Lola

Year releasted: 1969

by Keith Phipps
May 17th, 2000

Avoiding copyright infringement thanks to the exclusion of two letters and little else, 1969's Lola stars Charles Bronson as a 38-year-old American writer of erotic fiction who falls for a swinging 16-year-old London girl (Susan George, of Straw Dogs). Taking advantage of Scotland's relaxed age of consent, the two travel to Glasgow for a quickie marriage, a development frowned upon by George's family--which includes Bond Girl mom Honor Blackman and a death-ready Trevor Howard--but treated by the film with delighted whimsy, as if Bronson had instead married a space alien or a circus clown. Expanding the stone-faced persona made famous in The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen (and later in Death Wish) by neither leaps nor bounds, it's never clear whether Bronson's extended gazes at George are meant to express fondness or a desire to take her out in some sort of revenge killing. The pair's frequent love scenes aren't made any more comfortable by the fact that George looks and acts more like an overstimulated 12-year-old than a precocious teen; the sight of her lips descending on Bronson's unchanging, crag-ravaged, vaguely simian face provides more than a few uncomfortable moments. Despite Bronson's terse confessions of affection ("I love that kid"), their life together takes a turn for the worse once they move to New York together. After decorating their apartment with Jefferson Airplane posters in a jump-cut-ridden montage sequence (courtesy of future Superman and Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner), George finds that the greatest love of all may not be the one between a ditzy schoolgirl and a brooding, self-serious author of paperback trash, a decision most viewers will have reached long before she pedals her bike off to freedom with a song in her heart and a smile on her still-developing face.