time capsule/Aug. 5, 1962

AT THE MOVIES, Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert and Sue Lyon as Lolita (right), entices audiences to the box office. This August, another version, with Jeremy Irons, will run on Showtime (see review on page 53) after more than a year of being hot-potatoed by skittish distributors. ON TV, Westerns round up the top three slots as Wagon Train, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke ride tall. The following season, the No. 1 spot will go to another kind of country folk -- The Beverly Hillbillies. AND IN THE NEWS, the Soviet Union tests a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere over the Arctic. The blast, estimated at 40 megatons, is the second-largest nuclear explosion ever -- the largest being an in-air test the USSR conducted in 1961.