Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Dir: Alexandra Dean 1hr 28mins (12A)

The film star who helped to invent Wi-fi

It may be the best “not just a pretty face” story in history, said Nigel Andrews in the FT. Hedy Lamarr was a beautiful Viennese-born actress who portrayed the first on-screen female orgasm in 1933’s Ecstasy before starring in a string of so-so Hollywood movies, including Cecil B. Demille’s Samson and Delilah. Meanwhile, in her spare time, she worked as an inventor. Collaborating with the composer George Antheil, she patented “frequency hopping” – a technology to enable secure wireless communications that is used today in Bluetooth and Wi-fi. This remarkable tale is now “wonderfully told” by filmmaker Alexandra Dean in her documentary. Trouble is, to anyone who even vaguely knows the story, Bombshell is “a very ho-hum trawl”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. We get the expected “talking heads, archive clips, film experts, and friends and relatives”. Yet the fact is, to this day, few people do know anything about Lamarr’s scientific ability, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. That in itself makes this film an important “parable of modern sexual politics”.