The Exotic Dances of Bettie Page

How times have changed! In an age when explicit pornographic material is readily available on the Internet, it feels like entering a time warp to encounter the work of Irving Klaw, a photographer who set up a mail-order business to distribute stills and 8mm films that he produced between the 1940s-‘50s featuring attractive women in titillating poses and routines. Betty (or Bettie) Page was his best-known model: she became a pin-up star of the ‘50s, appearing in a famous Playboy Christmas centerfold in 1955. Prior to that, she and Klaw made the black-and-white “specialty films” that are featured as the main program here: a collection of 12 exotic dances and striptease routines. Added as a bonus are four of Klaw's “Kamera Club” films with Page wearing (and occasionally removing) lingerie in various poses. Accompanying these digitally restored archival items are a gallery of Klaw's photos, and a 2016 interview with Page's nephew Ron Brem at a Page exhibition held at the Catalina Island Museum. Klaw's films, which also included bondage sequences, might have been deemed shocking 60-plus years ago, but by contemporary standards they are absurdly tame; nevertheless, a series of U.S. Senate hearings headed by Estes Kefauver in 1957 deemed Klaw a degenerate pornographer, and he was banned from doing business in New York. At the same time, Page retired and converted to evangelical Christianity, eventually working for Billy Graham. A revealing curio from a far more innocent—or prudish—era in American history, this is a strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)