Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY, documentary, not rated, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3 chiles
The “bombshell” in this documentary’s title is twofold. One is Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born siren who smoked up the silver screen in Algiers and Samson
and Delilah. The other is Hedy Kiesler Markey, the married name Lamarr used on the 1942 patent for her frequency-hopping technology, which was designed to keep Allied torpedoes on course in World War II and led to the development of Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi.
Writer-director Alexandra Dean’s aim is to reconcile the two Hedys — one actress, one inventor. In the space of a lively 90 minutes, she succeeds in telling the significant story of Lamarr’s greatest invention — as well as the multiple iterations of the actress’s own persona. Born Hedwig Eva Marie Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, Lamarr showed an early spark at age five, when she took apart a music box in order to put it back together. But as a teenager, her sex appeal came to overshadow her smarts, when a role she took in Gustav Machatý’s 1933 film, Ecstasy, made her notorious for its depictions of the actress in the throes of orgasm (unbeknownst to the eighteen-year-old, whose scenes were manipulated by the director), as well as its nude scenes.
In 1937, she fled her first marriage to control-freak Austrian munitions manufacturer Freidrich Mandl by disguising herself as a maid and sewing all her jewelry into her clothing. In Paris, she contrived to meet MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, who was scouting European talent. By the time she stepped off the ship that brought her to America, she was already being touted as the newest sex bomb about to detonate in Hollywood. Hedy Lamarr was a master of personal reinvention — having changed her last name in tribute to the silent film star Barbara La Marr after she escaped from fascist Austria, she never publicly disclosed her Jewish heritage. And even as she went on countless publicity tours as a sexy movie star selling war bonds, behind the scenes, she was also dreaming up complex military inventions to help the Allied forces.
Acting seems to have mostly bored her. Her true passion lay in inventing, according to her patent partner, composer George Antheil: “She likes to stay home and invent things,” he wrote to a friend. She streamlined plane designs for aviator and sometime-boyfriend Howard Hughes, who called her a genius, and devised a fizzing tablet that made carbonated drinks from water for overseas troops. When her film career began to suffer from the typecasting that limited her to exotic seductress roles, she contrived to produce her own movies. And in her later years, as she sunk into seclusion and addiction (brought on by the ministerings of Max Jacobson, also known as Dr. Feelgood), she helped to pioneer innovations in plastic surgery, freely offering up new ideas to her own doctors.
Through interviews with subjects as diverse as author Richard Rhodes, BuzzFeed writer Anne Helen Petersen, and directors Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, as well as multiple family members and film scholars, the documentary casts Lamarr as a mostly forgotten prodigy. Her beauty and fame were the curse that obscured her most noteworthy achievement, the frequency-hopping innovation that changed the course of technology over the 20th century and beyond. If Bombshell’s pace seems too frenetic at times — bouncing as it does from the actress’ movies to inventions to husbands (Lamarr had six), with perhaps too little time allowed in between for reflection — it might bear in mind to remember the unrelenting drive of the wonder woman herself. — Molly Boyle