Ultimately, however, writer-director Nico B.'s intentions are undercut by the amateurish stagings (especially on the docudrama side)-with the overall result being that Bettie Page: Dark Angel is closer to Showgirls than Ed Wood both in terms of presentation and appeal. Much has been made of Page's fresh-faced portrayals of obviously staged S&M and other relatively softcore porn, and actress Paige Richards captures her look and attitude well in this otherwise unpolished production. In fact, these scenes strikingly capture the look and feel of the cheesy sets and limp action of Klaw's oeuvre, the highlights of which featured Page and other actresses rolling around on the floor pretending to wrestle, or being intricately trussed up and stroked lightly with whips and such, all the while wearing two or three pairs of panties, since-as the Klaw character remarks here-any sight of pubic hair would get the filmmakers busted and the films seized as being obscene. can certainly take sex or leave it alone." She "considers the human body, if anything, rather repulsive." In such a context, the look of sweet sexual eagerness-neither too aloof nor too ravenous-that was Bettie Page's specialty must have gone a long way.An homage to the infamous titular ‘50s pinup girl, Playboy centerfold, and smut icon, Bettie Page: Dark Angel does a faithful job of recreating the absurdity of much of the film erotica of the time, combining docudrama vignettes from Page's life with relatively lavish recreations of the films she starred in for seat-of-the-pants producer Irving Klaw. When it came to sex, explained an article in Life magazine in 1953, the female is "simply by virtue of her own physiology and through no coyness or stubbornness of her own, disinterested, unresponsive, and in fact sometimes downright frigid. Hers was an era in which the expectation of female frigidity was still a widely accepted axiom of sexual lore. It is true that Bettie Page may have been especially gifted at conveying the naughty-but-nice fantasy. The appeal of the sweet-faced girl with the bod for sin is as old as the oldest dirty postcard, and as common as guilt. In Bettie Page, forbidden longings were made safe by an ideal American girl." For Steve Sullivan, the author of a methodically researched history of the pin-up called Va Va Voom!, there's a "fascinating duality" in Bettie's photographs, "which run the gamut from sunny innocence to sinister darkness." Truth is, though, that's a gamut run rather often in pornography. Her fresh-faced beauty was the perfect camouflage for what lurked beneath her veneer-the exotic, whip-snapping dark angel. Swanson, Bettie Page "embodied the stereotypical wholesomeness of the Fifties and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface. You might reasonably ask, what is it about Bettie Page? Why does her image still capture the imagination, while legions of her cohorts in the nudie modeling trade could barely sell a publicity still to save their pasties? Bettie's fans tend to answer that question with the naughty-but-nice paradox.
It's a fascinating look at Page's iconic work and the pin-up subculture that made her so famous: Margaret Talbott wrote an essay on Page and her milieu called "Chicks and Chuckles" for TNR in 1997. Bettie Page, perhaps the most successful and intriguing pin-up girl in American culture, died last night at 85.
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