The Notorious Bettie Page – This is a film about sex in the early 1950s featuring sweet, innocent, naïve, comely Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol), a girl from Nashville who comes to New York City in hopes of becoming an actress but instead finds a career being photographed for cheesecake and eventually bondage magazines. She posed in the nude for camera clubs before achieving fame as New York’s top pin-up girl; her fetish modeling reached audiences well beyond the underground-cult followers. From her strict conservative upbringing (though her daddy sexually abused her) and a failed marriage in the ‘40s, she liberated herself, without rejecting her Christian faith to which she eventually devoted her life.

The photographers who took pictures of her “raven locks and sadomasochistic poses” and published them, such as Irving and Paula Klaw, are depicted as decent people, while Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver’s 1955 smut probe parallels Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to hunt down American communists. The scenes of her childhood and life in New York City are in black-and-white, while the Miami footage, where Bunny Yeager photographed her in the nude (most famously with a pair of cheetahs), is in Technicolor. At the same time a new magazine, Playboy, began publication (Bettie appeared as the centerfold in the January 1955 issue, and Hugh Hefner rescued her from bankruptcy); within the following decade much of what had been judged obscene and associated with moral corruption became hip and fashionable. Not mentioned in the film is her marriage in 1958 to Armand Walterson, after which she left modeling and began evangelizing; she divorced him in the ‘60s and remarried for a third time. The DVD contains a sample of the actual Bettie Page undressing in front of a camera. She’s alive today.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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