Cinema: 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...