The Notorious Bettie Page

A stylish classic that is black and white when it needs to be and then in color when they begin to sell color TVs in America; all so that we could imagine how Bettie could drive people wild in black and white and later in color, too. The story is certainly interesting, but only to watch once. It’s the same as what they said about Bettie when she stopped being interesting: it was good when she came up with nudity, but then nobody cared two hoots about her since her successors were even tougher. (16/08/2016)

The Notorious Bettie Page is a television film that cannot impress with grandiose sets or a star-studded cast, but that is by no means its biggest problem. Bettie Page can be compared in her own way to today's queen of fetishists and representative of perfect decadent beauties in erotic photographs, Dita Von Teese. Moreover, in the early 50s, she was a pioneer in this industry and became an admired celebrity. Thematically, it is amazing material and I can imagine that an excellent comedy could be made about this subject, about how a naive country girl discovers the emerging world of the erotic business, how nervous customers from better circles secretly shop for erotic material, and how the hypocrisy of prudish America looked. Based on this theme, an outstanding drama and an outstanding erotic film could be created. The problem is that the creators did not intend anything like that, and right from the beginning, they only wanted to make a television biographical film about a contemporary celebrity and that is also reflected in the essentially quite flat script, which, for example, tediously focuses on the main character's acting attempts. However, this approach runs up against the fact that Bettie Page was not a personality, but just a hanger for clothes, simply a contemporary model who happened to start working in erotic material. She is not interesting as a character - the interesting thing is the environment around her. The film does not make use of the potential of many supporting characters, especially the couple of entrepreneurs producing erotic material. Thus, it only resulted in an average television film that does not even remotely reach the quality and attractiveness of another television film about a famous model - Gia. Overall impression: 50%. (06/05/2009)

A very stylishly shot and in a strange way almost endearing retro biopic. For most of its runtime the light-hearted, black-and-white story is "disrupted" by colorful Technicolor interludes here and there (hello Raging Bull), Gretchen Mol is incredibly sympathetic in the lead role, and the supporting roles (Sarah Paulson, Jarred Harris...) and the period musical accompaniment are a delight. It’s quite good. HBO is simply HBO. (28/07/2012)