Success Quote by Bettie Page

A pinup icon name-checking a melodrama and admitting she still cries is a small cultural plot twist. Bettie Page is usually filed under the gaze: posed, curated, “naughty,” famous for an image that invites cool appraisal rather than tears. By elevating Bette Davis in Dark Victory, she quietly flips the script from being looked at to being moved. The line is less about ranking actresses than about staking a claim to sincerity in a world that treated her as a surface.

Dark Victory is classic tearjerker machinery: glamour, illness, stoic bravery, the slow approach of loss. Page’s “six or seven times” is doing work here. Rewatching doesn’t dull the feeling; it proves the feeling is real, reliable, almost ritualistic. That insistence pushes back against the idea that emotion is naive or that repeated sentimentality is embarrassing. She’s not performing taste; she’s confessing attachment.

There’s also a sly identification happening. Davis’s character is both radiant and doomed, a woman whose beauty doesn’t protect her from fate and whose strength shows up in the private spaces where spectacle drops away. Page, whose career was built on spectacle and later complicated by withdrawal from public life, seems drawn to that tension: the body as public property, the inner life as the only true possession.

The quote lands because it’s unguarded. In a single sentence, Page walks out from behind the pinup persona and into the ordinary, disarming reality of someone who loves a movie so much it still breaks her.