Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood icon. Stunningly good
looking, the star of numerous films from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, married
six times and linked to multiple affairs in and out of show business, she was
also a talented inventor, whose creativity and contributions to modern
technology have only been recently acknowledged. Bombshell, The Hedy Lamarr Story
is not the first documentary about her life, but it may be the best for our times.
The film is being rolled out in theaters around the US over the
next several weeks, opening in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend. It will
premiere on the PBS series American
Masters in May. (See below for more information.)
Lamarr was a woman of contradictions. She famously remarked “Any
girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” Of
course, she also understood that being good looking helps too; and while she expressed
the view that she’d rather be known for her mind than her looks, she spent her
later years undergoing a series of plastic surgeries in a vain effort to preserve her
beauty – eventually with regrettable results. She was notoriously private, yet reveled in public attention and
appreciation. “To be a star is to own the
world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is
poverty,” she said. She created and patented an invention that eventually paved
the way for modern communications and security systems, but after being turned
down by the American military in the Second World War, never talked about it.
It
seems her time has come.
Bombshell was written and directed by Alexandra Dean, an Emmy Award-winning
journalist and producer, and a founder of the documentary production company
Reframed Pictures, along with Academy Award-winning actor Susan Sarandon and Producer
Adam Haggiag. The stated goal of Reframed Pictures is to make documentaries that
“reframe the conversation around issues of gender equality, human rights, and
the environment.” Bombshell is their first.
Dean’s documentary is made up of archival footage and
photos, interviews with Hedy Lamarr’s children and people who knew and admired
her – people like Robert Osborne, Mel Brooks, and Diane Kruger - to give
context to her life, aa well as with a few experts who put her scientific
contributions into perspective. But the centerpiece of the documentary is
Lamarr’s own audio commentary on her life, based on an extensive, long lost interview
she gave a few years before her death, and which came to light a couple of
years ago.
As cinema, the documentary itself is not particularly
creative, but quite competently made: a good tale well told. And Lamarr’s life
was interesting indeed. Thematically, Bombshell
is about how the prejudices of a male-centered society (and the prevailing sexist attitudes of the day) saw the beauty but ignored the brains of a brilliant young woman, whose significant contributions to science and
technology were first ignored, then long unacknowledged because of her sex.
Hedwig
Eva Maria Kiesler, known as Hedy, was born in 1914 in Vienna
of upper-class Jewish parents. In
the late 1920s, teenage Hedy went to Berlin to
pursue an acting career. By age 18, she starred in the 1933 film, Ecstasy, playing a young wife married to an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for its explicit scenes of
sexuality - showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm, as well as several brief
nude scenes. She later claimed she was “duped” into doing those scenes, which
were shot with a telephoto lens, but the publicity
didn’t hurt her career, far from
it.
It
helped win the admiration of her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian
military arms manufacturer and one of the richest men in Austria, whom she
married that same year. Mandl was fifteen years her senior, but then, as she
later noted, she preferred older men. He
liked to show off his beautiful wife and took Hedy with him to business and
technical meetings where military science and technology were discussed. She
paid attention. Being highly possessive, however, Mandl refused to let her
pursue her acting career. Within four years, she left him and fled to Paris
(along with a passel of valuable jewelry). Over the next thirty years she was
to marry and divorce five more times.
In
Paris, Hedy was “discovered” by the powerful movie mogul Louis B Mayer, who saw
her as the next big thing, brought her to Hollywood, got her to change her surname
to Lamarr, and soon thereafter began promoting her as the “world’s most
beautiful woman.” He may have been
right. Her American debut came opposite
handsome Charles Boyer in the 1938 hit film Algiers. Contemporaneous accounts
claimed that jaws dropped and audiences gasped when Hedy Lamarr first appeared
on screen – she was so gorgeous. By 1940, she had appeared in four more films,
opposite such leading men as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Robert Taylor. But
Europe was at war and it seemed likely that the US would soon be involved; and
thus begins the second part of the story.
While Hedy undoubtedly liked the
attention she received and the money she earned as a beautiful actress, she was
generally typecast as the alluring and exotic love interest, and she did not
find the work particularly interesting or challenging. What she did like was
tinkering and thinking about inventions. Not long after her arrival in America, Hedy
met and briefly dated Howard Hughes, who was so impressed with her self-taught
scientific mind that he set her up with technical equipment and gave her access
to his engineering experts. She made suggestions to Hughes for how he could design
his airplanes to fly faster. On her movie sets, she had a trailer equipped with
a work bench, where she would work on new ideas between takes.
As the US edged closer to war, Hedy had
an idea for how to improve American torpedoes. The accuracy of torpedoes relied
on a radio guidance system, with the problem that radio signals could be jammed
by the enemy once their frequency was determined, causing the weapon to go off
course. Using knowledge gained from her marriage to munitions manufacturer Mandl,
Hedy came up with the idea that if the guidance signal could hop around between
frequencies, it would be very hard to track it or jam it. Working with her
friend George Anthiel, a pianist and composer, they came up with a nifty device
for accomplishing this: a frequency-hopping system that the two of them
patented in 1942. But when Hedy offered their invention to the US Navy, she was
politely told not to worry her pretty, little head about such technical
matters; if she wanted to help the war effort, she should do what other
actresses were doing – go out and sell war bonds. Which is what she did. Quite
successfully, I might add.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Eventually, twenty years later, the Navy rediscovered Hedy’s frequency-hopping
system and in the early 1960s began incorporating an updated version in their torpedoes. Even then, it took another thirty years, but late
in her life Hedy finally received the
recognition she deserved for her technological creativity. Now known as spread-spectrum
technology, her idea has found new application in securing the privacy of GPS,
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals.
Between 1938 and 1958, Hedy Lamarr appeared
in twenty-five Hollywood movies, including Boom
Town (1940), White Cargo (1942),
Dishonored Lady (1947) and her biggest
and most famous picture, Samson and Delilah
(1949), opposite Victor Mature. She continued to be a celebrity, but it was all
downhill from there.
Still, thanks in part to Bombshell:
The Hedy Lamarr Story, Hedy will be remembered. We hear her voice at
the end of the film saying that you may give the world all you’ve got and the
world may kick you in the teeth … but, do it anyway. As Alexandra Dean notes, her story and her
advice provide quite a message for the young women of the world. For all of us,
actually.
89
minutes
Grade: B+ Interesting story,
well told
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is being rolled out to select theaters
around the US throughout March and April 2018.
In the SF Bay Area, it opens on March 9,
2018 at the Landmark Clay Theater in San Francisco, the Landmark Shattuck in
Berkeley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Check HERE
for the location and date of the film’s release in your area.
The
film also will be broadcast as part of the PBS American
Masters
series beginning May 18, 2018.
