HOLLYWOOD -- When it comes to movies, the proverbial pendulum gets downright dizzy swinging between political correctness and artisitic freedom - and never more so than with last year's Lolita.

Budgeted at $62 million US and with appearances in only a small number of European theatres following its September premiere at a Spanish film festival, the controversial movie has yet to appear publicly in North America.

Studios and American pay-per-view stations have passed on the film, and its only current prospect is a bid by Montreal-based Lion Gate Films for North American distribution. But that company has been negotiating unsuccessfully for nearly a year with the film's owner, Pathe - which is naturally disinclined to sell for a small fraction of the production cost.

All this despite the New York Times declaring that star Jeremy Irons turns in the performance of his career as Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man with a sexual obsession for a 14-year-old "nymphet" (called so by author Vladimir Nabokov who, Literature 101 students will recall, had the girl two years younger in his famous novel).

Director Adrian Lyne (91/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal), in a statement through his agent yesterday, continues to blame cowardice for the fact the film can't get a deal.

"The community is not renowned for making courageous decisions," Lyne said. "I think the atmosphere in America now has changed over the last three or four years and is similar, in fact, to the way it was in the '50s."

Lolita, which also stars Melanie Griffith and Dominique Swain as the young girl, has the standard R-rating, instead of the more racy NC-17, and only implies sex between the aging Humbert and the young girl.

But in a climate in which the film version of Gunter Grass's acclaimed The Tin Drum was declared obscene in Oklahoma (subsequently overturned by an appellate court) sensitivity over the JonBenet Ramsey murder and the new Child Pornography Act in the U.S. - which prohibits even the use of adult body doubles in suggestive scenes - none of this seems to matter.

Viewer's Choice, a pay-per-view service, was being courted by Pathe but the channel's senior VP, Michael Klein, simply says that despite finding great value in the quality of Lolita, the company took the view that "the film is really depicting a sexual relationship that in U.S. law amounts to statutory rape."

Lyne has been staunchly defending the film, which he describes as being far truer to the novel than the 1962 Stanley Kubrick version, by saying that if he'd made a film in which the same little girl is "massacred, cut to pieces and eaten, nobody would be reacting like this."

Self-proclaimed moral authorities have spouted conflicting views of the value of the literature over the appearance of a pedophile being a sympathetic character, but in the end the debate is moot if the film is never seen.

Irons has been a strong defender of Lolita, and said in a press conference at the Spanish premiere that the very debate is why the film should be seen.

"Why I think it's desperately important that this film and films like it be seen and continue to be made is that it allows us to be adult, discerning, moral people who can see a story and be shocked by it, be appalled by it, be amazed by it, be excited by it, or whatever - but make up our own minds. It is a very moral tale about a man who loves a girl who is under the legal age. But at the end of the movie you're terribly glad you're not that man, and if you've ever had the thought of interfering with anyone under the legal age, this movie will put you off."

Some say that if the film truly showed commercial potential, it would have been bought by now. But it's taboo subject matter in conservative times and, according to some European critics, isn't as good as its lead actor's performance would suggest.

As one executive told the trade paper Variety: "If you're going to offend the parents of Americans, you might as well do it with a film you love."

Which is what Lions Gate president Jeff Sackman says is exactly what he's doing.

"I think there's an audience for it," Sackman told Variety yesterday, explaining that his Canadian company is awaiting word on the purchase. "People should be able to decide on their own about it. The media make it into much more than it really is. It's just a movie and there are more disturbing films. It makes you think."