Swimsuit Issues

Given that Bettie Page was the most famous pinup model of the 1950s, it is tempting to say that she was the Pamela Anderson of her day. Except that her puritanical “day” was so different from ours as to make nonsense of the comparison.

It’s almost impossible to overestimate the transgressive impact of Page’s often fetishistic pictorials at a time when, for example, an obviously-with-child Lucille Ball was forbidden by CBS to actually utter the word “pregnant” on I Love Lucy for fear of offending squeamish viewers. In such an atmosphere of repression, the photographs of Page brandishing a riding crop or gagging another female model left a lasting impression on the nation’s male youth. As legendary science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison revealed, perhaps unfortunately, in his introduction to a 1997 biography of the so-called “Queen of Curves,” “I cannot to this day see a photo of Bettie Page without getting an erection.”

By 1955, Page was seen as so threatening that she became the focus of a Senate investigation headed up by ambitious politico Estes Kefauver. It is Kefauver’s hearing in New York that acts as a narrative spine for Mary Harron’s long-in-development biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page, and from which we flash back to the model’s difficult childhood, gang-rape at 24 and subsequent transformation into one of the most photographed people on the planet. The foregrounding of the senatorial investigation, combined with the ’50s setting, effectively positions the film as a sort of less-clothed Good Night, and Good Luck, something that is assisted by Harron’s decision to film largely in black-and-white and the casting of Good Luck’s David Strathairn as Kefauver. But Kefauver was by no means in the same league of unpleasantness as Good Luck’s boo-hiss villain, Joe McCarthy. Moreover, the still alive but reclusive Page’s role in the history of sexuality was essentially a passive one, and Harron, who previously brought the story of a decidedly less passive female antihero, gun-toting radical feminist Valerie Solanas, to the screen in I Shot Andy Warhol, doesn’t pretend otherwise. Indeed, the film makes clear that Page was no erotic crusader, regarding, for example, the assorted leather apparel she was often photographed in with a mixture of bemusement and hilarity.

Yet, if the movie is somewhat tension-free, it is also made rather terrific by a combination of Harron’s empathetic direction and an award-worthy central performance by Gretchen Mol. Judged by both résumé and natural appearance, she’s about the last person you’d imagine playing Page. But she succeeds in embodying both the real person behind the sex kitten and the sex kitten. Certainly the number of scenes that require her to undress must have required cojones that the film makes extremely clear the actress doesn’t, biologically speaking anyway, possess.