MOVIES, MAGAZINES AND MUSIC; PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORY OF AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT.

Byline: Tom Nolan and Dick Lochte Special to the Daily News

In response to a request from the British Film Institute, director Martin Scorsese enlisted the aid of writer and filmmaker Michael Henry Wilson in putting together a documentary about this country's motion picture heritage. That piece of movie history is the source for ``A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies'' (Miramax/Hyperion; $40), a fascinating, if fleeting look at nearly 100 motion pictures, many of them unheralded B movies.

Along with his own insightful analyses of cinema art, Scorsese and co-author Wilson have included pithy comments from many of the old masters, including Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder. The documentary version used scene snippets to accompany the narration. The book substitutes splendid black-and-white stills that demonstrate how inappropriate that name can be. Lovingly reproduced on thick stock, the photos are filled with action, from James Cagney working out with chorus girls in Lloyd Bacon's ``Footlight Parade'' to a rapist stalking Mala Powers in Ida Lupino's ``Outrage.'' The shelves are filled with film history, but rarely does one come along that uncovers so many of Hollywood's unjustly forgotten gems.

Many of Scorsese's film noir favorites came from the sort of hard-boiled fiction written by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and first printed in cheap pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective. Those and many other vanished publications are pictured vividly in Frank M. Robinson's and Lawrence Davidson's ``Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines'' (204 pages, Collectors Press; $39.95), a handsome, oversized volume that beautifully reproduces some 440 vintage magazine covers in full color.

Hammett, Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Max Brand, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other writers taken up by Hollywood are flagged on the front of such periodicals as Argosy Weekly, Amazing Stories, Mammoth Detective, Thrilling Wonder Stories and the Illustrated Blue Book.

All sorts of genres in addition to hard-boiled are represented here, from science fiction to fantasy to sports to war. There's a sampling of ``spicy'' pulps (Spicy-Adventure, Spicy Detective, Saucy Movie Tales, Breezy Stories) - as well as a couple of short-lived financial pulps (Wall Street Stories, Fame and Fortune: Adventures in Making Money) doomed to fail in 1929. With its first-rate color and its connoisseur's contents, ``Pulp Culture'' looks like an instant classic.

Tales of the old West were also a pulp staple, and they, too, became fodder for Hollywood. Many of the resulting films are referenced in ``Tall in the Saddle'' (Chronicle Books; $14.95), a collection of ``Great Lines From Classic Westerns,'' compiled by screenwriter Peggy Thompson and editor Saeko Usukawa. Because movies about cowboys and villains contain so much action and horseplay, one tends to forget how good some of the dialogue can be. Thompson and Usukawa admirably remind us with a collection of Western wit, wisdom and wisecrack, illustrated by seldom-seen stills and posters. Here are some samples of the former. ``I was bit by a rattler there when I was 15,'' cattle queen Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) announces in Samuel Fuller's ``Forty Guns,'' to which fast-gun Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) replies, ``Bet that rattler died.''

In ``How the West Was Won,'' mountain man Linus Rawlings (James Stewart) tells Eve Prescott (Carroll Baker), ``You make me feel like a man standing on a narrow ledge face to face with a grizzly bear. There just ain't no ignoring the situation.'' Reprobate Hud (Paul Newman) in the film of the same name, shares this philosophy with his nephew (Brandon De Wilde), ``You don't look out for yourself, and the only helping hand you'll ever get is when they lower the box.''

And, of course, there's that famous bit of dialogue from John Ford's ``The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,'' penned by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, ``This is the West, sir,'' a newspaper editor (Carlton Young) informs Sen. Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart). ``When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.''

Singing cowboys and Western swing are part of the eclectic mix in Roy Carr's ``A Century of Jazz: From Blues to Bop, Swing to Hip-Hop: A Hundred Years of Music, Musicians, Singers and Styles'' (256 pages, Da Capo; $28.95), a gorgeous grab-bag of a full-color trade paperback stuffed with period photographs, album-cover art, movie stills, newspaper ads, nightclub playbills, lobby cards, postage stamps, V-Disc labels and even text.

Jazz purists may quibble at the inclusion of rock and r&b and country material; but who could fail to be charmed by a photo of a tuxedoed Duke Ellington and a duded-up Gene Autry side by side on a Hollywood backlot in the 1930s? English jazz writer Carr and six others wrote the more-than-serviceable commentary, but it's the graphics that are the main attraction here. Stunning!

Born at the same time, jazz and the movies grew up together and played in each other's yards. Hit-record artists such as Bessie Smith and Artie Shaw were given parts in films, and movie actors such as Kirk Douglas and Jack Webb portrayed jazzmen.

If ever a jazz player looked perfect for the screen, it was Chet Baker, the '50s cool-school Adonis. Baker, quoted in Carr's book above, agreed: ``I did look modern, looked good, should've been a movie star. A handsome guy.'' Baker remembered James Dean coming to gigs to check out the trumpeter-singer's wardrobe: ``Always looking at your clothes ... your shoes.'' Robert Wagner played a supposedly Bakeresque trumpet player in the 1960 film ``All the Fine Young Cannibals.''

Baker himself had a role in a '55 war flick starring John Ireland, ``Hell's Horizon,'' but - as he recounts in the posthumous ``As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir'' (110 pages, Buzz/St. Martin's Press; $16.95) it wasn't really his thing: ``I didn't dig it too much; having to get up early in the morning, get to the studio, be made up and then sit around inside the set while they set up the scene, the lighting, etc. I used to climb up to the top of the set when I got really bored.''

Baker also appeared in a 1963 Susan Hayward movie, ``The Stolen Hours.'' By then, he was a heroin addict and a serial romantic with a habit of splitting from ``a long list of very lovely ladies'' Baker's wispy reminiscences faintly trace his path from childhood in Oklahoma and adolescence in Glendale and Redondo Beach to virtual exile in Europe, where he died in 1988. This brief memoir, full of bleak junkie anecdotes and blurry evasions, is like one of his recordings: short, aching and ending in midair. Baker seems to have treated life like the watermelons he loved as a kid on the Oklahoma farm: ``I'd ... pick one up over my head and let it fall so that it split wide open. Then I'd eat the sweet heart out of it and leave the rest to the birds.''

Clint Eastwood must have seen Chet Baker perform in his prime. Before taking up acting, Eastwood (who later directed ``Bird,'' a feature film about Charlie Parker, with whom Baker toured memorably) considered playing piano for a living. ``I've been a jazz fan as far back as I can remember,'' he writes in his foreword to William Minor's and Bill Wishner's ``Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years'' (176 pages, Angel City Press; $40), a history in prose and black-and-white pictures of the Bay Area's long-running annual event.

Monterey's collective lineups comprised a virtual who's who of jazz history: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Woody Herman, Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk. Those are among the many players shown here in Monterey moments captured by Ray Avery, Veryl Oakland, Jerry Stoll and other photographers. Artwork by David Stone Martin is also included in this classy hardcover keepsake.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1) ``Tall in the Saddle: Great Lines from Classic Westerns,'' which actually includes all sorts of genres, reminds us of how good the dialogue could be.

(2) ``A Personal Journey with Martin Scorcese Through American Movies'' features the filmmaker's insights.

(3) ``I ... looked good, should've been a movie star. A handsome guy,'' says Chet Baker in ``A Century of Jazz.''