The Scoop: This HBO original, which won a Golden Globe for Best Television Movie, tells the behind-the-scene stories of Orson Welles' crusade to make "Citizen Kane." (RKO 281 was the production number assigned to "Citizen Kane" by the studio.) Although it is a little on the short side at just over 80 minutes and rushes through many of the details, it features several great performances and offers an engaging look at the friendship between Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz.
Liev Schrieber gives a surprisingly good performance as Welles, John Malkovich is up to his usual schtick as Mankiewicz, and Marion Davies is another one of those bimbo roles Melanie Griffith was born to play. And even though James Cromwell's interpretation of William Randolph Hearst borders on Don Corleone territory, it isn't distracting.
Most importantly, this film makes the point that "Citizen Kane" was as much about Welles himself as it was about Hearst. Director Benjamin Ross and writer John Logan highlight many of the contradictory foibles -- both his storytelling genius and his self-destructive arrogance -- that would make Welles a major figure in film history, but would also eventually ruin him creatively.
Best Line: "It is not my life you sabotaged with your movie, Mr. Welles. My battle with the world is almost over. Yours, I'm afraid, is just begun."
Side Note: Based on the documentary "The Battle Over Citizen Kane" (1996).
Take a Look: Welles and Bernard Herrmann (Kerry Shale) tackle the score:
Welles and Mankewicz discuss Heart's involvement in the death of director Thomas Ince (followed by scenes from "The Cat's Meow," a film about the Ince case):
The Scoop: Unlike “Bettie Page: Dark Angel,” this can be considered a true biopic of the iconic pinup queen. However, also unlike that film, “The Notorious Bettie Page” lacks a bit of sizzle.
Yet that’s not to say that Mary Harron’s film isn’t worth watching. Particularly exciting is Gretchen Mol’s performance in the title role. For all her fame and influence, Bettie Page is an idol who is frozen in amber for us. All we know of her comes from hundreds of still photographs and just a few film shorts, most of which are devoted more to particular fetishes rather than Bettie’s own considerable personality – and all of which came for just a short period of her life.
But Mol fills in the blanks wonderfully well. She bears a remarkable resemblance to Bettie and recreates the photogenic personality we know from all those pinups. But she also expands on that to bring to life a complex character who maintains a childlike innocence about her powerful sexuality, but who enjoys exercising it nonetheless. Plus, she’s not afraid to go the full monty with a refreshing exuberance.
The supporting cast -- which includes Chris Bauer as Irving Klaw, Lili Taylor as Paula Klaw, and David Straithairn as Sen. Estes Kefauver – is also excellent.
Also of note is the cinematography of Mott Hupfel. His rich black and white photography creates a gritty, noir-esque vision of 1950s New York that also faithfully recreates the look and feel of Page’s pinup work with the Klaws. For the Miami sequences, Hupfel switches to a brilliant, pastel-filled color palette that matches the sunny world of Bunny Yeager’s photos of Bettie.
So where’s the problem? Mostly it’s in the screenplay by Harron and Guinivere Turner, who also teamed up for "American Psycho." There is an evocative opening sequence introducing us to the world of 1950s adult bookstores, but the script quickly devolves from there into a clichéd naïve-country-girl-in-the-big-city take on Page’s pinup career. While we see all of the key moments in Bettie’s life from her start in modeling in New York in 1953 to her religious awakening in Miami in 1959, there is not depth or understanding to it. Also absent are all but a few hints of some of the darker, more extreme aspects of Page’s combustible sexuality.
Nowhere does the film really get under Bettie’s skin. So, consequently, it can’t get under the audience’s skin either. At the end of the film, Page remains just as much of a mystery to us as she was at the beginning, despite Mol’s best efforts to give us a glimpse at the real Bettie Page.
The film also avoids dealing with the mess of Page’s post-modeling life, which included evangelic missions, paranoid schizophrenia, an attempted murder trial, years in a psychiatric institution, followed by some messy copyright battles over her image in the 1990s. (She died in seclusion in 2008 at the age of 85). But that’s just as well, because that’s not the Bettie Page we want to remember.
We want to remember the Bettie staring back at us from all those classic pinup shots – energetic, confident and just as enticing to men as to women, generation after generation. “The Notorious Bettie Page” makes a spirited effort to capture that Bettie, but falls just a bit short.
Best Line: "I'm not ashamed. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden, weren't they? When they sinned, they put on clothes."
Side Note: This film is filled with improper camera technique on the part of the actors playing the photographers. While most of the cameras being used are period accurate, the actors are just waving them around without any clue of how they were supposed to be handled.
Companion Viewing: "Bettie Page: Dark Angel" (2004) and "I Shot Andy Warhol" (1996).
The Scoop: Along with Marilyn, Elvis and James Dean, Bettie Page was one of the quintessential 1950s icons. She may not have gotten the acclaim during her own time that those others did, but that's only because she was the epitome of sexuality in that era -- a sexuality that the nation's moral guardians tried so hard to keep under wraps. But her fans wouldn't be deterred and for years after her abrupt retirement from modeling, they kept her legacy alive with pinup shots and film shorts hidden in dresser drawers and under mattresses until the world was ready for her re-emergence in the 1990s.
"Bettie Page: Dark Angel" is ostensibly a biopic, but only in the loosest sense. Produced by Cult Epics -- the current distributor of most of her film loops -- the movie is built around faithful recreations of some of Bettie's most infamous "lost" shorts. Interspersed with the recreations are scenes from her life during that period, with the focus squarely on her bondage work with Irving Klaw, although there is brief lip service paid to her shoots with Bunny Yeager. But these scenes have all the awkward writing, stilted acting and cardboard quality production values that you've come to expect from the non-sex scenes of your favorite old pornos.
So the results are uneven, to say the least. But luckily, you're probably not watching this movie for the dramatic scenes.
The recreations are campy fun and star Paige Richards not only is a dead ringer for Bettie, but also brings along her years of experience in softcore porn to really sell it. She doesn't have the same presence as Bettie, but no one could. She comes close, though, which goes a long way toward making this cheapo production watchable.
Best Bit: The kindergarten quality recreation of the Kefauver hearings.
Side Note: The theme song is by Chris Stein of Blondie. He was signed to do the whole score, but then backed out. The swinging burlesque score used in the film is by Danny B. Harvey and Zack Ryan.
Companion Viewing: "The Notorious Bettie Page" (2005).
The Scoop: Director E. Elias Merhige's and writer Steven Katz's film is a provocative, yet highly fictionalized, account of the creation of the landmark horror classic "Nosferatu."
John Malkovich plays German director F.W. Murnau as a tempermental, single-minded genuis and Willem Dafoe is his mysterious star Max Schreck. The script's conceit is that Schreck was a real vampire, not just an actor lost in his role (as was the case in real life). There are faithful recreations of several of the sequences and settings of "Nosferatu," with many given an extra supernatural twist by the fact of Schreck's vampirism.
All this makes "Shadow of the Vampire" a hard film to categorize -- too fanciful for a biopic and too grounded in reality for a supernatural thriller -- but an enjoyment nonetheless.
There are good performances all around from a cast that includes Udo Kier, Catherine McCormack, Cary Elwes and Eddie Izzard. And extra kudos go to the gang of Pauline Fowler, Jamie Iovine, Amber Sibley, David Stoneman and Julian Murray for their Oscar-nominated makeup job on Dafoe.
Best Line: "If it's not in frame, it doesn't exist!"
Side Note: The real life Max Schreck was a veteran German stage actor and although "Nosferatu" was his film debut, he went on to make more than 20 other movies before his all-too-human death by heart attack in 1936, at the age of 57.
Companion Viewing: "Nosferatu" (1921) and "Gods and Monsters" (1997).
The Scoop: A great script anchors this HBO original movie about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. The gimmick that works unusually well is having two leads play the same character -- Ashley Judd as Norma Jean Baker, the ambitious, sexually abused orphan, who transforms herself into Mira Sorvino as Marilyn Monroe, the troubled sex symbol who can't escape Norma Jean's inner voice.
The film does a good job chronicling her drug use and the way she exploited men and sexual politics to rise to the top, but ignores many of the rumors and speculation that surround her death. Both actresses give strong performances, but Judd's is especially captivating. I absolutely fell in love with her in this movie -- and not just because she spends a great deal of time nude. This is one of my favorite Hollywood biopics -- right up there with "The Man of a Thousand Faces" (1956), "Chaplin" (1992) and "Ed Wood" (1996).
Best Line: "I'm going to be in the movies, even if I have to fuck Bela Lugosi to do it!"
Side Note: Judd and Sorvino both shared Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for lead acting.
The Scoop:
