Film: The Notorious Bettie Page

Directed by: Mary Harron

Year: 2006

Written by: Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner

Starring: Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson

Country: Canada

Language: English

Reviewed by: J.J.

Gretchen Mol stars as Bettie Page, the infamous 50s model. The film follows Page through her first gigs as a model to the pornography hearing and her retirement and conversion to Evangelical Christianity. Note that in the film, she had always been a Christian, and even after getting more deeply into her Christian convictions, she had no guilt whatsoever about the pictures taken of her.

Harron did a wonderful job of transporting the viewer to the stiff 1950s. Mol did a fine job of showing that Page was good, and had an innocence to her. Mol even looked like her. There are definitely only a handful of actresses today who have a body like Bettie Page, and Mol's one of the few.

The only downside of the movie is that it felt like a made-for-tv movie.

I have to commend Mol greatly, for she must have done her homework. She got the smile down perfectly, and she looked natural posing for the camera during the modeling scenes. Her innocence as Page shown.

In a perfect world, Harron and Mol should remake this movie with a better producer, or a bigger budget. This is a movie that could have been good. 6 J's out of 10.

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