door, she chases after her, we hear the screech of car wheels, then we're outside in the street and Charlotte is dead in the street. She'd run in front of the car. This is edited as if taking place in real time. Geoffrey briefly speaks with the driver of the car. When a police officer rolls up on his bike, Geoffrey tells him Charlotte had run out to post a letter.
An inquest is to be held. Geoffrey tells Lucy he and Charlotte had happily reconciled before her death and he wants her to put in a good word for him. He is going to take Margaret and go away for a few months, but what to do about Judith, why, he'll let Lucy have her, perhaps even indefinitely. At the inquest, the driver of the car that struck Charlotte says he wondered if she ran deliberately in front of the car, her eyes seemed filled with tears. Then Lucy testifies that Geoffrey was an abusive husband, that Charlotte was being slowly killed by her his cruelty. Margaret's beau shows up and as she leaves with him she tells her father she never wants to see or speak with him again. Lucy and William take custody of Judith and Stephen. End of film.
As it was only ninety-nine cents, of course I immediately bought the book, which was published in 1943. First, I zipped through it to check out if Mason's behavior toward Margaret had overreached the relationship in the book. Not really and yes. A couple of pages reveal little cruelties he makes toward Margaret when she's little, enchanted by her tears, "The droop of her mouth was delicious. She used to put her head down on his shoulder and cry, not noisily like a baby, but quietly like an adult. He used to frighten her for the sake of feeling her press closer to him, for the sake of soothing her again." When she's about twelve, her father regularly keeps her out of school, to amuse him at home. It's already decided she will be his secretary when older. At seventeen, when she becomes his secretary, he prevents her from having any other life away from him, but otherwise gives her everything she wants. He teachers her to take care of all the responsibilities of the house and she takes her mother's place going out with him. We're given a glimpse of his reflecting on his relationship with Margaret, how he wants her to be pure, sexless, "He could not bear to think that Margaret should fall in love with and be loved by a man." Charlotte recognizes that Margaret is the only person in the household Geoffrey loves.
The way the book is written, there's room left for a reader to suppose that Geoffrey is not abusing Margaret sexually, but it is an intensely abusive relationship psychologically and emotionally.
Charlotte does not run out in front of a car in the book. She drinks too much. Toward the end she is sometimes drunk in public, on the street. On one of those days she simply collapses and dies. There's no dramatic argument beforehand. There's no car. There's no inquest. Geoffrey's son has already gone away. Geoffrey gives Judith up to her aunts, sells the house, desposes of all that was in it, and he goes off to Canada with Margaret.
Now, that sounds bad, Geoffrey carrying Margaret away to Canada where she knows no one but Geoffrey and no one knows them. Like when Humbert carries Lolita away to Beardsley, and then on a cross-country trip.
Long before Nabokov had written Lolita, he had written another novel about a man seeking to get his hands on a girl, called The Enchanter. The girl is not named Lolita. He gains the trust of the girl's mother who becomes ill then dies. The girl now in his custody, he takes her to the French Riviera. When he attempts to molest her, she wakes up screaming. He runs into the street and leaps in front of a truck. Though written in 1939, the book wasn't published until 1987, after Nabokov's death.
They Were Sisters, the movie, crossed the ocean and was released in the United States in 1946, when Nabokov was teaching in Boston. One is left to wonder if his later naming Lolita's mother Charlotte was a matter of coincidence, or was it a nod in the direction of They Were Sisters, in which James Mason, as Geoffrey, too ardently embraces his daughter, is too possessive of her, and after her mother's death, plans to take only Margaret with him to Canada.
When I wrote my analysis of Kubrick's Lolita in 2014, which I compared to the book, I took considerable time with Charlotte's death scene in the film. Charlotte has discovered Humbert's diary and says he will never see Lolita again. She lying on the floor in distress, holding her first husband's urn, locked in their bedroom, and he runs down to the kitchen to make a Martini for her, yelling all the while his explanation that what she has found are only fragments of a novel. While he's making the drink, he gets a phone call that Charlotte is dead, hit by a car. He says it's impossible, she's up in her room. Hearing sirens, he goes out to explore, and following the sound of the sirens he finds Charlotte's death scene a street away.
Cinema distorts time but I found its distortion of time in the case of Charlotte's death to be odd. I wrote...
Charlotte had about one minute to get to wherever this is and be struck by the car, which isn't much time, and especially not that much time when at a minute someone is calling Humbert to tell him Charlotte has been hit, and then the State Police and ambulance are there already as Humbert comes walking up.
Humbert leaves Charlotte in the bedroom. He goes down to make her the Martini. This is all filmed as if events are occurring in real time. He enters the kitchen at 1:04:01 to make the Martini. He hasn't finished when the phone rings and he runs to answer it at 1:0505. Charlotte has not only had time to run out and be hit by a car in a remote enough place he didn't hear it, she has also been identified, and someone has gone to a location where there is a phone, they have looked up his phone number, and they have dialed him to let him know Charlotte has been struck. There's a lot of dark comedy in Lolita that helps make its horrors sufferable. Time had been so compressed, I almost felt there was an inside joke being played upon the viewer.
Having happened upon They Were Sisters, I rather feel now that Charlotte's death in Lolita has blended with the death of the Charlotte who was Margaret's mother. We hear the tires screech in They Were Sisters, James Mason as Geoffrey steps outside the house, and there lies Charlotte almost right before the door. The policeman approaches and James Mason as Geoffrey says she had gone out to post a letter.
In the book, Lolita, she does go out with a letter to post, which Humbert picks up and hides away. In the film, there is no letter, but there is a post office box on the street beyond the house's driveway.
Nabokov may have seen the movie and forgotten about it and accidentally used the name Charlotte later when writing of Lolita's mother being hit by a car. But he was already writing about the abuse of a child and so if he did see the movie I doubt he'd have forgotten about it. Or he may not have known about the movie and it was entirely coincidental, his coming up with a Charlotte who runs in front of a car.
However, when it comes to the filming of Lolita, I've a difficult time imagining that James Mason and Kubrick and Nabokov didn't have discussion on Mason having played already an abusive father, whose wife, named Charlotte, had run out in front of a car and been killed. And in the movie he had plans to take the daughter, Margaret, just them both, to Canada, which were thwarted. But in the book he did go off with Margaret. Even if it was all coincidental and Nabokov had no knowlege of They Were Sisters, I can't help but feel Mason having acted in it would have some impact on Charlotte's death scene. The one that occurs in the space of about a minute.
September 2026
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