Ms Kathleen's Review

Screen 3 of 7

The look of “The Notorious Bettie Page” is great, with most of the picture shot in black and white to evoke the feeling of a 1950's era film. The black and white also allows for a lot of stock footage from the era to be inserted. There are also a handful of scenes shot in color, as Bettie makes several trips to Florida, where she meets photographer Bunny Yeager, who would take some of Bettie's most famous photos, including her Playboy pictorial. These sequences are in a vibrant Technicolor that also seems fitting and help accentuate how much Gretchen Mol resembles Bettie Page during the photo sequences.

Mol does a beautiful job of capturing Page’s unrelenting and anachronistic cheeriness. Today her photos look like nothing wilder than what you would see on the cover of a men’s magazine and the bondage捆绑 — being tied or restrained sequences seem very tame, more like girl's playing around. Perhaps Page’s powerful erotic pull has to do with the sheer goody willingness that emanates from every photo she takes. “Even when she has no clothes on she doesn’t look naked,” says one photographer.

Bettie Page has been a cult figure for years, the subject of quasi-scholarly books and grainy videos. Director Russ Meyer (see my March/April 2007 review) described her once as "the nicest girl you'd ever want to meet."