The Notorious Bettie Page

What exactly were the 2 feminists who made this hoping to achieve other than critiquing 1950's morality & avoiding the "male gaze"? Does that mean trying to insure that men don't feel titillated by any of the cheesecake/kink on screen? How ironic. We learn Page experienced horrible traumas & that she's religious but also juggles 2 boyfriends at once. Oh & poses for BDSM photos - which she's anachronistically fine with. Page never wallows & always moves on, so we're left w/ a conflict-free film.

Gretchen is the perfect Bettie Page and the mostly black-and-white cinematography with just a few splashes of color work well to convey the oldies mood. Still, it just feels very superficial and you don't get to know much about Bettie as a person. She's just going along with everyone and there are no twists or turns to the story as it choogles on, the temperature always lukewarm despite the (then) controversial subject that the movie covers.

Bettie Page, in February 2007 Playboy: "I thought [Gretchen Mol] was real pretty, with those big eyes. She was good-looking, but the way she would screw up her face and all, I never did that. I didn't think her figure was too good. She was too tall, but she had a pretty face. That movie is full of lies. (...) The basic story is true, but the details are a lot of baloney - or most of them are."

Mol puts in a good performance, but the film feels like a damp squib in most regards. It's just a by-the-numbers biopic, taking us point by point through the various important moments of Page's modelling career, but never offering anything particularly insightful into her personality. The brief moments of colour photography made me wish the whole thing was in colour rather than the drab B&W we get for most of the runtime.

Gretchen Mol is a beauty, but there's not a whole lot going for this movie story-wise. I expected more from director Mary Harron who made one of my faves from the early oughts, American Psycho.

An oddly tame (and superficial) overview of Page is neither notorious nor titillating; holds your attention largely thanks to the performances, but Harron & Turner's screenplay seems to keep dipping its toes into more interesting waters before shying away. Mol's opaque Page doesn't help matters, never going beneath the affected (?) cheerful exterior; the counter-narrative involving the censorious nature of the times shows promise, but wastes Strathairn and fizzles out to nothing.

Nice atmosphere, and Gretchen Mol is an attractive mimic, but this film neither intensifies or solves the mystery of Bettie, the most cheerful and wholesome of all bondage pin-ups.

It's fairly well-acted and well-made, but it fails to really prove to me why this person was worth making a biopic about. It's good it's only 90 minutes, because that's just long enough to support the framework of the story without collapsing.

Gretchen Mol is amazingly innocent and sexy as Bettie, but the film seems to cover only the surface of her story. There is fashion, but no provocation here.

It was interesting in that I knew nothing of Bettie Page except what her boobs looked like and then I watched this and then I learned a couple things, and saw Gretchen Mol's boobs. It's watchable and if you are a fan of Bettie...it's a go-to just wasn't my cup of tea.

Not much of a story to tell but the film has an interesting look and style about it. The opening scene was strong but the rest was generally a bit disappointing.

Coined "the pin-up girl of the universe," the film shows an innocent look on the model that is Bettie Page. From her humble beginnings outside of Nashville to her career in NYC, the film never seems to involve the audience. Bettie seems as innocent as the 1950s, and her life events seeming very non-chalant... which made me care less about the story. Plot was seemingly predictable, and the ending was no surprise, even if you didn't know what happened to her. Overall feeling = meh.

Good perf by Mol. Cute direction and cinematography.

I was never specially interested of a funnily naughty Bettie Page hype, but sure when the movie appeared I wanted to see her biopic. Movie is made as a document type and that is the strength and fall side of the film. Mol is okay as dum head Bettie, but 50's porn and bondage was pretty silly and inocent. The movie would be more interesting if director took more artistic freedom according the story.

Fascinating. Page is presented as a nice, intelligent Christian lady who just happens to fall into this line of work -- "I do declare, I don't see what the big fuss is over these silly pictures that make so many people happy" -- and the ensuing stir her famous images cause is handled with an even-handedness I would never have suspected. Plus Gretchen Mol looks great with no clothes on. *swoon* :-)

Sort of a let down.

"Resisting the conventions of the traditional biopic at every turn, The Notorious Bettie Page never finds its footing as a story." - Jeremiah Kipp

watchable

Not as good as I'd hoped; not as bad as I had feared.

Mol does nice work in the title role, embracing Page's self-assurance in her modeling work. The make-up of the film prevents her from digging deeper as the bulk of Page's personal life challenges are reduced to cameo appearances. It's as if Harron is including the material of true biography out of dispirited obligation. The film duplicates the very indignity it was intended to exculpate. It discards Bettie Page as a person just as callously as those who cast her aside when the pin-up era ended.

A fairly entertaining biopic that I feel (perhaps unfairly) is let down by the ending. Though I'm sure she had her reasons, the movie never gives me a feeling as to why she made the decisions she did, and therefore still makes me feel distant from Bettie Page as a person.