I think it’s safe to say that most fans of fetish and bondage queen Bettie Page will enjoy seeing her life story (or at least, the kinky part of it) brought to the big screen in Mary Harron’s movie The Notorious Bettie Page, released in the UK on August 4 and starring Gretchen Mol. After all, how often do we get to see a movie of any kind — let alone a sympathetic one — about a fetish figure?
But when I saw this affectionate portrayal of post-war pervery’s most enduring icon at an advance press screening in London, I couldn’t help wondering what the British film press would make of the movie. Bettie might be as much of a heroine for British fetish fans as for our American counterparts. But I doubted she would be as widely recognised in mainstream culture here as in the States, where her story is familiar because of the big media fuss there when she was rediscovered a dozen years ago living in Los Angeles.
So how has our UK press received a biopic about a model who may not be that well known here, played by an actress who also is not yet exactly a household name in this country? To get an idea, I took a look at some of the coverage the movie has had here, both prior to and on the weekend of its UK release.
A very early British press preview was provided by the Sunday Express Review, which decided not to wait for the (initially uncertain) UK release date, and ran a spread on the movie to tie in with its US release on April 21, a date aficionados may recognise as the eve of Bettie’s 83rd birthday. The paper’s Mike Parker focused on the ‘storm’ the movie and its star were creating in the US, noting that Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers had declared Mol’s performance ‘the first by an actress this year that deserves serious Oscar consideration’.
If this seemed like a good early omen, then so too, closer to the UK release date, did British movie magazine Hotdog’s decision that Mol’s Bettie portrayal was worth a cover. It picked one of the actress’s full-on Page poses, complete with riding crop, corset, long leather gloves and convincing ‘Bettie snarl’ to front its August Hollywood Vice issue. Another Mol-as-Page pin-up pose occupies a full page opposite the magazine’s contents page with the irresistible (for Brits) headline OOOH BETTIE! while yet another full page pic (the one used in all the ads) opens its New Films section, where the movie is actually reviewed. Reviewer Catherine Bray’s verdict in a nutshell: ‘A romp through a lush spread of period detail and saucy outfits’ whose ‘light and coy tone’ tends to ‘rob Gretchen Mol’s stellar performance of any sense of gravitas’.
However, Hotdog isn’t about to let Bray’s three-star review spoil a good story, and offers a well-illustrated five-page feature further into the mag, where it endeavours, with the help of quotes from Mol and Harron, to answer questions ranging from ‘Who is Bettie Page and why is she so damn notorious?’ to ‘Just double checking: it’s really not just for pervs?’. This might all seem a bit facetious but actually it’s a well researched article that includes some interesting revelations — such as the fact that the film-makers were legally prevented from talking to Bettie herself because her lawyer had signed her up to another movie project.
Just days after the appearance of Hotdog, Ms Mol got her second bite of the cover cherry with Esquire, which went with a picture of the actress posing as her normal blonde self. Inside, The really useful guide to Gretchen Mol is illustrated with a New York fashion shoot by Tony Duran rather than pictures of Mol as her movie character. David Hochman traces the highs and lows of her career to date and assembles a lighthearted selection of soundbites from the actress — not including anything about the movie. It does make her seem like an interesting person to go on a date with, though.
For sheer coolness rating, it’s hard to beat The Guardian’s weekly entertainment supplement The Guide, which boldly went with a Bettie Page cover story two weeks before the film’s release. Rather than use a movie still of Mol, the Guide’s cover uses an actual (famous) image of a BP herself, wielding a crop and clad in white lingerie and gloves, black opera hose and black pumps. On the down side, the Bettie cover is hidden inside another wraparound cover advertising the arrival of Film4 on Freeview.
The accompanying three–page feature by Joe Queenan uses more actual pix of Bettie and only one of Mol (the Hotdog cover shot again). Headlined Skin Deep, the piece compares Mol’s career trajectory with that of Page herself, but Queenan reveals himself to be on safer ground talking about the actress than talking about the model. ‘With her winning smile,’ he suggests, ‘Page apotheosised an era when fetishism was stylish and witty, and even a tad goofy, when it wasn’t all about humiliation, penetration, suspension and asphyxiation. You know: back when fetishism had class.’
Nonsense. The stuff Bettie and her chums were doing for Paula and Irving Klaw, which may well look fairly quaint and harmless now, was regarded in its day as being just as dangerous and deviant as modern extreme SM pornography is considered currently. There’s plenty of fetishism today that’s way classier in its execution than the make-do amateurishness of the Klaw era, but Page’s unique qualities transcended the limitations of her time and place, which is precisely why she became iconic (a fact Queenan also disputes). I do, however, agree with the Guardian writer that she was nowhere near as notorious as the film’s title suggests. As I recall, the word ‘notorious’ was added to the original movie title to help make it marketable. Gosh, who ever thought they did things like that in Hollywood?
When, a week later, The Guardian formally reviewed the movie, critic Peter Bradshaw also gave it three stars. He says the film ‘looks great, with loving period detail, and Gretchen Mol really is very good’. But he questions what exactly it’s trying to say, given that the young Bettie is both abused and raped before leaving home, and then finds happiness in the picturesque world of soft porn. ‘Something,’ he offers, ‘which, in narrative terms, would appear to reverse the causal relationship between porn and violence proposed by feminist thinking’. So it would appear that, not necessarily intentionally, this film contains an important lesson for feminist thinkers (and possibly some movie reviewers) about the forces in people’s lives that pushed them towards pervery then and still do so now.
Interestingly, just before the movie’s UK release, another Guardian supplement, Guardian Weekend, gave a clue to how well Bettie Page is known in British mainstream culture today. Weekend finishes off each issue with a back-page Inspiration feature called Pictures with Meaning, in which different celebrities talk about one image that has special resonance for them. And for its July 29 issue, the picture with meaning was Up Periscope, the famous 1990 depiction by Olivia De Berardinis of Bettie Page in a black rubber mermaid outfit. It was chosen by MTV presenter Emma Griffiths, who reveals that Bettie’s style has ‘influenced and empowered’ her to the extent that she even dressed up as the fetish icon for her recent 30th birthday party. So, clearly, Ms P is not unknown in modern pop circles.
Meanwhile, at my favourite tabloid The Daily Mirror, reviewer David Edwards reckons that although Page was a taboo-breaker, on this showing she wasn’t interesting enough to deserve a movie of her own. Echoing the sentiments of other British critics, he considers the best thing about the movie to be Gretchen Mol. She is, he says, ‘simply sublime’, delivering ‘a five-star performance in a three-star movie’ and deserving all credit for ‘fleshing out a character we never really get to know’. He even predicts that ‘the Academy will come knocking next year’ — by which I presume he means the one that hands out the Oscars in Hollywood and not the one that specialises in human pony training down in Wales.
Mol racked up an impressive hat-trick of British magazine covers when the Sunday Times Culture supplement awarded front page status to Christopher Goodwin’s interview with her in its edition of July 30. Although the Bettie film is the topical peg for the story, the interview does not shy away from the controversy created by an earlier magazine cover appearance — the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair — whose proclamation that Mol was the next big thing was followed in quick succession by her next two movies flopping and a big dip in her career prospects.
However, if the actress was apprehensive about getting covers this time around for her part as Bettie, she doesn’t let on. She does, however, give some interesting insights into the process of making the movie, revealing that understanding how Page combined her bondage career ‘with an intense religiosity’ helped her cope with the more explicit aspects of the rôle. The return of the actress’s self-confidence is apparent, writes Goodwin, from the abandon with which she threw herself into the part. ‘She is often naked,’ observes the writer, ‘and sometimes trussed up like a particularly succulent chicken, a gag ball in her mouth. She evidently loved it.’
As is often the case, however, when another Sunday Times writer — film critic Edward Porter — came to review the movie the following weekend, he awarded it just three stars. While complimenting the movie’s ‘watchable style’, Porter (unlike his fellow critics) has virtually nothing to say about Mol’s performance other than that it is ‘bright’. He laments the film’s ‘unintrusive approach to its subject’, observing: ‘What Harron perhaps sees as respect for Page’s emotional privacy looks more like bad reporting’. Ultimately, he agrees with the Mirror’s David Edwards that the series of images of Bettie that the film presents to us don’t let us know the woman they depict. ‘And that,’ he concludes, ‘was already the story of Bettie Page’s life before this film came along’.
So in this cross-section of the British mainstream press at least, The Notorious Bettie Page is pretty uniformly seen as better than average but still rather lightweight: a three-star movie, albeit with (for some critics) a five-star performance by Gretchen Mol. For comparison, the film’s rating by the seven ‘heavy’ daily and Sunday papers surveyed for The Guardian G2 Review of Reviews averages out at three-and-a-third stars — considerably ahead of Miami Vice and My Super Ex-Girlfriend, both of which, released the same weekend as Bettie in the UK, were rated overall as two-star efforts.
I have to admit that this is largely how I expected mainstream critics to view this biopic of a fetish icon. However, while pervs are often rightly very critical of mainstream movies that purport to offer a window into our world, I think most of us will thoroughly approve of The Notorious Bettie Page. And if you want to know why I think so, read my own review in the Reviews section of Fetish Dayz.
Tony M’s review: www.fetishdayz.typepad.com/fetish_dayz_reviews
Official movie website: www.thenotoriousbettiepage.com
Sunday Express: www.express.co.uk
Hotdog magazine: www.smdpublishing.co.uk
Esquire magazine: www.esquire.co.uk
The Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk
Olivia De Berardinis: www.eolivia.com
Daily Mirror: www.mirror.co.uk
Sunday Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/sundaytimes
