Develiker terrible... so disappointed.

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

agostino-dallas I am a movie goer and I go a lot. I have seen many, many people embodying real people on the big screen but nothing like this. The Oscar is little compared to what she did. The movie is also sharply directed and you don't doubt for a second she is Bettie Page. I am a big fun of pin up girls. I can't help it. I see those 50's and 60's housewives and I am like a kid in a candy store. Bettie might have made some stuff who some people could have found inappropriate but it wasn't sure not pervert, not evil, but she was terribly criticized and probably felt so bad about herself. Men took advantage of her, for a change. Does it ring a bell? Gretchen you're great! So is Bettie.

Dalbert Pringle From a religiously hypocritical up-bringing, to sexual abuse by her father, to being gang-raped in her teens, to a failed marriage, Bettie Page (as a determined, young woman in 1949 with nothing much to lose), then, travelled from her hometown of Nashville to N.Y.C.And when Bettie arrived in The Big Apple full of hopes and dreams, she went from being a failure as a legitimate actress, to appearing in cheesecake magazines, to being a bondage & fetish model in sleazy cinema, to becoming a coyly winking, soft-core pin-up girl.And, finally, things went back around, full-circle, to more religious hypocrisy (ho-hum) with Bettie, now in earnest, arguing the same, old tired crap about morality and the question of Adam & Eve's nakedness.Oh, me! Oh, my! Take my word for it - This "bio" film certainly could've been a helluva lot better than it was.As hot & sizzling & tantalizing as this picture should've been, unfortunately, its final product was a pretty damn tame and light-weight look at Page's career as a piece of provocative "pin-up" eye-candy throughout the conservative, yet turbulent, 1950s.Though actress Gretchen Mol looked simply sensational (in any stage of undress) throughout the story, I found that due to some very poor scripting decisions the Bettie Page character was presented as being too unbelievably naive in regards to the reality and true nature of the sort of employment that she had landed herself into. And rarely, if ever, did Page, at any time, seem to actually find a moment to completely enjoy the fruits of her obvious celebrity status.At a mere 90 minute running time, this film seemed to actually move along at a literal snail's pace. And contrary to what one might think, its subject matter, though intriguing, just wasn't enough to hold my undivided attention.I don't mean to sound downright sexist here, but I personally think that this picture suffered its greatest deficit by being directed by a woman.It appeared to me that director Mary Harron deliberately tried to white-wash and sanitize the notoriety right out of the Bettie Page character, making her appear to be more of an innocent victim of circumstance rather than an active and knowing participant in the manufacturing of "smut".

ericjhanvey I watched this on TV the other night and was really disappointed with it. For me it completely lacked any narrative whatsoever or was it only narrative and no substance. Each scene seemed to be written with the sole purpose of getting to the next one. There was no depth to the characterisation of any of the key figures and I felt that I knew no more about Bettie Page at the end of the film than I did at the beginning. In particular the film seemed to just skirt over her relationships with men, some of which seemed to have lasted for quite considerable lengths of time. This is not a criticism of the actors but the dialogue they were given.On a more positive note Gretchen Mol has IMHO the finest breasts on the planet and we do get to see a fair bit of them.

Andres Salama An entertaining though somewhat conventional biopic of the famous bondage model from the fifties. Gretchen Mol acquits herself nicely in the title role – even though she looks to be quite a bit taller than Bettie was. As played in this movie, Page was a naive and devoutly Christian girl from Tennessee, who nevertheless, after moving to New York, became the main model of a genre that was considered extremely shocking, not to mention illegal, at the time (of course, by the standards of today's pornography, Bettie's photos look now almost innocent). Why she did so is never quite explained, unless you consider a flashback to a gang rape during her teenage years as a valid explanation. In a final analysis, you probably can't explain why a nice girl agree to model in what was then considered extremely shocking set pieces, except by falling into amateur psychology. Though the religion of her main photographers, Irving and Paula Claw is never mentioned explicitly, it is nevertheless quite obvious - therefore, the most provocative thing in this movie is not the nudity but the subtext of a small town southern Christian girl exploited by callous Jewish pornographers. In black and white with a few color scenes.