Directed By

BETTIE PAGE UNCOVERED

Review by Scott Essman

In the superb new film THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE, a hit at the most recent Toronto film festival, director Mary Harron and star Gretchen Mol uncover the beginnings of a 1950s America unknowingly losing its sexual innocence.  In fact, what Harron presents is not so much a biopic of the somewhat tragic titular subject of her film as an unveiling of a secret underground America that slowly crept into the consciousness of mainstream homes at the time.  Expertly portrayed by Mol (THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR), the Betty Page character is shown to have suffered sexual and physical abuse in her youth, only to redeem herself by successfully posing as a model for nude, bondage, S&M, and fetishistic pictures.

At first innocuous of that world and referring to her posing as dressing up in “costumes,” the Page character loses her religious restraints and accepts her destiny as a erotic model.  She had been an aspiring actress, but with her thick Southern accent (she came from Tennessee) and her 36-24-36 1/2 figure at the time, modeling beckoned.  By her 30s (Page was born in 1923), she had gained due notoriety for her work.  During her ascension to becoming “the pin-up queen of the universe,” America itself is going through a sexual metamorphosis in the backdrop of the film as various photographers and “pornographic” businesses are put on trial by the government for selling obscene materials through the mail.  Even Playboy makes its debut during the mid-1950s setting of the majority of the narrative (Page was a Playboy centerfold in January of 1955).  Save for some selected brilliantly colored scenes, Harron shoots all of this material in sumptuous black-and-white.

When Page finally reaches a summit with her photos and is rejected by boyfriends and one of her home studios due to their legal problems, the film has her settle in Florida, the site of some of her most famous work with photographer Bunny Yeager, where she marries and becomes a born-again Christian.  She soon retreated from public life completely, leaving her whereabouts for the last 40+ years a complete mystery.  Likewise, by the film’s end, censorship has become a hot-button issue in the courts and in American homes.  The end of the Hollywood production code and the encroachment of more explicit materials in magazines and films were around the corner.  In THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE, a case is made for the 1950s being a time of the inevitable transition of mainstream American culture into a place where multiple viewpoints and interests became acceptable.