Bomb­shell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

When dark-haired silent film vix­en Bar­bara La Marr was still just a teenag­er, the papers had already start­ed call­ing her the ​‘too-beau­ti­ful girl’. She was always get­ting into some kind of trou­ble, and the hard-liv­ing flap­per star was dead by the age of 29.

Years lat­er, memo­ri­al­is­ing her trag­ic death, the sen­ti­men­tal MGM head Louis B May­er had to choose a name for a promis­ing new Vien­nese beau­ty called Hed­wig Kessler. He set­tled on Hedy Lamarr. Like her name­sake Bar­bara, Lamarr could quite eas­i­ly be called the ​‘too beau­ti­ful girl’ too. For her entire life, her beau­ty would be both the vehi­cle for her suc­cess and a tool for oth­ers to under­es­ti­mate and pigeon­hole her.

In Bomb­shell: The Hedy Lamarr Sto­ry, doc­u­men­tar­i­an Alexan­dra Dean paints a vivid por­trait of the cin­e­ma glam­our girl whose active, inquir­ing mind was respon­si­ble for one of the key sci­en­tif­ic inven­tions of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. Born to a bohemi­an fam­i­ly of Aus­tri­an Jews, she became aware of her potent visu­al pow­er as a teen. She starred in sev­er­al Aus­tri­an films before swim­ming nude in the lust­ful inter­na­tion­al hit Ecsta­sy. The film brought her world­wide fame – and scandal.

After charm­ing Louis B May­er and suc­cess­ful­ly nego­ti­at­ing her week­ly salary – in spite of bare­ly speak­ing Eng­lish – Hedy would become one of the most desir­able movie stars on the plan­et dur­ing the 1940’s. Refus­ing to lean back on her film career, she exper­i­ment­ed with chem­istry sets in her trail­er between takes, even­tu­al­ly invent­ing ​‘fre­quen­cy-hop­ping’, a method of secure radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions intend­ed to pro­tect Allied forces from Ger­man U‑boats. It is now the basis for wifi and bluetooth.

Accord­ing to Kent’s film, the invention’s mar­ket val­ue is now esti­mat­ed to be worth $30 bil­lion. Because of mil­i­tary mis­han­dling, Lamarr saw none of the prof­its. The guid­ing voice in the film belongs to Hedy her­self, tak­en from a recent­ly redis­cov­ered inter­view record­ing between the star and Forbes jour­nal­ist Flem­ing Meeks. It’s put to excel­lent use here, chart­ing her life essen­tial­ly from cra­dle to grave.

In her ele­gant­ly accent­ed Eng­lish, Hedy describes dat­ing a pre-pres­i­den­tial JFK, run­ning away from her wealthy fas­cist hus­band in Aus­tria, pro­duc­ing her own films, and sketch­ing air­plane designs for avi­a­tion mag­nate Howard Hugh­es. A por­trait emerges of a woman both high­ly aware of how to use her beau­ty and resent­ful of the fact so few could see beyond it to her intellect.

Yet the film is unafraid to delve into a less straight­for­ward vision of Hedy; one where she is not sim­ply an unblem­ished pro­to-fem­i­nist pio­neer. Lat­er in her life there was drug addic­tion, tabloid scan­dal, a court­room tri­al, and dif­fi­cul­ty with numer­ous plas­tic surgery pro­ce­dures. Bomb­shell may be clas­si­cal in its approach to doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing – archival footage and knowl­edge­able talk­ing heads – but it could nev­er be called hagiog­ra­phy. Over­all, it’s a sur­pris­ing­ly full por­trait of a woman who was as mul­ti­fac­eted as she was talented.