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THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE Send This Review to a Friend
Gretchen Mol has a showcase role as model Bettie Page, who in the 1950s became a popular pinup, with special emphasis on fetish type photos that appealed to the bondage crowd. Later, she was rediscovered in the 1970s. Her stuff, once considered hot, is innocuous by today’s standards, given what’s around on the internet and elsewhere, but Page was typical of what drove the censor-minded wild in her heyday. In the film she is seen waiting to testify, but never called, outside the hearing room of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, who was looking for publicity to help propel a potential presidential candidacy.
The film, of course, has special value today as a lesson against censorship. Just as the Kefauver committee was riled up in its time, there are those trying to clamp down today on broadcasting and the internet, and by holding up the bluenoses of an earlier period to ridicule, “The Notorious Bettie Page” by inference sounds an alarm for those who believe in free expression today.
Director Mary Harron, who wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner, has created a film that smartly captures the look of the times and the sort of pictures that made Page famous and turned on her fans. But there’s one underlying flaw. Mol portrays Page with such rosy innocence that she thinks her work is just plain giggly fun without any idea that the pinups had any serious sexual content and that what she did ran counter to her growing up going to church in Nashville.
This is from a character who in the screenplay is depicted as possibly being victim to sexual abuse and then being gang-raped. She also gets slapped around in a marriage gone wrong. Betty Page may have been the religious good girl and aspiring actress the film blithely depicts, but she is shown as too smart to have treated her sexual photos as just a lark and expressed surprise that anyone could get wrought up about them.
Such a take, while it fits nicely with the film’s effort to create an innocent air about semi-porn in the 1950s, works against giving the film dramatic credibility. “The Notorious Bettie Page” becomes mainly a voyeuristic collectors’ item, gussied up in an eye-popping look smartly photographed by Mott Hupfel, with Mol enjoyable to watch in the role whether dressed, partially dressed or undressed. She certainly exudes fun playing the part. There’s nothing wrong with this. Just don’t expect character credence.
The supporting cast is fine, including David Strathairn as Kefauver, John Cullum as a Nashville preacher, and Lili Taylor and Chris Bauer as Paula and Irving Klaw, whose photo business distributed pictures of Page and other models for those with, shall we say, special tastes. A Picturehouse release.
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