Bettie Page: Dark Angel is a 2004 biographical drama about the 1950s American pin-up and bondage model, directed and produced by Nico B., founder of Cult Epics. Paige Richards, herself a fetish model, plays Page. The film is set in New York from 1953 to 1957, the window when Page was shooting the Irving Klaw material that still defines her for rope-and-gag audiences. Klaw is played by Dukey Flyswatter. For viewers who came to Page through the bondage stills, this is the feature that tries to put those lost 16 mm reels back on a screen.
Six lost Klaw shorts, and the Senate
The plot device is reconstruction. The film recreates six lost fetish and bondage 16 mm featurettes Page made for Klaw — the mail-order loops and shorts that did not survive the way the still photographs did. Those bondage films and photographs are what earned her the nickname Dark Angel. They are also what pulled her into a U.S. Senate committee investigation. The movie’s bet is that you can restage the missing footage and, with it, the career that the investigation helped end.
Richards, Flyswatter, IndieFest 2004
Casting a working fetish model as Page is the honest choice: Richards already knew the poses the Klaw stills taught everyone after her. Flyswatter’s Klaw is the other half of that shop — the man behind the camera and the mail bag. Bettie Page: Dark Angel premiered at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival in February 2004. Cult Epics remains the label attached to it. The reels Klaw shot are still gone. The 2004 picture is what you watch instead if you want the Dark Angel years as a narrative rather than as a pile of surviving stills.
