The Notorious Bettie Page: Critic Reviews

A comedy of high freakishness that invites us to climb deep into the mystique of Bettie Page's image, her phenomenon.

Mary Harron's exuberant biographical film stars Gretchen Mol as the 1950's pinup queen Bettie Page.

Bettie Page more closely resembles a TV movie than a probing feature.

About controlling the means of production; she is her own raw material, and she is not about to let someone else take over.

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.

There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie.

Page [is] played as if on a mission by Gretchen Mol.

This listless biopic of the famed 1950s model is as timid and tame as her photos seem today.

Manages to work as a subtle send-up of '50s film sensibilities and as a tentative study of an earlier sex symbol.

Astute -- even frisky -- as it is, Notorious Bettie Page never shakes being enamored of the mystery of Page.

With her blue-black hair, Mol looks so much like Page that this could be a documentary, and her swings between modesty and exhibitionism are amazingly fluid.

There's a problem with Harron's approach: it leaches all the danger out of the subject. In this movie, there isn't any genuine power in erotic imagery or any menace in perversion.

The tone of the movie is subdued and reflective. It does not defend pornography, but regards it (in its 1950s incarnation) with subdued nostalgia for a more innocent time.

It does a bang-up job of illuminating why many a contemporary pop icon and, online, a whole new generation of men have taken to Bettie.

We can't always be sure what's archival and what's simulated because sometimes the filmmakers are trying to fool us. But their preoccupation with the manufacture of images keeps this exercise in exposure and concealment interesting.

Mol is a delight as the saucy brunette, a God-fearing innocent seemingly oblivious to the use of those lascivious pinup photographs for which she so cheerfully posed.

There are interesting parallels between the hemmed-in culture of America's paranoid postwar years and the enforced restraint and caged sexuality of the fetish photos that flourished at the time, but they go unexplored.

But still, who was Bettie Page? The film offers not a clue.

It isn't a bad film, but it isn't a good film, either. Basically, it's a movie that doesn't have a good reason for having been made.

Smugly anti-erotic in the extreme.

Like Bettie herself, the movie is wholesome and sexy at the same time. I liked it immensely.

A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, pic feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject.

Disappointingly skin-deep and almost shockingly wholesome.

In Mary Harron's film biography of the nude and naughty pin-up girl, Notorious is synonymous with 'joyless.'