Review: No sleaze in 'Bettie Page'

If you are an online person you have, no doubt, gotten countless e-mails offering access to various and sundry porn sites, enlargement processes and mortgage schemes.

Times aren’t so simple anymore.

Pinup girls, while scandalous in their day and in their way, seem sweet, innocent and even charming by modern standards.

GIs had the famous Betty Grable photo in which she was not even in a state of undress. But those legs!

Marilyn Monroe’s centerfold for Playboy in 1953 is legendary.

Sweet gal

Then came Bettie Page, a sweet gal from Nashville who fueled the fantasies of post-World War II men for many a year.

The black leather, the garter belts, the pointy bras. Page literally defined the style.

And, if one can believe the biopic directed by Mary Harron, she didn’t really deserve the “notorious” adjective in the film’s title. She was just a sweet kid from a religious family, who made money with the assets she had on hand.

Actually it wasn’t her hands that made her famous. It might not be what you assume, either.

It was mostly her smile, sweetness and attitude. She looked happy – in a nice way — about what she was doing.

“Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden … it wasn’t until after they sinned that they put clothes on,” is Page’s reasoning.

Nudity

In “The Notorious Bettie Page,” actress Gretchen Mol portrays her subject in Oscar-deserving fashion. While the film does have several scenes featuring nudity, those scenes never approach being gratuitous. They are simply integral to the story at hand. And Mol seems to have the same attitude to baring it all that Page did.

Bunny Yeager, a photographer who worked with Page towards the end of her posing career, put it like this: “When she’s nude, she doesn’t seem naked.”

Mol, director Harron and cinematographer Mott Hupfel combine talents to make this one of the most perfectly executed “true-to-itself” films in recent memory. The black-and-white cinematography is rich and the brief color scenes have the Technicolor look from the 1950s.

The film follows Ms. Page from her home in Nashville to New York City. She was the victim of an assault that the film makes clear but, again, does not exploit.

Acting studies

Her goal is to become an actress and she begins to study at a “Method” acting workshop.

She needs to do something to earn some money and finds absolutely nothing contrary to her religious beliefs in posing naughty, naked or even in the (by today’s standards, mild) S&M photos that made her a legend.

Page begins her work with the brother-and-sister photography team of Irving and Paula Klaw. Lili Taylor – as good as she always has been – plays Paula Klaw.

“Boots and shoes, shoes and boots,” Paula says to Page.

“They can’t get enough of them. I guess it takes all kinds to make a world.”

Page simply looked at the work as helping people with “special needs.”

Politics

The film also deals with a political reality of the time. Sen. Estes Kefauver – played here by David Strathairn — held congressional hearings in the 1950s about the dangers of pornography. The rules for “smut” were strictly defined and all but ruined the careers of people like the Klaws and many others.

After those hearings, Page moved to Miami where she worked with Yeager doing “cheesecake” shots. She soon retired and preached on the streets, but has never apologized for her modeling, the photographs she was in or the films she made.

Page is still alive, now in her 80s.

It’s hard to convey the feel of this film. The naivete and downright sweetness of Page, and “The Notorious Bettie Page,” is something that needs to be seen to be understood.

Despite what some uninformed folks might fear, there is not a sleazy frame to be found anywhere in the movie.

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician. He can be reached at info@wunderlesound.com.