I am not going to lie. Despite looking interesting, I watched The Notorious Bettie Page because I had heard (and it was fairly obvious just by looking at a synopsis or anything about the film), that Gretchen Mol got naked in it. I have never been a fan of Mol, but I cannot resist seeing an attractive woman taking off her clothes. Yes, that may be perverted, but its a theme and ideal central to the very core of the movie, and helps to make the film a lot stronger than it probably should be.
The film chronicles Bettie Page's (Mol) life from her physical and sexually abused days as a kid in high school in the South, and onto her new life in New York. She wants to be an actress, but she has to pay bills too. After taking a few seemingly innocent shots on a local beach, Page slowly becomes a modeling sensation, and quickly jumps from suggestive photos to sexually provocative pin-up photographs.
I feel the briefness of the film (just over ninety minutes) is both a curse and blessing for it. On one hand, the film never overstays its welcome. You get to know Page within a few short minutes, and then it gets right into her modeling career and does not look back. But it curses the film as well, because we never really get a chance to grasp everything that is going on. She just kind of jumps around between modeling shoots and the controversies that they create before jumping right into the major senate investigation that takes up much of the final act of the film. You just sit there, and attempt to absorb it all, and more just comes right at you. It feels like the filmmakers wanted to summarize too much material in too short a film. It begs for longer sequences, and begs more for even longer explanations. It does not feel rushed; it just does not feel all there.
Another bit of a fumble, although a bit more of a curiosity, is the use of colour throughout the film. The majority is in black and white, but frequently, splashes and sequences of colour do emerge. But while this may have been done as a symbolic gesture early on, it becomes a bit of a distraction as it continually pops up later on before cutting back to black and white. It gets confusing, and becomes more of a tedious interference than anything else as the film goes on.
While it may fumble a bit with the actions, the film stays dead-on with its themes. Page, who I know little to nothing about, is played off innocently, and her world is exactly the same. Save for a few shady characters during her teenage years, everyone she encounters is an innocent, and everything she does has an innocence to it. I never thought I would look at full frontal nudity as being something that was anything other than vulgar and depraved, but here, it truly is something to marvel at. All at once, it is beautiful and innocent. Even the most sexually perverted moments in the film (albeit tame compared to today's standards) have an innocent and angelic feeling to them. There is just something about the way Mol's nude body is portrayed that it just strikes at such a different chord than nude bodies in other films. It just feels so natural and so wondrous, that if there were any reason to watch the film, it would be to see the spectacular depictions of Mol's body as she plays Bettie Page.
The other reason is Mol herself. As Page, she exemplifies that 1950's Southern belle everyone knows (or can at least imagine). Despite her profession, she is still a normal person, and still looks at herself as being religious. Mol plays her exactly to the right amount of squeaky-cleanliness needed to make this character feel authentically from the 1950's. She plays her with such matter-of-factness that you would be hard-set not to think that Mol was actually Bettie Page herself.
Unfortunately, the supporting cast have very little moments to shine, and are totally overshadowed by Mol's wonderful performance. None of them do anything particularly pleasing, and none of them really have that same strength in their role as Mol does. This is not really the fault of the actors, but more of the fact that they do not have much to work with. Many of them are totally recognizable, such as Oscar-nominee David Strathairn (in a role a little too close to one of his better performances), Sarah Paulson (recent Golden Globe nominee for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), and character actor Lili Taylor, but you would be hard set to really place their performance in being anything other than okay. None of these characters are really developed, and they really just stand as character cut-outs who Mol runs loops around as she picks up steam in her brilliant performance.
Really, this film is worthwhile for its portrayal of nudity, and for Gretchen Mol's excellent performance of Bettie Page. Everything else is a bit too muddled and awkward than it should be. Had more work been done to develop supporting characters and not just blast right through the story, this film would have been a much better biographical film. As it stands, it is just a vehicle for Mol to really rise into the stratosphere of popularity as an actress.
7/10.

You'll notice that the chemist, who appears in two scenes and gets to speak, is played by Stephen King. "Don't give up your day job" is the standard thing to say, but that's not fair. King acquits himself reasonably well: he's no worse than any other member of the cast, and better than most. The story, on the other hand, is pure rubbish. Please, give up your day job.
Never have I seen so many dreadful performances - of which the lead actor's (the LEAD ACTOR'S!) is probably the worst - gathered together in the one film. Everyone acts hammily, but not in any entertaining way; they all somehow manage to go over-the-top without expending, or manifesting, energy. I blame screenwriter/director Tom Holland. It can't be that ALL the actors are REALLY this bad. What are the odds against that? Admittedly, I've never heard of any of them before, but still, I don't think I could walk into a talent agency and walk out with this many bad performers if I tried: ONE actor, despite my best efforts, would turn out to have talent. So what's more likely - that Tom Holland rolled a dozen consecutive snake-eyes, or that he wrote a lousy script and then directed it poorly? That would also explain why actors are bad in direct proportion to their prominence in the script. The more direction an actor got, the worse he performed. ("You want me to bend over like a hunchback, talk from the back of my throat, show all my teeth, and look bored, all at the same time? Okay...")
This theory is confirmed by the fact that Holland undeniably managed to co-write a lousy script. Several writers here have commented on the fact that Billy Halleck is not a likeable character, but that's a misleading way of putting it. He's not a knowable character. All we find out about him before the supernatural stuff starts happening is that he's fat, and that all he can think about is food. ("All I can think about is food," he tells us, helpfully.) And in the end...
(Sigh) I suppose I ought insert a spoiler warning here...
In the end he becomes evil. Why? I can only shrug. Perhaps he's under some kind of enchantment. Yeah, that's probably it. By "evil" perhaps I mean "inexplicable" - it's not so much badness as a socially undesirable suspension of ordinary means-end psychology. Anyway, his actions at the end make no sense, nobody's actions make much sense, and this is despite the fact that the characters do little but explain their motivation for the benefit of the audience.
By the way, here's my nominee for hammiest line/delivery: "I don't think you'd like it. IN FACT..." [big dramatic pause] "...I don't think you'd like it at all."