Review: Marcus Hearn’s ‘Pink Floyd’ and ‘The Who’

Last December I reviewed official Hammer Films historian Marcus Hearn's latest book on the venerable studio. More recently he has assembled new editions of two handsome collections from the Rex Features photo library documenting Pink Floyd and The Who. A Hammer Horror nut and a psychedelic Rock fan: now there's a guy I'd like to hang out with!

Both books capture two of our most enduring British Rock bands in unexpected ways. Pink Floyd begins with a series of shots from Dezo Hoffman, the photographer most famous for his iconic snaps of The Beatles in mid leap. He attempts the same thing with the far less cuddly Floyd to hilariously incongruous effect (Roger Waters, of all people, looks like he's really into it!). Next Marc Sharratt shoots some more appropriately moody, psychedelically lit portraits of the group. Ray Stevenson catches a moment certain to fascinate fans as future "Have a Cigar"-singer Roy Harper appears on stage with Pink Floyd at the Midsummer High free show the day A Saucerful of Secrets was released. The band poses with a less likely guest in Goksin Sipahioglu’s 1971 clicks featuring French movie star Jeanne Moreau. 

Not surprisingly, Pink Floyd posed together for few photos after that point, and most of the book’s remaining shots were captured in concert. The highlights of this period are André Csillag and Brian Rasic's eerie image from the elaborately staged Wall tour, some of which look like outtakes from a long lost German Expressionist film.

Hearn's text is sparse, but refreshing because he refuses to shy from the group's turmoil, as writers tend to do in books of this sort. Hearn quotes some pretty harsh barbs exchanged between Waters and Dave Gilmour. Fortunately the tale ends with a welcome peace accord, as Rasic and Richard Young document one final appearance by Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason at Live 8 in 2005, finishing the book arm-over-arm in a shot as unexpected as the Dezo Hoffman snaps that opened it.

I'm no Pink Floyd expert, so I can't really attest to the rarity of the photos in Hearn's book on the brooding psychedelicists. I'm a lot more caught up on my Who homework, so I'm more comfortable assuring my fellow Whooligans that there is much fresh imagery in The Who to delight longtime fans. Dezo Hoffman really dominates this volume, getting things underway with some black and white shots of the Shepherd's Bush thugs in full Maximum R&B mode. These photos are astonishing for their mod moodiness and their textured clarity. You can feel each scratch (plus one prominent puncture) in Townshend's Rickenbacker as he thrashes it in a soul trance. Hoffman also contributes some atypically intimate shots of the group, zooming past their flailing limbs to zero in on vulnerable, disarmingly boyish faces. Considering The Who's reputation for clowning and destruction in the '60s, there is also an unexpected melancholic undercurrent in the early shots. Hoffman catches Keith Moon pouting behind his kit on the set of "Ready, Steady, Go". The photographer also seizes the group's more celebrated contempt, as seen in Pete's bloodletting sneer while hovering over his puckish drummer. Hugh Vanes gets even more personal with his oddly pensive candids of Townshend, Entwistle, and Moon eating on the road. 

Most fascinating of all may be David Magnus's series starring model Carl-Anne Martin as she drags Entwistle out of bed to the sleazy lounge of Germany's "Beat Club" T.V. show. The first shot in the series is the female Who fan's equivalent of the one of Jimmy reclining under a wall of pin ups in the Quadrophenia photo booklet. There are also some obscure treasures taken at Monterey and "The Rolling Stones Rock 'n' Roll Circus". Afterward, we zip through Townshend in his boiler suit and Daltrey's bare chest and Moon on the paunchy decline. Several pages survey the Kenney Jones years and the various reunions with and without Entwistle (plus Townshend's painfully withering assessment of the first gig "The Who" played after their bassist's death). But the book's true beauty lies in its first two-thirds ogling The Who at their stylishly photogenic '60s peak.

Review: 'Graphic Horror: Movie Monsters and Memories'

John Edgar Browning’s new book Graphic Horror: Movie Monsters and Memories (Schiffer Publishing) is a coffee table collection of movie posters and recollections from fans familiar (David Skal; Philip Riley) and otherwise. My favorite part of the book is easily the foreword by one of my heroes. Skal is our finest horror commentator, the thinking man’s Forry Ackerman, and he gets more personal here than I’ve yet to read in his own books (The Monster Show, Hollywood Gothic, etc.), discussing his boyhood introduction to monster memorabilia collecting with wit and candor (I was also thrilled to learn he’s at work on a new book about Bram Stoker!).

Perhaps the other memories and insights strewn throughout the book didn’t affect me similarly because I don’t really know who most of Browning’s guest commentators are. Or maybe they’re just too insubstantial and blurby. In at least one case, the commentator didn’t really know what she was talking about: Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart notes how in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein the Monster was called “The Creature” instead of “The Frankensteinian Monster” for possible copyright reasons. Huh? In what movie was he ever called The Frankensteinian Monster?

Of course, as is the case with any coffee table book, the purpose is more the graphics than the text. Browning selected a really intriguing hoard of images, passing by the more familiar U.S. posters to illustrate how London After Midnight was marketed in Argentina, The Mummy was hawked in Sweden, Psycho was sold in Israel, and so on. There are some fabulous graphics in Graphic Horror; I particularly dug the groovy space-au-go-go poster for The Astounding She Monster and the underground comix style Astro-Zombies promo. I just wish the designer had taken better advantage of the book’s size to present larger reproductions of this artwork. A bizarre illustration promoting Dead of Night with a giant vampire bat looming over decadent images from the film simply begs to be studied closer.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About The Byrds

As Roger McGuinn turns 70 today, Psychobabble takes a look at 20 things you may not have known about The Byrds!

1. During his pre-Byrds days, Jim (not yet Roger) McGuinn backed up Bobby Darin on guitar and banjo during the crooner's folk phase.

2. In The Byrds' original incarnation as the four piece Jet Set, singer Gene Clark played rhythm guitar and David Crosby played bass. Clark's inadequate guitar skill necessitated Crosby's move to rhythm and the hiring of bassist Chris Hillman.

3. When The Jet Set released a single in 1964 with Elektra Records, the label's Jac Holzman tried cashing in on the British pop craze by renaming his new acquisitions The Beefeaters.

4. According to Alan Clayson's book on The Stones' Beggars Banquet, The Byrds got their wings on "Mr. Tambourine Man" after British R&B maniacs The Pretty Things, who had "first refusal," passed on Dylan's demo.

Review: 'Muddy Waters / The Rolling Stones / Checkerboard Lounge / Live 1981'

In late autumn of 1981, The Rolling Stones were clomping across the States with a bombastic arena act that put paid to the grubby blues rockers they’d once been for good. During their stop in Chicago, Mick, Keith, Ronnie, and Stu popped in to Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge to catch the man who’d given them that first spark way, way back in 1962. At 66 (and just two years before cancer spirited him away), Muddy Waters retained the vitality of a man younger than half that age. Even confined on his stool, he exuded fire. Powerful as he’d ever been in voice, Muddy’s guitar work was sublime, slipping on his slide to build from liquid ripples to a psychotic torrent on “Country Boy”. When it came time for their respective solos, his supporting guitarists could only seem meek in comparison. Here was an imposing man, seemingly in command of the very elements, a man who could invoke the biggest Rock & Roll band in the universe with an offhand shout of “C’mere, son!” With that, the Stones and their entourage (wives and girlfriends, Ian McLagan, Bobby Keys) shamble in, taking the table at the front of the room. Jagger barely has the chance to shimmy off his overcoat when Muddy is calling him to the stage. This Lucifer, this lithe sex god is no more imposing than anyone else in the room in the presence of the man who bestowed electricity on the blues like Prometheus handed humankind fire.

Cult Club: "Batman" (1966 - 1968)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

When The Dark Knight Rises opens next week, you can bet your cowl that the punches won't be punctuated with cartoon Pows, there will be a distinct lack of villainous canted angles, and at Christian Bale's personal request, Robin won't be invited to the grand finale. Not a "Holy this!" or a "Holy that!" to be heard. Even more so than Tim Burton's Batman movies of yore, Chris Nolan and friends have distanced themselves from William Dozier's campy sixties super sitcom as assuredly as possible. With several decades of dark, dark Dark Knights by way of graphic novels such as Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, in which The Joker severs Batgirl’s spine, and hate-fueled Frank Miller's Year One, in which Catwoman is given a fun new back story as a prostitute, Batman had basically cleansed himself of his goofy past with a Brillo pad dipped in lye. The Bat fans who groaned every time Neal Hefti's theme tune started pumping welcomed this return to the superhero’s supposed grizzly, gritty essence.

Those of us who don't feel that ample doses of nihilism and streetwalking are necessary to justify our comic reading may be amenable to the existence of several Batmans. The black armor-clad Dark Knight has his intriguing place as a noir-ish tortured hero/anti-hero willing to cause zillions of dollars in urban damage to bring the baddies to justice and give us our daily dose of existential angst. But so does that milk-drinking square in the grey leotard who always cautions Robin about driving safety and pows us into guffaws whenever he batclimbs up a skyscraper or breaks into an impromptu Batusi.

Even in the sixties, there were Batfans who squirmed at the series that debuted on ABC in January of 1966. Longtime fan and former D.C. Comics editorial director Mike Gold dismissed TV’s Batman as “regrettable” in his introduction to The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. In his afterward to the Batman: Year One graphic novel, Miller grumbled about “Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars like Vincent Price and Cesar Romero… For me, Batman was never funny.” He goes on to recall picking up his first Batman comic at the age of eight and marveling over Gotham City’s “cold shafts of concrete lit by cold moonlight, windswept and bottomless.” Now there was a fun kid.

Of course, in the sixties, comic books were for kids, and a vocal adult fanbase of the medium would not emerge for a decade or two. The Batman series, however, was embraced by all ages because it was comic booky and TV’s first direct link to the burgeoning pop art movement. A single episode of Dozier’s series was worth its weight in an endcap of Warhol soup cans. There was much for kids to enjoy at face value, with its colorful villains and action-packed punch ups. For adults, Batman was an unprecedented exercise in irony. No weekly series was so self-aware and so funny. Standards for humor change, which is why it isn’t likely many modern viewers will find much to giggle about when Dick Van Dyke flops over his ottoman for the zillionth time. Batman holds up because its humor was so far ahead of its time, seemingly responding to viewer criticisms in the same way current shows often do in the wake of Internet outcry. Batman acknowledged the ridiculousness of Commissioner Gordon not recognizing that the voice of Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred was the same one he heard at the end of the Batphone, the fact that Wayne and Batman never appear in the same place at the same time, and how Batman and Robin managed to escape seemingly inescapable death week after week. Though the series’ formulaic structure would cause it to wear out its welcome before finishing its three-season run of 120 episodes (for its first two seasons, the show ran twice a week),  it largely excused its clichés by acknowledging and poking fun at them.

Batman could be knowing, but its humor was equally dependent on the brilliantly broad comic performances of its cast. West’s humor was almost solely derived from his nearly comatose even-temper in the most ludicrous situations, while his friends and foils contrasted his hurricane eye with whirling lunacy. Stand up comic Frank Gorshin transformed the minor comic book villain The Riddler into one of Batman’s arch and most manic nemeses. As the best of three Catwoman portrayers, Julie Newmar was a master of drawing out the double-meanings in her sexually suggestive, often sadistic (to a captive dynamic duo: “Your eardrums will shatter and your brains will turn into yeccchh”) dialogue. Victor Buono channeled W.C. Fields for his King Tut. On the side of justice, Burt Ward bordered brilliance when lapsing into randy delinquent mode after Catwoman’s assistant slipped him a Mickey in the “That Darn Catwoman”/”Scat Darn Catwoman”, the series’ funniest arc. A great deal of the fun of Batman is watching its great cast have fun.

Batman’s humor—both clownish and ironic—and vivid imagery (the characters and blatantly artificial sets were painted in a primary palette pulled right from the comics) made it a sensation among the psychedelic crowd. The year it debuted, both The Kinks and pop-art champions The Who aligned themselves with the series by covering Hefti’s theme in concert and on disc. The producers did their best to cash in on the Rock-and-Batman connection by enlisting a few agreeable pop stars like Leslie Gore, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Chad and Jeremy to guest star. The older generation got in on the hipness when Sammy Davis, Jr., Edward G. Robinson, and Art Linkletter appeared in the iconic Batclimb gag (while Batman and Robin were taking their sexually suggestive scale up the building of the week, a celebrity would open a window, whom the Dynamic Duo would engage in an awkward, action-halting interview). Some respected sources, such as Variety (which noted the “action, clever sight gags, interesting complications and … all out … batmania” of 1966’s feature-length Batman), got the joke.

The very perks that endeared Batman to its generation of viewers were those that made it a thing of derision among later-day Dark Knight fans. But if we look back on the comics, they were ripe with what we now call camp from the days when Bill Finger and Bob Kane first hatched the Caped Crusader. 1946’s “1001 Umbrellas of the Penguin” finds our fine-feathered fink feigning partnership with the Dynamic Duo to convince his auntie she’d raised him right. In 1952’s “The Joker’s Utility Belt”, the clown prince of crime harrumphs at not being inducted into Gotham Museum’s Comedian Hall of Fame. That latter story was way-out enough to pull the rare feat of directly inspiring an episode of the series (Cesar Romero’s coming out “The Joker Is Wild”). In the years immediately preceding the series, Batman and Robin had taken to time traveling and battling space dinosaurs in the comic, leaving the series looking positively sober in comparison.

Much like The Monkees (which I gave a more thorough once over here on Psychobabble last year), Batman is a series that skews hopelessly dated and corny in hindsight. Also like The Monkees, its wit and innovation is unmissable when actually reviewing the series. Something to be remembered, not swept under the Batcape.

Review: Deluxe Edition of Small Faces' 'Ogden's Nut Gone Flake'

Small Faces had really hit their stride by 1968. They'd moved from Decca to Andrew Oldham's more sympathetic indie Immediate. They'd finally cracked the U.S. top twenty with “Itchycoo Park”. Now they were poised to create their defining statement, which would distance them from their early bubblegummy hits and put them into serious competition with The Beatles, Stones, Who, and the rest. A conversation with Pete Townshend about his latest pet project inspired Small Faces to bin the covers of “Every Little Bit Hurts” and “Be My Baby” they'd recorded to pad out their next L.P. and spend some time crafting a narrative suite. Glued together with some inspired gibberish from double-speaker extraordinaire Stanley Unwin, the “Happiness Stan” suite would be Small Faces’ magnum opus and Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake their most convincing bid for major artistdom.

What set the album apart from the similar psychedelicized concept albums of the time are its unflagging humor, complete lack of pretentions, and fidelity to the hard R&B and R&R that was Small Faces’ specialty. Ogden’s was a smash sensation in the U.K. and a particularly well-loved album in a year crowded with such well-loved items as “The White Album”, Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland, Music from Big Pink, and Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Everyone was gaga over the novelty round cover done up to look like a tobacco tin too. Too bad that Small Faces’ most sweeping triumph also signaled their end.

Ever unsettled and hardly placated by Ogden’s’s success, Steve Marriott insisted on bringing Peter Frampton into the band to give it a fresh boost. When the other guys resisted, Steve and Pete went off to form Humble Pie. The remaining Small Faces hooked up with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood and ceased to be Small. With a recording career that lasted a scant four years and three official albums, Small Faces had ceased to be, leaving Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake as their defining statement.

Considering the album’s weighty rep, it’s appropriate that Charly Records has also given it the most elaborate treatment of any album in the recent Small Faces reissue campaign. Housed in a round box and expanded to three discs, Charly’s deluxe, limited edition Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake is a pretty impressive looking package. It would have been nice if the set was in an actual tin tin, but it's still a neat little container, if a little tight to uncover. Inside are a few variations on the original round artwork, photos, and band member profiles, which are collected in a lightweight foldout booklet and on individual, coaster-style discs. The hand numbering indicating your standing in the limited edition run of 5,000 is scrawled on the back of a reproduction of Mick Swan’s psychedelic artwork (I'm almost dead center at #2,455). Oh yeah, there are some CDs too.

As was the case with those previously released deluxe editions, the sound here is aces. The expansion, however, is a bit overinflated. We get the album presented in stereo and mono, each mix on its own disc and undiluted by bonus tracks. The bonuses are relegated to their own disc, which basically recreates the album’s original running order with alternate mixes that uncloak few revelations and some backing tracks. The most interesting things here are a mix of “Lazy Sunday” with more prominent acoustic guitar and electric piano that is probably the clearest stereo version I've heard, the backing track of a chunky alternate take of “Mad John”, and best of all, the backing track of “Happiness Stan”, which reveals a panorama of amazing textures, particularly the Prokofievian string pizzicatos and Kenney Jones’s titanic drumming. “Every Little Bit Hurts” (“Be My Baby” is apparently lost), the backing track of a funky raver called “Kamikhazi”, and what sounds like “Ogden's Nut Gone Flake” played backwards round out the disc.

As soon as this tracklisting hit the Internet, fans came out of their hidey-holes to start the inevitable griping orgy. If this is the last word in Small Faces remasters then where is “The Universal”? Where is the Ogden’s era b-side “Wham Bam Thank You Mam”? Where is “Donkey Rides a Penny a Glass”? Where are all the tracks (finished and unfinished) Small Faces cut for their aborted final album 1862? As the griping got heated, Tosh Flood (a project assistant on these reissues) took to the comments section of The Second Disc to ensure fans that all this and more would populate a four or five disc box set— without any overlap with these recent deluxe editions— sometime in the near future. So while Ogden's Nut Gone Flake brings an end to the Small Faces story, the Small Faces reissue-campaign story still has a few chapters to go.

Review: ‘Horror and the Horror Film’

When I was much younger and working toward my film degree, I took a course on the horror film. There’s nothing quite like padding into class at 9AM to watch The Exorcist with a bunch of groggy, probably hung-over 21-year olds. I’d take my seat at the back of the class, and my professor would hover behind me near the projector, shuddering at every flitting shadow and drip of blood spurted throughout the semester. It was a fun experience, not least of all because of its weirdness, but it also solidified my love of the genre and bolstered me with enough theoretical psychobabble to create this site you’re reading right now. One thing the class lacked was a good text. Our professor’s chosen book was Gregory A. Waller’s American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. It’s a pretty good collection of essays, but as the title indicates, it’s limited. And that limitation doesn’t just apply to region: the films discussed were mostly released between 1968 and 1980. The few photocopied essays we students received to supplement Waller’s book still didn’t add up to an encompassing study of a genre with much greater breadth than many non-fans realize.

Review: 'American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films, 1913-1929'

It took five writer/researchers and over seven years of work to create McFarland’s oversized, two volume, 800-plus page American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films, 1913-1929. Unwieldy? You bet! Even that title is big. But what an achievement! John T. Soister and Henry Nicolella—with Steve Joyce, Harry H. Long, and Bill Chase—have assembled an unbelievably definitive study of American silent fantastic films. Of the near 300 movies (and an additional 86 with minor supernatural themes), only a tiny handful will be familiar to all but the most devoted silent film buffs. That’s because most of these titles are out of circulation or lost. For the lost ones, our team of crypt keepers has pored over antique documents, original reviews, and cast and crew biographies to recount these tales and the filmmakers behind them vividly. Entries for viewable films are utterly exhaustive, bursting with behind-the-scenes reportage, insightful analysis, vintage synopses, period reviews, and trivial tidbits. Best of all, the writers impart their information with cheeky wit, so this hefty, potentially daunting set is an absolute pleasure to read. By recreating such juicy rarities as the speculative war fantasy The Battle Cry of Peace, which stirred a national hoopla; Black Fear, a wacky proto-Reefer Madness drug rant; the identity-switching insanity of The Haunted Pajamas, featuring a crook with the priceless name Foxy Grandpa; and the apocalypse-comedy Waking up the Town, in which a character gets hilariously shot in the face, the book is also historically essential. One of the finest studies of horror film I’ve ever read.

Cult Club: ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ (1965)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Cult cinema became a self-conscious movement in the ‘70s when audiences hopped up on goofballs and near-lethal doses of irony started convening at urban cinemas to hoot along with midnight showings of Pink Flamingoes and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s amazing to consider that Russ Meyer made Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! a decade earlier when every aspect of it seems consciously contrived for the midnighters. Perhaps that’s because it was so influential among the makers of those ‘70s cult items. Pink Flamingoes-director John Waters has called Pussycat “the best movie ever made… possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” Waters, a master ironist himself, may have been joshing a bit when he wrote this in his autobiography Shock Value, but was he at least a little right?

Legions of critics would catcall, “Not even close!” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has been derided for its obvious offenses for decades (certainly one reason Waters holds it so close to his mustachioed heart). Even its entry in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die tisks at its "troublesome sexual politics." Russ Meyer is perhaps history’s most famous breast-fetishist, and there is certainly no shortage of female objectification in his best-known picture. The man was no less enamored with violence, which is well present, too. So sex and violence, eh? That’s why Meyer is so much more horrible than every other filmmaker, none of whom would ever indulge in such things? Well, the naysayers say “nay” because Meyer so lingers on his actresses’ cleavage, he so revels in his character’s violence. His plot hangs on sex and violence as wispily as Tura Satana’s catsuit hangs on her bodacious frame.

In Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Varla (Satana), Billie (Lori Williams), and Rosie (Haji) are a trio of go-go dancers who dig nothing more than swinging with each other and tooling around the California desert in their hot rods. When they run into a square (Ray Barlow) and his bikini-clad girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard), Varla challenges the dude to a drag race. As he starts gaining on her, she forces him off the track. When he gripes about her poor sportswomanship, Varla karate chops him to death (with a twist of back breaking). Linda gets all bent out of shape after watching her boyfriend bite the dust, so Varla commands her go-go underlings to drug and kidnap the girl until they can think of what to do with the potential squealer. While refueling at a gas station, Varla learns about a local wheelchair-bound man (Stuart Lancaster) who lives on a farm with his sons: sensible Kirk (Paul Trinka) and a muscleman known as The Vegetable (Dennis Busch). The Old Man also happens to be sitting on a big pile of cash. At the farm, he tries to get his paws on Linda, Billie tries to get hers on The Vegetable, and Varla tries to get hers on the scratch. Mayhem ensues, leaving all but our two dullest characters, Linda and Kirk, dead.

Tura Satana
Meyer uses this goofy plot as an excuse to exploit the boobs and bashing for which he is infamous. While Meyer couldn’t have possibly conceived Faster, Pussycat! as a mainstream film, he still seems bound by the restrictions of mid-‘60s American cinema. Nudity and graphic bloodshed are taboo. So is the triumph of his villains, hence the plethora of deaths that end the film. For those criticizers who’ve actually seen the film, the opening monologue about the “rapacious new breed” of violent women and Varla’s death are the strongest arguments for Meyer as misogynist, but the time in which his film was made has to take some of the blame. If we can forgive the rote moral and our antihero getting her rote comeuppance, we have without a doubt the strongest woman to appear in an American film thus far.

Review: 'Character Actors in Horror and Science Fiction Films: 1930 – 1960'

Laurence Raw pays tribute to 96 familiar faces in his new book Character Actors in Horror and Science Fiction Films: 1930 – 1960. These are the twisted assistants and the wizened scientists, the screaming damsels and the officious police detectives who granted essential support to stars Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney, etc. They’re Zucco and Frye and Atwill and Ankers and Naish.

Such a volume is well overdue, but I would have liked Raw to focus more on these actors. The jacket describes Character Actors in Horror and Science Fiction Films as a “biographical dictionary,” but there is very little biography. Rather each entry begins with a line or two about an actor’s background before recapping their characters' roles in various films. While there is some interpretation of how an actor’s looks or mannerisms affected viewer’s understanding of underlying themes, Raw spends too much time analyzing plot and the characters as written on the script’s page. He misses some interesting opportunities, such as a discussion of how Wallace Ford played the same character in two different films (The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb) with two completely different tones (comedic and tragic). Some major bit players, such as Una O’Connor and Laird Cregar, do not get entries at all. Some of these actor’s major films get slighted too. There’s no mention of Son of Frankenstein in Lionel Atwill’s profile; no mention of The Wolf Man in Claude Rains’s. Raw manages better balanced profiles for actors who allow him to get deeper into politics, particularly African-American players like Mantan Morland, Noble Johnson, and Sir Lancelot. Too often, though, the actors seem like background players in this book. Appropriate, but unfortunate.