Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8689 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-03-19
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: PAL, Anamorphic, Colour, Black & White, Dolby
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Synopsis
Director Mary Harron (I SHOT ANDY WARHOL) and writer Guinevere Turner (GO FISH, THE L WORD) deliver a loving, whimsical biopic of the century’s greatest pinup queen. The film also offers a highly relevant commentary on the sexual mores of the 1950s, as well as stunning cinematography by W. Mott Hupfel III that perfectly captures the age. Played by the lovely Gretchen Mol (THE SHAPE OF THINGS) in a career-making performance, Bettie Page is portrayed as a sweet but strangely wise naïf from Tennessee, buffeted by circumstances outside her control but buoyed by an innate, cheerful optimism. After an abusive marriage and a brutal gang rape, Bettie flees to New York and begins a modelling career, for which she has a natural talent and which she does with an uncommon joy and palpable enthusiasm. She also begins acting lessons, but it’s the bondage photographs she takes with Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor) that really alter the course of her life. Shot in the basement of the Klaws' celebrity photography business, Bettie’s photographs were among the first harbingers of a society’s awakening sexuality, and her ability to project boundless delight--no matter what activity she is engaged in--is truly remarkable to behold. Eschewing the sensational, the film instead unfolds at a leisurely pace, lacking much cohesive narrative and revealing the mundane realities of the life of a notoriously glamorous figure. The story is bookended by the trial the Klaws were subjected to for selling obscene materials, which led to Bettie’s retirement to her much-loved Miami getaway and a rediscovered devotion to Jesus.

Customer Reviews

Worth it for Mol's performance, but feels somewhat shallow
This fifties-set drama tells the tale of pin-up sensation Bettie Page, who was kind of the FHM cutie of her day. Wholesome Nashville girl Bettie sets out to New York with dreams of acting, but finds herself sidetracked into the world of glamour and bondage modeling for magazines with quaint titles like Wink and Sunbather. This being a more repressive time, poor Bettie also ends up at the centre of a McCarthy-esque anti-smut trial.

Holding the film together is a very good performance from Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page. Mol is immensely likable in the role, expressing perfectly the wide-eyed innocence of this woman who embraced her work (which included quite a bit of nudity, as well as some uncomfortable looking boots) with a big smile, a good heart and not a trace of shame.

If there's a problem with the film, it's that it feels heavily slanted and somewhat disingenuous. It's hard to believe everyone Bettie met in the mucky book business was as well intentioned as they're portrayed in this one. Additionally, you would think a woman who thought herself a good clean Christian throughout her career would have been more conflicted over the nature of her work. This isn't a problem during the first hour of the film, which is a delightful and funny look at a guileless young woman taking her clothes off and not understanding why it causes such a fuss, but later in the story you feel that director Mary Harron has avoided the darker aspect of the material.

That said, this is still a worthwhile watch. It had more humour than I expected and is far less prurient than you would think a film where the lead actress doesn't wear very much would be. It's a shame they didn't go deeper into Page's later life, but Mol's charismatic performance more than makes up for that, so this is recommended.

Interesting story but...
I thought this was a really interesting attempt to look at the morality of the 40s through the prism of Bettie Page and a decent attempt to put her into her proper place in history.

Gretchen Mol looks amazingly like Bettie, and does a very nice turn in wide-eyed innocence. However, it is difficult to believe that Bettie remained quite as innocent and free as she was portrayed, particularly given her experiences in early life.

The relationship with her long-term partner is also sketched very loosely, leaving much unsaid.

The black and white filming, with occasional splurges of colour looked beautiful, but lets you know that what you are seeing is not really meant to be a realistic portrayal of Bettie's character; its what she showed those around her at the time.

What I really do not understand, given that there is very little nudity in the film and no intercourse, is how it managed to get an 18 certificate, because there is nothing in this that would be news to a 15 year old. Interesting yes, but erotic or realistic, definitely not.

The resurrection bop
On the 26th of September 1983 a short dumpy 60 year old woman stood trial for the attempted murder of Leonie Haddad, a lady whose husband had recently died and had agreed to take in a lodger who came via a housing authority for the elderly. Haddad was not made aware that her new lodger had, in fact, come fresh from The Patton State Mental Hospital where she had been incarcerated for an inexplicable knife attack on a married couple three years previously. Haddad soon realised that something was `rotten in Denmark' when the woman began to lock herself in the bathroom with a tape recorder reciting prophesies about' seven Gods'. Haddad's fears were confirmed one night when she awoke to find her lodger sitting astride her chest holding a bread knife announcing that "God has inspired me to kill you". Haddad managed to knock her assailant out with a telephone but not before she had lost a finger and suffered deep lacerations to her face and chest. It was a miracle she survived. The lodger was judged to be innocent by reason of insanity but sent, kicking and screaming, back to the laughing academy.
Ten years later she was released and found that she was now a celebrity; but not for the brutal attacks on her innocent victims, but for her incarnation of 25 years earlier when she was known as the `Queen of the Curve's, the `Tennessee Tease' and `Miss Pin Up Girl of the World' - the Notorious Bettie Page.

Director Mary Harron, mainly known for `American Psycho' takes us back to the glory days of a legendary cheesecake and bondage model (played solidly enough by Gretchen Mol) who inadvertently wrote the blue print for fetish iconography and whose influence can be detected in everything from comic books to catwalks. T.N.B.P is day-glo fun ride through an evocative depiction of the 1950's where Page, with the familial help of good intentioned boyfriends and photographers, becomes the number one star of pocket sized men's glossies with titles like Wink, Tab and Parade. Her real dream of movie stardom evades her and a brush with the authorities over obscenity charges in 1957 is the inciting incident which leads her to retire from modelling and give herself to God. The overall style of the film is light and frothy and only darkens momentarily with an allusion to her father's incestuous attentions and a sexual assault which inexplicably appears to have no discernable effect on her. Mol plays Page as she seems in her photographs, happy, carefree and fun - even the bondage shots betray little more than a good humoured incomprehensibility. The film ends on the upbeat with Page cheerfully handing out bibles in a park with no indication of the real life unhappy marriages, personal tragedy and decent into murderous insanity which lay before her; avoiding what I think is the essential core of Page's story - rebirth and resurrection.

Having emerged from a decade of incarceration Page found that her cult had been in the ascendance since the mid 1980's and that she had become a huge underground icon, during which, many were asking "whatever happened to Bettie Page". Her `mysterious' disappearance fed the fires of any number of conspiracy theories only adding to the allure of her legend. When the world's media finally caught up with her she gave no hint of her darker past and she was soon giving interviews for magazines, T.V and being photographed at Playboy parties with the likes of Pamela Anderson and the equally tragic Anna Nicole Smith.
She found that she was now more famous than she ever was in her `glory years' but in the glare of this `resurrection' it was only a matter of time before the full story would come to light.

The only notorious thing about The Notorious Bettie Page is they left out the part when she became truly notorious.