One used to say, concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne, that his failures were more interesting than his successes. I believe that the same remark could suit to McDonald-Eddy's pictures. And especially this one.
It apparently possesses many characteristics of a failed movie: it's kitsch, the script, because of censorship, sounds inconsistent Yet, this movie gets also some good points: good Rodgers-Hart's music ("I married an angel", "Tira tira tira la"), good acting with E.E.Horton and Reginald Owen.
Anyway, if you may dislike it, you can't forget it. This strange movie actually leaves a very strong, dreamlike, impression, and you are very likely to keep it in mind for days, maybe for weeks. Why? In the thirties and the beginning of the forties, movies didn't have the same mean than today: it aimed, like a dream, to divert the public in order to make it forget a difficult reality. Of all the the dream-movies that was made, in that time, this one stands as particularly powerful.
In short, let's say that the better way to appreciate this movie, is to watch it without wondering whether it's good or bad. To watch it, like you would watch a dream.

On the 26th of September 1983 a short dumpy 60 year old woman stood trial for the attempted murder of Leonie Haddad, a lady whose husband had recently died and had agreed to take in a lodger who came via a housing authority for the elderly. Haddad was not made aware that her new lodger had, in fact, come fresh from The Patton State Mental Hospital where she had been incarcerated for an inexplicable knife attack on a married couple three years previously. Haddad soon realised that something was 'rotten in Denmark' when the woman began to lock herself in the bathroom with a tape recorder reciting prophesies about' seven Gods'. Haddad's fears were confirmed one night when she awoke to find her lodger sitting astride her chest holding a bread knife announcing that "God has inspired me to kill you". Haddad managed to knock her assailant out with a telephone but not before she had lost a finger and suffered deep lacerations to her face and chest. It was a miracle she survived. The lodger was judged to be innocent by reason of insanity but sent, kicking and screaming, back to the laughing academy. Ten years later she was released and found that she was now a celebrity; but not for the brutal attacks on her innocent victims, but for her incarnation of 25 years earlier when she was known as the 'Queen of the Curve's, the 'Tennessee Tease' and 'Miss Pin Up Girl of the World' - the Notorious Bettie Page.
Director Mary Harron, mainly known for 'American Psycho' takes us back to the glory days of a legendary cheesecake and bondage model (played solidly enough by Gretchen Mol) who inadvertently wrote the blue print for fetish iconography and whose influence can be detected in everything from comic books to catwalks. T.N.B.P is day-glo fun ride through an evocative depiction of the 1950's where Page, with the familial help of good intentioned boyfriends and photographers, becomes the number one star of pocket sized men's glossies with titles like Wink, Tab and Parade. Her real dream of movie stardom evades her and a brush with the authorities over obscenity charges in 1957 is the inciting incident which leads her to retire from modelling and give herself to God. The overall style of the film is light and frothy and only darkens momentarily with an allusion to her father's incestuous attentions and a sexual assault which inexplicably appears to have no discernible effect on her. Mol plays Page as she seems in her photographs, happy, carefree and fun - even the bondage shots betray little more than a good humoured incomprehensibility. The film ends on the upbeat with Page cheerfully handing out bibles in a park with no indication of the real life unhappy marriages, personal tragedy and decent into murderous insanity which lay before her; avoiding what I think is the essential core of Page's story - rebirth and resurrection.
Having emerged from a decade of incarceration Page found that her cult had been in the ascendance since the mid 1980's and that she had become a huge underground icon, during which, many were asking "whatever happened to Bettie Page". Her 'mysterious' disappearance fed the fires of any number of conspiracy theories only adding to the allure of her legend. When the world's media finally caught up with her she gave no hint of her darker past and she was soon giving interviews for magazines, T.V and being photographed at Playboy parties with the likes of Pamela Anderson and the equally tragic Anna Nicole Smith. She found that she was now more famous than she ever was in her 'glory years' but in the glare of this 'resurrection' it was only a matter of time before the full story would come to light.
The only notorious thing about The Notorious Bettie Page is they left out the part when she became truly notorious.