Chronicles handicapped stereotyping from the “Obsessive Avenger” Quasimodo, to the “Oedipal remasculinizing” of Luke Skywalker after he loses his sword hand to Darth Vader, to Scent of a Woman, in which Al Pacino wants to kill himself because he’s blind. From Hollywood’s Golden Age: Freaks repulsed ‘30s sensibilities (the cast was barred from eating in the MGM commissary), and the studio extended this prejudice to the publicity, calling the Tod Browning film a “thrillingly gruesome tale” and referring to its performers as “creatures of the abyss,” “strange shadows,” “nightmare shapes in the dark” and “grim pranks of nature—living in a world apart.” Even the sympathetic Browning was not immune—he took liberties with the original magazine article on which Freaks was based and tagged on the film’s famous midnight revenge/Chicken Lady. Gabba-gabba-hey. GR

Publisher: Rutgers University
Paperback: 385 pages
Illustrated

An American original—the finest female purveyor of good, clean smut. Before the Brooklyn-born vaudevillian hit Hollywood (Night After Night, She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel), Mae West was a Broadway playwright and actress. From day one, the “girl who shook a wicked shoulder” was in hot water with the critics, and she thrived on the scandal. Her 1927 comedy/drama Sex (written as “Jane Mast”) was raided by the police, and the cast was thrown in jail. The “hot second act” in the bordello was probably the reason. Next came “a homosexual comedy in three acts,” The Drag. Said one Variety reviewer: The play “was a cheap and shabby appeal to sensationalism.” The high point came in the third act, “a jazzed-up revel on the garbage heap. Some 30 young men take part in the spectacle, half tricked out in women’s clothes and half in tuxedos. Half a dozen of the boys in skirts do specialties, and the episode takes on the character of a chorus-girl ‘pick-out’ number in a burlesque show… All hands are rouged, lipsticked and liquid-whited to the last degree.” Mae West’s sister was arrested for disorderly conduct prior to the opening. GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 208 pages
Illustrated

Tales of the Teutonic Love Goddess. “Universal, having created a ‘new Dietrich’ with Destry Rides Again, was prepared to cash in on a good thing. What they hadn’t counted on was giving Dietrich a role that was to become one of her best! Seven Sinners, an action-packed, two-fisted melodrama, had wide appeal, and Dietrich’s Bijou Blanche is a gorgeous satire of the Sadie Thompsons of the world. René designed some of the wildest creations. The black-and-white-patchwork quilt get-up is a riot of bad taste, to say nothing of her rings, bracelets, cigarette holder (loaded with jewels) and the inevitable feathers!” As movie critic Bosley Crowther noted: “If Miss Dietrich and her comedies were both just a little broader, Mae West would be in the shade.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 224 pages
Illustrated

Rimbaud, Stein, Cage, Beefheart, electronic music, Reinhardt, Duchamp, Fuller, Paik, performance art, Reich, copy culture, etc. “Elucidates, celebrates, enumerates and sometimes obliterates achievers and achievements in the avant-garde arts. Although it runs from A to Z, it could have easily have been written from Z to A (or in any other order you might imagine) and may be read from front to back, back to front, or point to point. It is opinionated, as all good dictionaries should be, but it is also inclusive, because there can never be just one avant-garde.” If you don’t like it, says the author, go read the phone book. GR

Publisher: A Cappella
Paperback: 246 pages
Illustrated

Young Doré (1832-1883), “the precocious genius from Strasbourg, who had been drawing practically from infancy,” was inspired by Rabelais’ two social satires, Gargantua and Pantagruel, to produce these comic illustrations. The woodblock prints show Doré’s deft, humorous hand at work, playing light against dark for both dramatic depth and theatrical effect. Gargantua is the story of a giant man, who can be seen here spearing a human on his dinner fork (strictly a Doré touch—it’s not in the story). GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 153 pages
Illustrated

Blood-drinking vegetables! Bronze-skinned Gorgons! This A-to-Z guide to monster features such DC Comic creatures as Horro from Sea Devils and the Giant Cat from House of Secrets mixed with Star Trek TV villains like the Horta; horror-movie monsters like Universal’s mummy Im-Ho-Tep and Hammer’s Gorgo; Harryhausen animations like the Minoton from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger; B movie abominations such as the Crawling Eyes from The Crawling Eye; and pulp horrors from way back like the Klangan from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Pirates of Venus, written in 1932. Whew! Includes references on each monster’s first appearance, “species,” gender and powers, size and “biography.” GR

Publisher: Facts on File
Paperback: 400 pages
Illustrated

Notes, letters, documents and essays on the early years, 1910 to 1914. “We were possessed. In cafés, in the streets and squares, in artists’ studios, we were ‘on the march’ day and night, we drove ourselves to fathom the unfathomable, and, as poet, painter and composer in one, to create the incomparable ‘Art of the Century,’ a timeless art which would surpass all art forms of preceding centuries.” That was the Expressionist vision, but the art of its adherents became imbued with another sort of timelessness—the horrors of World War I and death, which came “like a visitation upon mankind, and the words of those writers who survived formed themselves into a scream of revolt, desperation and hatred.” From 1915 through 1920, Expressionism went dark during and after the war. “Yet something of the old European heritage survived in the passionate hope and faith in the future.” GR

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 421 pages

An exhaustive A-to-Z compilation of Hollywood’s popular postwar film fad, hopelessly over-analyzed by scholars and critics. “[These movies] consistently evoke the dark side of the American persona. The central figures in these films, caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness, drowning outside the social mainstream, are America’s stylized vision of itself, a true cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition.” Includes plot synopses, critiques, casts and credits. GR

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 479 pages
Illustrated

Thirteen shameless defenders wallow in the cheese of 14 shameless films, including The Tingler, Dune and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Film history, director interviews and volumes of insider film facts help weave these amusing tales of cinema’s classic clinkers. Maniac, in which a madman eats out the eye of a cat, is defended as “a satisfying reprieve from the carefully paced, well behaved, overscripted mainstream pictures that dominate the history of the cinema.” Voodoo Man “succeeds in creating a fun world that weds the ridiculous with a genuinely important scene in the Lugosi canon.” Dino DeLaurentiis’ King Kong is called “movie magic at its thrilling best.” On Indestructible Man, Lon Chaney’s drunken tour de force, well, “you just have to love this film.” And Rodan is proved to rank “with Godzilla and The Mysterians as one of Toho’s top three science fiction films.“ Consider the film’s moving “Eulogy for Two Dying Monsters,” dubbed in by Key Luke as the monsters are brought down by a volcano: “As Kyo turned to weep on my shoulder, I realized that the Rodans were doomed. The heat, the gases, the bombardment added to their bewilderment. Like moths in those rivers of fire, they seemed to almost welcome the agonies of death. And when, still calling to each other, one of them fell at last into the molten lava stream, the other still refused to save itself. The last of their kind, masters of the air and Earth, the strongest, swiftest creatures that ever breathed—now they sank against the Earth like weary children. Each had refused to live without the other, and so they were dying together. I wondered whether I, a 20th-century man, could ever hope to die as well.” GR

Publisher: Midnight Marquee
Paperback: 251 pages
Illustrated

Meet five Black Mask pulp detective writers (who weren’t named Chandler, Gardner, Hammett, Halliday or L’Amour): Horace McCoy, who wrote Island of Lost Men for Paramount before he wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; Eric Taylor, who penned Universal’s The Ghost of Frankenstein; Peter Ruric, who wrote Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat; Dwight V. Babcock, who scribed Jungle Captive and The Brute Man for Universal; and John K. Butler, who churned out westerns for Republic, and a rare horror movie, The Vampire’s Ghost. Did anybody say “auteur”? GR

Publisher: Bowling Green
Paperback: 189 pages
Illustrated