Hedy Lamarr’s story is inspiring and dispiriting in equal measure, says Dan Slevin.
Hedy Lamarr in 1938. Photo: Diltz/RDA/Everett Collection
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but “they” are dead wrong. Beauty is an utterly empirical quality and – if you were to start at 100/100 and work your way down the scale – you would be starting with Hedy Lamarr.
I try and make a point of not commenting on the physical characteristics of actors in these pages in order to not objectify human beings who weren’t put on this earth to be objectified but, blimey, Hedy Lamarr just takes your breath away.
She had mixed feelings about her undoubted beauty, though. While she desperately wanted to be recognised for her other qualities – spunk, spark, wit, etc. – she was not averse to using her physical charms to subdue a room and bring the men and women in it to heel.
Wilful from an early age, growing up in Vienna between the wars, she fell in with an artistic crowd and was a photographic model for a while – figure work despite being only 16. That led to an erotic drama picture called Ecstacy at age 18 which featured some nudity and sexual frankness uncommon in the non-European pictures of the day. It was a film that would both inspire her American career but also derail it.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
But it isn’t just the Hollywood movie stardom – which eventually she could take or leave – that makes her story remarkable and still worth telling. It’s her parallel-but-thwarted career as an inventor and innovator that writer/director Alexandra Dean wants to tell us about, even though her visuals so often rely on those studio clips and photos that continue to make your jaw drop.
Lamarr became interested in engineering as young woman during her first marriage to Austrian munitions tycoon Friedrich Mandl. That marriage was doomed however, as Lamarr (born Hedwig Kiesler) was a Jew and Mandl spent a lot of the 1930s hobnobbing with Hitler and Mussolini.
During WWII, after she had escaped to the States, Lamarr wanted to join the Inventors Council and was put off for some reason but – with the assistance of avant-garde composer George Antheil and his experience with automated piano rolls – she came up with an idea for a way the Navy could steer torpedoes remotely without the enemy listening in. That idea eventually became known as “frequency hopping” and is the basis for all wireless communication today.
I’ve wanted to see Bombshell – great title – since it came to the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2017 but only now, thanks to DocPlay, I have managed it. Highly recommended – it’s a great story, well told.
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is streaming on DocPlay and is rated M (nudity) by the NZ authorities and M (Suitable for (but not restricted to) mature audiences 16 years and up) which I think is the Australian censor’s verdict.
