I'd been meaning to watch The Notorious Bettie Page for months and I finally got a chance this weekend!
Bettie Page was always interesting to me - I didn't know very much about her but was familiar with her cult status and iconic style. The film outlines, in broad strokes, her life from childhood until she vanished into obscurity in the late 50s, focusing (naturally) on her years of fame.
I particularly enjoyed the clever use of colour versus black and white in the film* - black and white for Page's 'real life', growing up in Tennessee and working in New York, and colour for Florida (when she escaped from New York for holidays) and Irving Klaw's films (perhaps another type of escape, from the drudgery of working as a secretary during the week).
Having since done a bit of research into Page's life, it's good to know that the filmmakers stuck fairly closely to the true story (although perhaps there's no way they couldn't, since so much of that time is known). However, they did skip through events that weren't directly related to her Movie Star News or camera club days, such as her exemplary academic record and her work in Haiti in the 40s. It's interesting to note that biographies of Page note her ambition to be a movie actress, but she claimed in her 1998 Playboy interview that she never really pursued acting very seriously.
Page did seem to be - in her real-life interviews and from the film - a free spirit who saw nothing wrong with nudity and non-exploitative photos; she simply got caught up in the mood of censorship in the 50s. I can't really decide if her apparent naiveté about what the rest of the country thought was because she was just oblivious or if it was an indicator of her later psychological problems. I suppose we'll never know.
As she got older she may have thought that she had too much sex in her life back then (interesting fact: despite the implication to that effect in the film, she never had sex with her boyfriend Marvin), the photos and films of Page, nude or in bondage gear, always had a sense of cheekiness about them. 'Sordid' or 'pornographic' doesn't even inhabit the same universe as Bettie Page in her heyday (or at any other time in her public life).
Even that peculiar silent film in the bonus features of Page doing a striptease and talking to someone off camera was completely unsexy - it was more bemusing than anything. That said, I thought Gretchen Mol did a fantastic job, playing a character who (at the time) was still alive and revered by her fans. And I really want to know what happened to Marvin Greene.
RIP, Betty Mae Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008).
* Other films I've enjoyed that also combine of black and white (or lack of colour) and full colour include Pleasantville and One Hour Photo.
