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The Notorious Bettie Page
R for nudity, sexual content and some language;
It is a strikingly objective account of a nice Protestant Nashville girl who survives sexual abuse by a relative and a gang rape to become a New York pin-up and soft-core pornographic film star in kinky attire and bondage situations.
The film sneers neither at appearances by Tennessee Democratic Sen. Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn), who chaired a smut probe in the mid-1950s, nor a father who testifies about porn's possible impact on his son.
Despite early traumas, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol) -- misspelled Betty on some of the magazine covers she adorned -- arrived in New York City in 1949 and became the most revered practitioner of her craft until she abandoned it in 1957 and became a born-again Christian.
Bettie had the body. No question there. But she was also so sunny, cooperative and quick to find an innocent rationale for her participation that she got by partly on congeniality.
At least according to the film, she had wholly positive relationships with such photographers as Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), his sister Paula (Lili Taylor) and Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson), all of whom valued Bettie's lack of inhibition.
Bettie's classes with an acting teacher (Austin Pendleton) don't seem to have led to -- What shall we call them? -- legitimate acting jobs.
The film, for all of its exploitative posing, is never in itself exploitative. It's as tame as a 1950s drive-in skin flick and considerably more matter-of-fact.
"The Notorious Bettie Page" was directed by Mary Harron from a screenplay she co-wrote with Guinevere Turner. Six of the seven producers are women. They seem to be saying Page enjoyed a kind of common-sense empowerment uncommon to women in her environment.
The filmmakers' selection of detail sanitizes the salaciousness.
Considering the focus is on a real person who just turned 83, you might expect an epilogue that sketches in the half century since. You might expect.
Black and white 'Bettie'
About 80 to 85 percent of "The Notorious Bettie Page" is in black and white. About midway, it switches to color for a sequence set in Florida and thereafter alternates between black and white and color without clear purpose.
We could belabor interpretations and guesses as to why color sequences recur inconsistently, but I'm reminded of Lindsay Anderson's half-black-and-white 1968 British drama "If...," which also jumped to color and back regularly, seemingly without reason.
Years later, Anderson fessed up. He said he had been greatly amused, if sometimes chagrined, by interpretations of why certain scenes were in color and others in black and white.
The truth, he explained, was that "If...," like most movies, was shot out of sequence and that well into production on the color movie he realized he wouldn't have sufficient funds to complete it and so he shaved expenses just a little by shooting the balance of it -- scenes that would be strewn throughout the story -- in black and white.
Ironically, today black-and-white film stock is more expensive than color. When the occasional period-flavored black-and-white movie like "Good Night, and Good Luck" is made, it's shot on color stock, and the color is removed in post-production. Which is also why "new" black and white looks grayer than their counterparts from the early and mid 20th century.
