The Notorious Bettie Page

I saw this movie at the 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival and it is a movie and not a film since it apparently was shot by HBO to be shown on their cable network sometime this year. This movie presents Page as a bondage and discipline fetish pinup and B&D stag film actress who had enough talent to become a real actress. Page was a little more than that and the film touches on some of her other roles in modeling but not enough to balance out the career of the 50's pinup icon. This film is supposedly based on the book "The Real Bettie Page" by Richard Foster. It's shot in black and white for that 1950's nostalgia feel. I have the book called "Bettie Page The Life of a Pinup Legend" that has a lot of great photos chronicling the career of Page and I must say that this movie reproduces on film, with Gretchen Mol as Page, many of those famous photo's very accurately. Mol herself with the Bettie Page black wig and brown contact lenses is Bettie Page. Not only does she have the Bettie Page look but she has the smile and characteristics of her personality that came through the camera down perfect. And her body is as close to a replica of Page's as possible. Terrific casting. The story is kind of thin and tabloidesque and certainly could have been a lot better. But this is a pretty good TV movie. I would rate it a 7.0 of a scale of 10 and recommend it's viewing when it comes on TV.

If this film strikes you (as it did us and, apparently, others departing the theater) as disappointingly thin, it may be because the subject herself is mildly disappointing. The film faithfully presents us Bettie Page as she probably was: a playful almost-innocent from the rural South whose career as "the pinup queen of the universe" was for her just goofy, natural fun. Her eventual moral qualms, religious conversion and sudden departure from nude and bondage modeling are biographically accurate, yet hard to understand given how untroubled she seemed by her livelihood.

There are many reasons to see this film even so, not least of which are the amazing b&w noir cinematography of W. Mott Hopfel III (complete with old fashioned wipes and dissolves), the 1950's-faithful acting of the cast under the direction of Mary Harron, pitch-perfect performances by some of our most underrated supporting actors (including Chris Bauer, Lili Taylor, Sarah Paulson, Austin Pendleton, Dallas Roberts and Victor Slezak), not to mention the Oscar-worthy and technically difficult lead performance of Gretchen Mol.

Ms. Mol does several scenes fully naked and most others in amazing period lingerie and "specialty" costumes (gloriously assembled by costume designer John A. Dunn), yet she astonishingly maintains Bettie Page's unstudied pleasure in her lush body. To watch Ms. Mol as Ms. Page, an aspiring actress, progressing through degrees of progressively less "bad" auditions and student acting scenes is to see a truly fine actress in complete control of her craft.

The script does effectively bring us into 1950's America, where childhood sexual abuse, lawless abduction and rape, and the legal suppression of brands of pornography which today seem laughably tame, is a reality. 50's New York is evoked with seamlessly-inter cut news reel footage. 50's Miami comes alive in super-saturated, 16mm-style color. The real Bettie Page seems to scamper, smile and pose before us, and yet the effect is curiously lightweight, barely lewd and not at all dangerous.

How odd that bondage's greatest icon should be so lacking in venom, and that this technically excellent biopic should have so little sting.

I was at the small gathering at Hef's house for this movie. In fact, I had dinner with Bettie just before the movie. We were both Southerners and enjoyed each others' company in a well connected conversation about alternative medicine and spirituality. After dinner, we went into Hef's screening room. I always sit directly in front of Hef's sofa, nearest to the screen. Bettie was several rows back in a chair. All was fine until the rape scene. Betty screamed,"No! No!" from the back of the room and ran out, through the lobby, outside and into an SUV. I followed her. She let me into the SUV with her and I proceeded to calm her down. She was crying,"No one was supposed to know that!" Apparently, only Bettie and one other person (a relative) knew about the gang rape. She was very upset and felt betrayed that her lifelong secret had been exposed and she had to witness it in a room full of strangers. Hef never did come out to see what was going on. Richard Bann, a long timer at Hef's did come out. My friend Elliot Silverstein (director of Cat Ballou and A Man Called Horse) came out. I waved them away. I sat and talked to Bettie for quite a while until her driver appeared and took her away. For ANYONE to say this movie pleased Bettie and she liked it is not true! And whoever wrote that was NOT in the room when this film premiered at Hef's. I was there. I sat in the car with this marvelous woman, then in her 80s and held her hand as she cried. That is the God's honest truth. My heart went out to her. She truly felt that Hollywood had beaten her down yet again.

One of the great pioneers of Pre-XXX exploitation cinema, David Friedman, has often said that one of the main keys to his success (particularly in regards to his sexploitation films) was that he always teased the audience. Show them just enough to lure them in (and give them some of what they want), but not enough so that were satisfied and didn't have to come back (but leave them asking for more).

Certainly, Bettie Page and the Klaws knew how to tease their audience when they did their photo and film shoots. Unfortunately, the same could be said for this film and it disappoints for that reason. Harron's film is all surface and tease (and well done in that regard), but we never learn that much of the person behind the bondage.

For a low budget film Harron is quite deft in combining stock footage, set decoration-wardrobe and film stock manipulation to bring the era to life. The recreations of Bettie Page's career are handled with care and attention to detail. Were the same only able to be said about the screenplay which is banal and...ahem...only skin deep.

Judging the acting is more problematic in that Harron has chosen to go along with what seems to be the prevailing technique current filmmakers have when portraying characters of the 1950's - They seem to smile, grin and leer in a bizarre ritualistic way as if they were the members of a cult who can communicate with one another through their teeth and eyes! Mol does her best within this construct, even if she's too thin to realistically depict the voluptuous Page as she was (fortunately, Harron was wise enough to find a suitable actress without anachronistic implants).

It's not quite correct as many have contended that the film doesn't tell a linear narrative story (many have argued that it's just a slice of her life, nothing more). There IS an arc to the story. What's crucially missing are the thoughts and feelings of Bettie herself. Surely, a girl with such a strict religious background (which she returned to), would have believed something more strongly about the sexual nature of her work than "Adam and Eve were naked". When the film gets more serious towards the end, both it and Mol's performance are harmed because the audience has gotten used to the winks and the smiles, and haven't been given reason to think any more deeply than that.

In the end, it's like that glossy magazine you see on the newsstand, all bright, shiny and alluring, but you suspect that inside it will be a teasing disappointment.

P.S. Just a note on the Black & White photography. Pity that better care wasn't given to the film stocks used for the release prints. They seem to have blue tint to them, so you don't get the full dark blacks and bright whites of true B&W film stock. Hopefully, this will be corrected on DVD.

Also, because Page is such an icon, there's an odd sense that you don't WANT to know the details behind the image (even when they are so superficial as here). Of course, recent biographies and a recent L.A. Times interview with Page herself have sort of let the cat out of the bag prior to this film.

For a film that's ostensibly about sex and leather, it doesn't have any right to be as oddly sweet as it is. The story of Bettie Page, a good Christian girl from the South who's momma wouldn't let her date until she married, who moved to New York and ended up becoming the most successful pin-up of her age, is driven by an outstanding performance from Gretchen Moll. Her Page can't quite reconcile the pictures that she takes (nobody's allowed to touch, it's all fun and respectful) with the pornography trials and supposed ill-effects that her images have on the world around her.

Page has been an inspiration to every burlesque artist since, not just because she had a figure to die for, but because she invested every picture with an innocent sense of fun that was uniquely sexy and simple at the same time. Rather like this film, in fact. Filmde in both black and white and glorious technicolour, it's a lovely way to spend a couple of hours.