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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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The Film File
"The Notorious Bettie Page" might be called a bio-pic devoted to a body--Gretchen Mol's body, which is seen in every degree of cladding, from full to scanty to blissfully naked. Mol plays Page, a real-life pinup queen of the nineteen-fifties, who appeared in coy nudie-cutie magazines like Bachelor and Wink and in highly unconvincing and frequently out-of-focus lesbian bondage movies with titles like "Sally's Punishment." As the naughty girl next door, in black lace and stiletto heels, she domesticated fetishism and flouted the postal laws. Page, who is still alive, was quite a celebrity in her day, until she abruptly disappeared, in 1957, into a life devoted to Jesus. In the movie, directed by Mary Harron, who also wrote the screenplay (with Guinevere Turner), Page is a nice girl from Nashville who grew up listening to the honeyed lilt of singing preachers--a naif who never quite comprehends the meaning of what she is doing or the effect it has. After all, Adam and Eve were naked, weren't they? God, she is sure, wants her to be, too. When her earnest New York boyfriend, Marvin (Jonathan Woodward), an actor, registers his disgust at some bondage photographs in a greasy sex mag, she can't understand what he's riled about. The pictures, she thought, were just for fun. No one actually got hurt--she and the other girls were just...
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