Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

Average user rating

No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

There’s a note of Hitchcockian irony in the title of Mary Harron’s latest. As the pin-up who titillated the libido of ’40s and ’50s America in both innocent-nudie cheesecake and soft-naughty dominatrix shots, Bettie Page came to be associated with what the Right perceived as a moral threat to American youth. Yet, like Ingrid Bergman in Hitch’s ‘Notorious’, Page emerges from this picaresque account of her life – from high school in mid-’30s Nashville to the Senatorial hearings two decades later that preceded her departure from the trade – as a sympathetic, even wholesome victim of reputation.

As played (terrifically) by Gretchen Mol, Bettie is sweet-natured and tolerant, God-fearing and sincere, hopeful of a legit acting career but proud to provide a little pleasure and have some fun along the way. And fun is the word: the soft-core industry is presented as a supportive community of misfits, including the always-welcome Lili Taylor and Jared Harris as a louche, soused English snapper. Think ‘Ed Wood’ meets ‘Boogie Nights’ – who knew shooting ‘Second Initiation of the Sorority Girl’ would be such a giggle?

Harron (‘I Shot Andy Warhol’) again proves her aptitude for period pop culture with spot-on soundtrack choices and design details, and punctuates the B&W photography with gloriously garish faux-Technicolor moments. But the production carries a cheap whiff, which might suit the subject but makes it harder to engage with. Bettie’s steadiness compounds this: juvenile gang-rape, the skin trade and public scorn come and go without denting or even modifying her essential peachiness. Her self-sufficiency – naive yet thoughtful – seems to defy worldliness, and therefore change, which makes her paradoxically inspirational and apart. A portrait of the centrefold as a closed book.

Author: Ben Walters

Time Out London Issue 1876: August 2-9 2006

Email Tweet Share