June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is AIP! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Also released as Twinky and London Affair, Lola has the kind of story that only a movie made in 1970 could have.

Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls in love — or something — with Sybil Londonderry (Susan George), who also goes by Twinky and Lola. The problem is that he’s 38 and she’s 16. He seemingly knows the age of consent and any guy that can instantly tell you that is a creep.

Then Scott gets busted for being married to a child and forced to leave England. He says, “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” Now this pornographic author has to go back to the United States.

If you think this couldn’t happen, well…

Norman Thaddeus Vane wrote this and its based on his own married to 16 year-old model Sarah Caldwell, who he married when he was also 38. In an interview with the astounding Hidden Films, the writer — and later director — would claim, “There was a reason I wound up marrying Sarah Caldwell (who was 16 at the time and later cast in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter which Vane scripted; Vane later based the script for Lola on this scandalous marriage). I was a good-looking kid on King’s Road in Chelsea, I had a sports car, I had money, I had a beautiful flat.”

Vane also pretty much explains the plot of this film in that interview: “I met her at a party. She was stunningly beautiful. I had a small flat on King’s Road in Chelsea, and she used to come over secretly on the way back from school, and we used to fuck. And she told her parents that she was seeing me — I was probably about 38 or something—and they were angry. Her father was head of the East India Trading Company. The only way we could see each other was if we got married, and in Scotland, you could get married at 16. So we eloped there. I had been sleeping with a Scottish girl from Glasgow. You had to spend three days in residence in Scotland before you got married, so I asked her if we could use her family’s address and she said yes. Sarah called her parents and said “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I got married today!” The newspapers wrote columns about her, it was like a front page story, for months afterwards. They called me “The Cad of the Year.””

This entire interview is wild and I urge you to read it, as he claims that director Richard Donner immediately slept with Susan George, that the movie was financed by an Italian baron and Bronson superfan who later committed suicide over Britt Ekland, that Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland wanted to play the teenage girl and that Bronson couldn’t be controlled by Donner and he ruined the movie.

Lola is fascinating because why would Scott and Lola ever get together — well, sex — or stay together? There’s nothing that suggests that they have a single thing in common other than her schoolgirl crush on him and well, yeah, she’s Susan George in 1970, I get that. Yet Bronson comes off as, well, Charles Bronson, a man who speaks little and is quick to violence. Maybe that’s how I see him as I’ve watched so many of his action movies, but when you see the posters and VHS covers for this, you’ll see that I wasn’t the only one who saw Bronson just as a force of violent nature.

Lola ends up getting an apartment for the couple while Scott is in jail over a misunderstanding, then she doesn’t realize that he has a job as a writer and needs to be left alone while he’s working. As a jerk of a writer myself, I get it. She also acts like a kid because she is one. Finally, after running away and coming back, she goes back to England for good.

This is not the last movie that Vane would make that references his life. The Black Room is about how he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It remains to be discovered if any of those women were vampires. Vane also made the absolutely baffling Club Life, a movie that I want everyone to watch.

I wonder if Susan George met with her agent and said, “Can I do something not so scuzzy for my next movie, like sleep with a guy twice my age?” And the agent said, “Susan baby, have I got a movie for you. It’s classy. It’s called Straw Dogs.”

You can watch this on Tubi.