The Notorious Bettie Page [2006]

Biopic of the rise and fall of the original '50s burlesque queen/ pin up girl, Bettie Paige. How did a plain, innocent young girl from Kingsport, Tennessee come to be the subject of a senate hearing and the talk of a nation that really should have had more to think about, given the times? It's a long story and here we are given a whistle-stop tour of the route taken by Bettie Page from bespectacled secretary to the whipcracking bondage vixen in the photo hanging on a few hundred thousand locker doors. At first Bettie, with typical dreams of movie stardom poses for camera clubs which she thinks acceptable, since the pictures are guaranteed not for publication. Her chance meeting with pornographer Herb Klaw, changes all that - Herb is secretly publishing and distributing magazines with names like Titter and Wink and flirting with legality in an ultra-right-Christian climate. The innocent Bettie is soon the nation's top pin-up and moving in high society but the law has its eye on Klaw. A senate hearing into juvenile delinquency, of all things, is where Klaw meets trouble and Bettie looks set to go down with him.