Bettie Page: Begehrt und berüchtigt (2005)

Bettie Page: Begehrt und berüchtigt: Directed by Mary Harron. With Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson. The life of Bettie Page, a 1950s pin-up model and one of the first sex icons in America, who became the target of a Senate investigation because of her risqué bondage photos.

“Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron is a cultural gadfly whose previous films laid bare some the artistic excess of the Sixties and the hollow avaricious Eighties. With u0026quot;The Notorious Bettie Pageu0026quot; she points her unswerving eye at Fifties America, an era cloaked in the moral righteousness of Joe McCarthy, while experiencing the beginnings of a sexual awakening that would result in the free love of the next decade. Harron and her co-writer Guinevere Turner, are clearly not interested in the standard biopic of a sex symbol. This is a film about the underground icon of an era and how her pure unashamed sexuality revealed both the predatory instincts and impure thoughts of a culture untouched by the beauty of a nude body. If the details of Bettieu0026#39;s life were all the film was concerned about, then why end it before her most tragic period was about to begin. Clearly, Harron is more interested in Americau0026#39;s attitudes towards sexual imagery then and now. Together with a fearless lead performance by Gretchen Mol and the stunningly atmospheric cinematography of W.Mott Hupfel III, she accomplishes this goal admirably, holding up a mirror to the past while making the audience examine their own u0026quot;enlightenedu0026quot; 21st Century attitudes towards so-called pornography. As America suffocates under a new conservatism, this is a film needed more than ever.”