The Notorious Betty Page – Pretty Betty Without The Sleaze

Article first published as Movie Review The Notorious Betty Page – Pretty Betty Without The Sleaze on Blogcritics.

The Notorious Betty Page is one of those movies that really has all the potential in the world for gratuitous nudity and all around lasciviousness. It would be so easy to go that route that it’s all the more surprising that it doesn’t. We follow the iconic Betty Page (Gretchen Mol) through her adolescence and early marriage in cliff-note style and it’s clear that we are dealing with a young lady who is in possession of a substantial intelligence as well as beauty. She is also surprisingly naïve, despite the hints at child abuse and spousal abuse and the tastefully showed gang rape she is subjected to when she first tries to make it on her own.

Betty wants a career as a model/actress, but finds that there is a more lucrative way of making a living posing in “special clothing” and all the trappings of sado-masochism and fetish ware. At the time having an interest in leather corsets and boots that go all the way to there, was not considered fashionably chic, the way it is today. It was considered aberrant and deviant sexual behaviour to such a degree that it was illegal.

Betty is offered the job by Irving (Chris Bauer) and Paula Klaw (Lili Taylor) and she poses for a good many pictures and even some shorter films that feature fetish ware and various scenes that include spanking and bondage. What strikes me as interesting about this particular movie is that all this is portrayed as dressing up in good fun, kind of light-hearted and not particularly sinister. Things only get sinister when Betty is called to testify at a 1955 hearing investigating the negative effects of pornography on the youth of America. She never actually makes it in to the courtroom, but that certainly means the innocence is gone.

Betty tries to get regular acting jobs as well, but she is too well-known, hence the notorious part, and finds herself drifting in Miami where she ambles in to a church and is saved. That part s a little peculiar, but then, real life often is. Betty puts her modelling days behind her and goes on to work as a Christian missionary, and yes, there’s a joke in there somewhere.

Some of the sensibility of the movie most likely has to do with the fact that it has a female writer/director, as well as a female producer. Most of it, except the scenes that take place in Miami, is shot in black-and-white, which really does something to capture the 1950s feel. Gretchen Mol is a very pretty Betty, and a good look alike, too. One of the things said about Betty Page was that she somehow seemed more dressed when naked and that she always seemed very comfortable when in front of the camera, and that is certainly not an easy feat to pull off. There is something about this kind of attitude to nudity that de-sexualises it, no matter how explicit the scene, ironically.

1950s pornography is surrounded by some kind of nostalgia, clearly, and there’s more than one classic pinup girl pose here that just seems quaint. This Betty Page is very much portrayed as smart, sensitive and playful, very much a real person, which is, again, surprising. There are many instances where things honestly could have gotten much grimmer for Betty, which is not to say that she doesn’t occasionally get herself into trouble. To my mind there is still a very carefully calculated objectivity to the overall feel of the movie which shows that this is not done for sensationalism, but it is not offering any conclusions either.

At the end of the day I am not sure if we are left with a drama, a kind of documentary, a piece of social commentary, a cautionary tale or none of the above. And I am strangely okay with that.

The Notorious Betty Page (2005) directed by Mary Harron stars Gretchen Mol (Betty Page), Chris Bauer (Irving Klaw), Lili Taylor (Paula Klaw), Jared Harris (John Willie), Sarah Paulson (Bunny Yeager), David Strathairn (Estes Kefauver), Norman Reedus (Billy Neal), Cara Seymour (Maxie).

Public Enemies – Dillinger, fedoras and Tommy guns

Public Enemies (2009) directed by Michael Mann stars Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Jason Clark (Red), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Channing Tatum (Pretty Boy Floyd), James Russo (Walter), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis) and Branka Katic (Anna Sage).

It starts with a prison escape. It is fast and vicious and goes badly wrong as one of the escapees gets shot and never makes it out, left hanging on to Dillinger’s hand while dying as the get away car speeds off. That sets the tone.

This is one of those movies that is going to leave people a little puzzled. I have had that feeling quite a few times when watching Michael Mann’s work. I had it with Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and with The Insider (1999). Mann has this obvious thing about surface and visuals and it snags your attention, but you have to be cautious about that kind of thing. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

In Heat there is a specific scene, just a flash of seconds really, where Neil (Robert DeNiro) puts his gun down on a glass tabletop. Ten years later I can call up that scene and that sound with almost perfect recall. It’s a matter of texture and precision and a certain indulgence on the directors part, I suppose. It didn’t propel the action forwards or have any meaning in the larger sense, but it still left an imprint on this viewer that won’t go away.

Here we are dealing with a lead character that a lot of people will have heard of, at least to some extent. We also have a cast of spectacularly good actors, like in Heat and Manhunter (which I still say is the better version of that particular narrative, despite The Silence of the Lambs). There is always going to be the sense that the actors weren’t used to their full potential.

It’s 140 minutes long. It could easily have been twice that to my mind.

The era, the 1930s, lends itself beautifully to the big screen. The guys are in suits and fedoras, the girls are in pretty dresses, the cars have running boards and the weapon of choice is the Tommy gun. If you’ve seen the still frames, you know what I mean. This is as visually appealing as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

We are also dealing with “real life”, although many small facts have been altered to fit the narrative here better. Despite that anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the lead character knows that he was shot to death by the FBI, actually on the night of July 22 in 1934. So we know how this is going to end right from the get go.

It sets up a sense of foreboding and inevitability right from that first prison break. That makes this a grim story for a lot of different reasons. There is also less of a glorification of the bank robbers than you would expect. They take hostages on their way out of banks in order to not get shot at by the law, and even though they mostly leave those people unharmed, they still use them as human shields, which must leave them deeply traumatized.

The representatives of the law are likewise not particularly easy to sympathize with. Hoover seems wound extremely tight and his go-to guy, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is a very serious young man. There is a rather unpleasant scene where Dillinger’s girl Billie gets slapped around by a G-man, and that leaves you feeling a little nauseous, despite how delicately it is handled.

When Dillinger’s body was lying in the street outside the Biograph theater, many onlookers dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a souvenir. This movie doesn’t do that exactly, but it gives you that same sense of distance, surface and grim interest.

It’s not hard to like a movie as consistent and as visually pleasing as this one. There are some very, very good actors at the core of it, the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard, Johnny Depp playing a more subtle character than I have seen him do in a while, Christian Bale being a supporting actor and so on and so forth with guys like Billy Graham and Giovanni Ribisi.

If you are looking for a caper movie or an action movie, this is not the thing to watch. This is more of a character study. Many of the locations, like the lodge at Little Bohemia in Manitowish are the actual locations where scenes from Dillinger’s life took place. Rumour has it shell casings from that gunfight between the FBI and Dillinger’s gang can still be found in the woods surrounding the lodge. As a character study, though, it takes liberties with the truth as it has been documented.

I highly recommend it, none the less. I recommend it for the obvious tension in the narrative, for the visuals and the stellar cast. My only caution is that the fewer preconceived notions you have of what kind of movie this is the better you will fare and the more you will enjoy it.

Mule