Girls Girls Girls

The Love Goddesses, put forth as a history of sex in the movies, is a grab bag of old film clips that suggests that the sundry excesses of Sweet Charlotte stem from time-honored Hollywood tradition. In The Cheat (1915), villainous Sessue Hayakawa leaves the mark of his desire on Fannie Ward's neck with a hot branding iron. In one of her early forays, Vamp Theda Bara anticipates the living bra by wearing what appears to be a giant tarantula. In Blonde Venus (1932), a gorilla lumbers through a chorus line, yanks off hirsute head and paws and clears its throat for a husky song. The gorilla is Marlene Dietrich, who puts on top hat and tails for another floor show in Morocco (1930), ends by kissing a lady customer.

After tiptoeing past the social significance of such phenomena, the film's narrator asserts that "Depression breadlines brought about an age of innocence," which in turn brought fame to Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin and Dorothy Lamour. Obviously Goddesses blunders into some broad generalizations, but it does offer an Olympus of dimpled deities, each doing her utmost to prove that any personable young miss can become a myth with sufficient luck, sufficient talent, of perhaps just a well-placed lisp. Sensation seekers lured by its title will find The Love Goddesses a disappointment. But movie buffs will happily sit through Harlow, Hayworth, Turner, Monroe, Taylor, Loren and Bardot to see tempestuous Pola Negri taking a whip to small-town prudes (Woman of the World, 1925); a giddy Greta Garbo clomping around in a tank suit for her first Swedish film (Peter the Tramp, 1922); and durable Claudette Colbert sharing her milk bath with two thirsty black cats (DeMille's Sign of the Cross, 1932) in what must be the only known instance of a striptease accomplished swallow by swallow.

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