The Notorious Bettie Page

This biopic is a nod to the pinup’s irresistible appeal, a woman who saw her purpose to make people happy with her God-given talent.

By: Bob Brown
   "It’s quite a treat to meet the notorious Bettie Page," says a director of a play Bettie is reading for. "Send the next one in." Bettie has read well. It’s just that her reputation has trumped her.
   Bettie is a sub-cultural icon of America’s 1950s. She’s post-World War II, post that other pinup Betty, the one with the world’s most pinned-up gams. Grable’s bathing suit pose, a backward glance over the shoulder, was parodied in Bettie’s own skimpier-clad poses. Betty Grable was the blonde next door; Bettie Page was the younger, naughtier brunette across the street — if the railroad happened to bisect your neighborhood.
   Co-writer/director Mary Harron has teamed with her American Psycho collaborator, Guinevere Turner, to produce this amusing, but curiously airy, biopic of Bettie and the age that made her. Who knows, maybe Bettie (now living out of the public eye) was really as clueless and naive as she’s portrayed here by Gretchen Mol.
   What she did have, by the plentiful photographic evidence, was a talent for showing off her gorgeous attributes in a way that was playful and non-threatening. How was she to know that "deviants" had evil thoughts when they saw her in leather and chains?
   The story follows Bettie’s trajectory, from modest origins as the daughter of poor, God-fearing folk from Tennessee, to her eventual pinnacle as the 1955 "Miss Pinup Girl of the World" and a spot as one of Playboy’s first centerfolds. Bettie was a bright girl who missed out on a big scholarship and went to Peabody College to train as a teacher — although her heart was in acting.
   After a failed marriage, Bettie’s fateful encounter with an amateur pinup photographer led her down a much more exciting career path. Bettie loved to show off ("the girl with the perfect figure," some dubbed her). Posing in her own homemade bikinis was one way. Another was posing with a riding crop to threaten another girl, or to be tied up and spanked while attired in black underwear that wasn’t sold at Macy’s… now that’s sheer fun. "It’s just play acting. We were laughing all the time," Bettie tells her horrified boyfriend when he sees her first S&M series in one of the many pulp magazines of the day.
   The movie is a peep into a vanished culture of men’s periodicals, with suggestive names like Wink, Eyeful, Titter and Beauty Parade. It’s a world of amateur photography clubs, consisting of polite, appreciative young men ("Hey, no touching," one club leader tells his charges). They just want to enjoy the fruits of their membership in the privacy of their own homes.
   And it’s a world of government inquiries into the pernicious effects of graphic bondage on impressionable young minds. While Bettie floats blissfully on the bubble of her considerable charms and their attractions to an audience of fine, upstanding citizens (lawyers, doctors, etc.), she becomes increasingly uneasy about the uses her work may be put to. In committee hearings, Sen. Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn, crossing over from Good Night, and Good Luck) grills Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), Bettie’s first pinup marketer, about the content he’s peddling.
   When S&M photographer John Willie (Jared Harris) asks Bettie what Jesus would think of her posing, she responds, "I hope that if he’s unhappy with what I’m doing, he’ll let me know somehow." Mol gives us Bettie’s sweet nature and her transcendent figure — all of it. The notoriety was in the minds of men. Bettie was not, it seems, ashamed of showing what God gave her. Adam and Eve were naked and innocent in Eden; the wickedness began when they donned clothes.
   What the movie ignores is the growing sex industry’s exploitation of women. We see things from Bettie’s point of view.
   The film’s soundtrack brings back the ’50s in the cool jazz and the pop tunes on the radio. Most of the feel is evoked in the black and white cinematography of Mott Hupfel, including some period clips of New York and rural roads, when Route 66 was the biggest paved surface in America.
   What the film gently mocks is not Bettie, but the quaintness of what passed for obscenity. While we don’t really get beneath the skin of Bettie Page in Mol’s otherwise fine performance, we do get a glimpse of how our own obsessions and our conceptions of obscenity define us by comparison. The real Bettie Page has had a growing legion of admirers and imitators in the past 20 years, even though her career is long behind her. She turned 83 last week. This film is a nod to her simple, irresistible appeal. It hardly seems that a Bettie Page is possible today. She’s a woman who saw her purpose to make people happy with the talent God gave her, and to watch for signs in case he had a change of plans.
Rated R. Contains nudity, sexual content and some language.