Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story **** (2017, documentary) – Movie Review

Bombshell: A fascinating, ultimately sad story, hauntingly well told.

Who knew it? The famous Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamarr was an under-appreciated genius inventor. Wow! Writer-director Alexandra Dean’s biographical, historical documentary tells a fascinating, moving, and ultimately sad story, and tells it hauntingly well too.

The free-spirited beauty Lamarr [then Hedy Kiesler] becomes a world name appearing naked in the infamous movie Ekstase [Ecstasy] (1933), infuriating Hitler, escapes a loveless marriage to an Austrian arms manufacturer on the eve of Nazi Germany’s conquest of her country, and flees to London with her jewels, but attracts the attention of visiting MGM movie mogul Louis B Mayer, who gives her a movie contract. The world is soon at her feet. She has the world, but the world is not enough.

In between films, she helps Howard Hughes with his plane designs by studying birds and fishes, founds Aspen as a ski resort, produces movies, raises $25 million for the war effort, promotes cosmetic surgery and, most significantly, invents frequency hopping, along with composer George Antheil, a technique to help in war and later GPS and wi-fi.

But, and this is the big but, she ended up poor, unrecognised and unrecognisable through her unsuccessful cosmetic surgeries, a pathetic recluse, a parody of her previous stunning beauty. Despite all her herculean efforts, she remained always exploited. It really is an ultimately sad story, a tragic one. Depressing though it is, it is a story that needs telling, and Alexandra Dean finally gives Hedy Lamarr the full respect and proper due she seems to have lacked in her lifetime.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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