The Blowfish Blog

[Videos] Paging Betty

I’ll acknowledge there are classics in porn, films that were greatly influential and pushed or redefined boundaries, which deserve to be given new life if only for historical interest — some Marilyn Chambers films and Deep Throat come immediately to mind. The “classic” under discussion today is comparatively lightweight, though, and it’s hard to see why it was chosen over literally thousands of other porn titles to get new life on DVD . . . but, you know, taken on its own merits, Paging Betty (1994) is actually a pretty good flick! Based (very) loosely on the life of famed fetish model Bettie Page, with Selina St. Claire in the title role, it takes the pin-up model and goes hardcore. It’s a rather sweet flick in its narrative moments, with an adult daughter discovering her mother’s old pin-up pics and asking about her secret life as a young model. We get a flashback to the ’50s, with some surprisingly well-written voiceover exposition, where young Betty dreams of being an actress — while her roommate works as a hooker to make ends meet. (If this is really the story the older Betty is telling her daughter, it’s pretty damned explicit — I prefer to think we’re just seeing the theater of memory at work . . .) There’s some really funny stuff, like Betty reading lines from a schlocky film script for Attack of the Gopher People. When she refuses to complete her audition using, ah, different oral skills, the director shouts, “You’ll never work in this town in B pictures again!” A profound threat! (Fear not, there’s still a sex scene, when the director calls in his secretary, who has a very demanding job.) We finally get some scenes with the headliner when Betty scores a gig doing lingerie photographs, then some girl-girl action with her roommate (before she runs away with all their money), and finally — because her financial situation is so dire and poor Betty must compromise her morals for cash — some boy-girl fucking. Betty sucks off her landlord, and later agrees to do porn. There are some nice moments where, intercut with the normal scene, we get grainy low-fi film footage of the same action, in period style. Betty discovers she has a taste for the work . . . but life intervenes, she gets pregnant, and settles down. I guess you can’t spoiler a 15 year-old film, so I’ll say she even marries the guy she did her one porn scene with! This is a weirdly moral film about porn. I’m surprised the thieving roommate doesn’t get some karmic comeuppance in the end . . . though there is a nice twist when Betty’s daughter reveals, in the last frame, that she secretly works as a stripper. (And the disclaimer at the end, about how any similarity to actual persons is unintentional and purely coincidental, is pretty funny in its own right.) A nice, sweet little film, though I wish there’d been a little bit of actual fetish stuff — Betty with a whip wouldn’t have gone amiss, but you can’t have everything.

• Paging Betty

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This entry was posted on Thursday, 10 July 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.