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Title: The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Gretchen Mol | ... | Bettie Page | |
| Chris Bauer | ... | Irving Klaw | |
| Jared Harris | ... | John Willie | |
| Sarah Paulson | ... | Bunny Yeager | |
| Cara Seymour | ... | Maxie | |
| David Strathairn | ... | Estes Kefauver | |
| Lili Taylor | ... | Paula Klaw | |
| John Cullum | ... | Preacher in Nashville | |
| Matt McGrath | ... | Nervous Man | |
| Austin Pendleton | ... | Teacher | |
| Norman Reedus | ... | Billy Neal | |
| Dallas Roberts | ... | Scotty | |
| Victor Slezak | ... | Minister in Miami | |
| Tara Subkoff | ... | June | |
| Kevin Carroll | ... | Jerry Tibbs | |
Portrait of an American innocent. In 1955, Bettie Page (1923-2008) waits to testify before a U.S. Senate sub-committee investigating the effects of pornographic material on American adolescents and juveniles. In flashbacks, we see her childhood in Tennessee, a brief marriage, a gang rape, and her going to New York City in 1949. There she takes acting lessons, models for photos, and acts in short films for adults, earning the nickname "The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe". We see her relationship with merchants Irving and Paula Klaw, photographers John Willie and Bunny Yeager, boyfriends, and the public. Through it all, she is wholesome, sporting and forthright - Eve before the fall. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>
I had a vague idea of who Bettie Page was, partly due to her appearance in the very wee days of Playboy (apparently, when she got her photo taken of her and her Santa hat, just that, she didn't know what the mag was). The movie, co-written and directed by American Psycho's Mary Harron, fleshes out the key parts of her life well enough. A southern belle of a church goer has some bad experiences and leaves them behind to seek better times in New York City, where she gets into modeling, and from there a lot more. Soon, she becomes the underground pin-up sensation, with bondage the obvious (and "notorious" of the title) trait attributed to her. The actress Gretchen Moll portrays her, and gets down the spirit of this woman about as well as she could, which is really a lot of the success of the film. She's not a simplistic character, even if at times her ideas of morality are questionable ("well, Adam and Eve were naked, weren't they?" she comments a couple of times). Apparently, the filmmakers leave out the later years of Page's life and leave off with her in a kind of redemptive period, leaving behind the photo shoots for Jesus.
In all, the Notrious Bettie Page is not much more than a kind of usual bio-pic presented by HBO films, albeit this time with the stamina for a feature-film release. The best scenes that Harron captures are Page in her "questionable" positions, getting photos of her in over-the-top poses and starring in ridiculous films of whips and chains and leather uniforms. This adds a much needed comic relief to the film's otherwise usual nature. It's not that the story behind it is uninteresting, which involves the government's investigation into the 'smut' that came out of such photos and underground magazines. But there isn't much time given to explore more of what is merely hinted at, with Page and her complexities or her relationships or to sex and the fifties. It's all given a really neat black and white look and sometimes it seemed as if Harron was progressing some of the black and white photos to be tinted more as it went along. It's a watchable view if you're not too knowledgeable of Bette Page, and probably for fans too.