The Lola Revue The Lola Film as Genre

Abstract

One of the contentions of this book is that the Lola film qualifies as a genre in its own right. I could and perhaps should have been content with developing a typology of Lola as a distinctive character (her name, her stance, her occupation as singer/dancer, her claim to pleasure), and that is certainly part of what I am doing. I would not call Damn Yankees a Lola film, but Gwen Verdon’s Lola is definitely based on the Lola type. By the same token, the saloon singer Lola in Laurel and Hardy’s Way out West (1937), the nightclub singer Lola in Charlie Chan in Rio (1941), and the drag queen Lola in Kinky Boots are all recognizable embodiments of the Lola type. The virtue of pursuing a typology of this kind is that many more films would fall into my purview. Instead of 35 films, I might have as many as 100 on my hands. But limiting the category of analysis to typology brings two problems with it. For one thing, the Lolas that are inserted into genres as diverse as the western, the musical, the slapstick, the spy film, and many more tend to be reduced to stereotypes and verge on parody by sidelining the claim to pleasure that is central to the whole idea of Lola.