films easy ascendancy. Room at the Top  features the new cool 
realism. Not only is it not a success story, it is as much an 
announcement of the end of the Cinderella package as Marilyn 
Monroe was the end of the star system. Room at the Top  is the 
story of how the higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of 
his backside. The moral is that success is not only wicked but 
also the formula for misery. It is very hard for a hot medium like 
film to accept the cool message of TV. But the Peter Sellers 
movies I’m All Right, Jack  and Only Two Can Play  are perfectly in 
tune with the new temper created by the cool TV image. Such is 
also the meaning of the ambiguous success of Lolita . As a 
novel, its acceptance announced the antiheroic approach to 
romance. The film industry had long beaten out a royal road to 
romance in keeping with the crescendo of the success story. 
Lolita  announced that the royal road was only a cowtrack, 
after all, and as for success, it shouldn’t happen to a dog.