BEFORE: From Marilyn Monroe to Rita Hayworth to another cover girl, Bettie Page - makes sense, right? Only this is a modern biopic ABOUT Bettie Page, so it's nearly impossible to link from a film made in 1944 to one made in 2005. I'll have to find some actor in this film with a really long career - and there are a couple of possibilities. I could link from Phil Silvers via "The Cheap Detective" to James Cromwell, who was in "L.A. Confidential" with David Strathairn. Or I could go from Gene Kelly through "What a Way to Go!" to Shirley MacLaine, who was in "Guarding Tess" with Austin Pendleton.
You know what, that's going to have to do. I'm too tired to try and find a direct link, which may not even exist.
THE PLOT: The story of Bettie Page, uber-successful 1950's pin-up model, one of the first sex icons in America, and the target of a Senate investigation into her bondage photos.
AFTER: Well, now I've gone and stepped in it. I can't talk about this film without talking about porn, but what is porn? And what is the 1950's version of porn? According to this film, it's just what people bought in magazine stores before we had the internet, and the occasional stag film with women in underwear and high-heels, pretending to tie each other up. Oh, and most of it was (apparently) shot by very nice, clean-cut men who were members of "photography clubs". I'd like to believe this, but something tells me this is really sugarcoating things.
Porn is now a billion-dollar industry - and I find it hard to believe that everyone in that business has the best interest of the models at heart. I know it would be foolish to assume that it's just a bunch of mom-and-pop operations that make sure that their actresses all get payroll taxes withheld and 401Ks funded - I doubt that it's run by crime syndicates, either, so I think the real truth lies somewhere in between. I've met some people who work in the industry, and they seem nice enough, but I'd never make a blanket statement about the business based on that.
Bettie Page was known as the "Queen of the Pinups", and one of the earliest Playboy Playmates (as was Marilyn Monroe...) and she later converted to evangelical Christianity, suffered from depression and mood swings, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. She married young, filed for divorce young, studied acting, but never got the same sort of breaks that Marilyn got. But considering Marilyn's depression and drug-use, it's tough to say whether the fame's worth it in the end. Maybe Bettie lived longer because she got out of the business before achieving fame outside of modeling for men's magazines.
Because of her lack of inhibition, she was the first famous "bondage model" (go ahead, name another one...) acting out all kinds of scenarios involving ropes, whips, ball-gags, etc. Photographer Bunny Yeager took her to a wildlife park in Boca Raton, FL and shot the famous "Jungle Bettie" photos, and also the famous "Santa Hat" image that ended up being in Playboy. And then in 1970's and 1980's, her photos were re-discovered by erotic artists like Olivia and Dave Stevens ("The Rocketeer") and that led to a sort of cult following.
You can't even keep track of all the people in music and film who can trace their influences back to Bettie - would we have The Pussycat Dolls, or Katy Perry without her? Dita Von Teese, or Uma Thurman's character in "Pulp Fiction"? It's hard to say. But my annual week of being a de facto glamour photographer myself at Comic-Con is coming up - so I don't know if I'd even get to do what I do without someone like Bettie breaking down the barriers and making it OK for women to pose in almost-there costumes.
So it's a darn shame that this film never really GOES anywhere with Bettie's story, it just sort of tells it and lets it lie there. If you want to see nudity, it's here, so bully for that. But sometimes you need more than just nudity (yes, I realize how ridiculous that sounds...) - sometimes you need to have a point. Just as you can admire a photo of a pretty girl posing without being able to tell what she's thinking, in the same way this film never really gets inside Bettie's head, so it's just a bunch of provocative imagery.
I'm left marveling how much society has changed in the last, say, 100 years. We've gone from a Hollywood system where actresses could be in trouble if they showed too much ankle, to a system where nearly every major actress has been seen topless, at the very least, in one film or another. At one point it was scandalous for Mae West to tell a man to "come up and see me", and if you watch the recent Adult Video Awards (I caught a bit the other night on cable), you can hear acceptance speeches where actresses talk about how much they love to eat pussy. If an actress said that back in the 1920's or even the 1950's, I think America's collective brains would have exploded.
Also starring Gretchen Mol (last seen in "Get Carter"), Jared Harris (last seen in "Sylvia"), Lili Taylor (last seen in "Brooklyn's Finest"), Sarah Paulson, Chris Bauer, David Strathairn (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Austin Pendleton (last seen in "Guarding Tess"), Norman Reedus, Cara Seymour, with cameos from John Cullum, Max Casella, Kohl Sudduth.
RATING: 5 out of 10 acting lessons
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