By the late 1940s, Page was a divorc?and a would-be actress with nowhere to go. “She finds herself in New York City and she is making a living posing for photographs,” the actress notes. “A lot of it was her not really crossing the line and looking at what people were doing with the photographs.”It’s an extraordinarily courageous performance by Mol. She was simply a woman from a poor Southern background trying to make a life for herself in a society where her opportunities were very limited.

Strangely, David Straithairn (who played legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow in Clooney’s movie) is cast here on the opposite side of the congressional fence as the moralistic Senator Estes Kefauver, one of the politicians who interrogate Page and her colleagues, the photographers Irving and Paula Klaw.Mol argues that Page wasn’t as naive as some of her detractors have suggested. She saw Page’s turbulent and colourful biography as being akin to that of country divas like Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn.The Notorious Bettie Page makes an intriguing counterpart to George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck Both films are set in the same period Both feature congressional hearings. Nor, until recently, was she any more forthcoming about her childhood, during which she has now acknowledged that she and her sisters were abused by their father.Harron, a country music enthusiast, suggests that one of the main reasons she was drawn to Page was the model’s Nashville background. This was an incident that the model only revealed when she was in her seventies.

At the time it happened, she simply refused to talk about it. It’s a world where people dealt with things like sexual abuse and rape by never talking about it.”Just occasionally, Harron’s film touches on the dark underside of Page’s life There is one grim scene in which she is sexually assaulted. You were having fun dressing up, you were making people happy.”Bettie didn’t want to think about it any more than that. And it is important to see her as a woman of the Fifties, before ‘therapy’ culture.

She isn’t part of a world where everyone is confessing things or examining their emotions or looking at their childhood traumas. So when Bettie was doing these [bondage] photographs, the one thing you didn’t think about was what these photos were used for and who they were for. She was, she says, simply trying to capture the spirit of the times. “For women in the Fifties, a lot of the way they dealt with things was to pretend it wasn’t there – that there was no elephant in the room. These were the 1950s, after all, the Eisenhower era, a lost age of (relative) innocence when the great American pornography industry was still in its infancy.Harron remains unapologetic about not having made an overtly polemical, feminist film. Even in the bondage pictures, some of which are deeply degrading, she somehow retains her cheery demeanour.Harron’s film suggests that both Page and the photographers she worked for regarded their work as a bit of a lark. They didn’t understand why certain customers wanted pictures of Page trussed up, but if the demand was there, they had no qualms about trying to satisfy it.