risky business; The Notorious Bettie Page remembers a bygone era, while Thank You for Smoking lampoons the tobacco industry.

Is there anything more quaint than yesterday's scandals? Back in the 1950s, the pinup model Bettie Page became infamous for racy photos that were reckoned a grave danger to American society. Today, she's a pop-culture icon. Magazine spreads mimic her best-known poses, while biographers squabble about the true meaning of her life: Was Page a tragic victim or a protofeminist pioneer?

Happily, she's neither in The Notorious Bettie Page, one of the cheeriest movies ever made about the skin trade. The story begins in Nashville, where Bettie (Gretchen Mol) is the daughter of a poor, devoutly Christian family, raised to fear the infinite varieties of sin. Fleeing her conservative hometown (and a bad marriage), she heads off to postwar New York with dreams of being an actress. One day at Coney Island she meets an off-duty cop who asks her to do some cheesecake photos. Soon she's peeling off her clothes-and finds she's good at it. Although it's Bettie's curse that she freezes up whenever she tries to do any proper acting, she's a natural at posing au naturel. This talent leads her to the soft-core studios of Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor), an affable couple who film her in S/M scenarios so silly it's hard to believe anyone could ever find them titillating. With her placid smile and signature brunette bangs, Bettie becomes an underground sensation, the face (so to speak) of the nudie-film business. Such stardom eventually gets her subpoenaed by a congressional subcommittee headed by fulminating Senator Estes Kefauver (played by David Strathairn, who here turns in his Edward R. Murrow halo for an inquisitor's censorious glare).

The Notorious Bettie Page was directed by Mary Harron, who specializes in looking at archetypal characters, from the man-hating heroine of I Shot Andy Warhol to the psychopathic yuppie in American Psycho. Shooting in period black-and-white with occasional bursts into exuberant color, Harron treats Page's story as a revealing emblem of the Eisenhower era. Comfortable in her own body, Bettie's the supercharged emanation of a conflicted America that made a fetish of the squeaky-clean housewife and idolized va-va-voom sex queens like Marilyn Monroe. At once naughty and nice, the unneurotic Page straddled both sides of the famous mother/whore dichotomy. Even dressed in dominatrix garb, she came across as innocent.

With luck, the role of Bettie should mark a breakthrough for Gretchen Mol, who was prematurely anointed a star in the glossies back in the nineties and has spent years struggling against the backlash. Dyed brunette, she looks smashing in The Notorious Bettie Page (if too thin for a true fifties bombshell), and her performance reveals a newfound comic ease. For all her life's ups and downs, Page was as unsinkable as Molly Brown, and Mol's ...