Movies

Bettie Page reveals all

The cult of ’50s pinup girl Bettie Page is hardly underexamined, but this documentary has the advantage of voice-over narration by the reclusive Page herself, from interviews with director Mark Mori before she died, at age 85, in 2008.

Her black-banged image is so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget how risqué Page’s career was; at a time when “obscenity” was both vaguely defined and illegal, she never minded posing nude, and also sewed her own teensy bikinis for shoots long before the swimsuits became popular. She says she got a kick out of the bondage photos and 16mm films she made, a sentiment echoed by former lovers and fans alike: She just always seemed to be having such a good time.

“Bettie Page Reveals All” includes pretty dark times, too, from childhood sexual abuse and an assault by several men in her early New York days, to later struggles with mental illness, which would leave her institutionalized for a decade.

But Page, who became a born-again Christian, still sounds delighted and surprised that so many people love her — and they really do. In one of Hugh Hefner’s least creepy moments ever, he describes how they became friends later in life; with his help, she finally obtained the legal rights to her rampantly used image.