‘Bombshell’ Tells the Amazing Story of Hedy Lamarr, the Star and Inventor

• By Manohla Dargis, www.nytimes.com
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  “Any girl can be glamorous,” the actress Hedy Lamarr once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” It’s a withering observation, especially for a Hollywood star once known as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Beauty brought Lamarr fame, at least until everything fell spectacularly apart; as with too many actresses, beauty was also her gilded cage. The new documentary “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” shows how hard and how long she struggled to escape it — including through her invention in the 1940s of a groundbreaking communication system that underlies modern encryption.
  
  
  The story of that invention has been told before though it’s curiously missing from Lamarr’s contribution to a dubious 1966 memoir, “Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman,” which, bizarrely, includes an introduction by a shrink. (She unsuccessfully tried to stop its publication.) The title refers to the 1933 film that set her on the path toward scandal and stardom. Directed by Gustav Machaty, “Ecstasy” involves a young woman’s sexual desire and disappointment, and remains best known for the sight of its teenage Viennese star — then called Hedy Kiesler — frolicking naked and, more notoriously, feigning orgasm. (Machaty apparently jabbed her with a pin to achieve the desired writhing.)
  
  
  By 1938, Hedy Kiesler had been renamed Hedy Lamarr, and she was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and starring alongside Charles Boyer in the romantic thriller “Algiers.” It was Boyer’s show; Lamarr was a side dish. In his review of the film, the critic Otis Ferguson all but shrugged her off as “the girl,” while movie magazine writers slobbered over her looks. “No more beautiful woman,” one columnist gushed, “has ever stormed the doors of moviedom than Hedy, grey-eyed, raven-haired Viennese known as the ‘Ecstasy Girl.’” Four years later, Lamarr was still battling such typecasting blather, despite having patented a secret communications system called frequency hopping.
  
  
  Directed by Alexandra Dean, “Bombshell” is a very enjoyable addition to what has become a minor Hedy Lamarr industry that includes documentaries, books and stage productions. Like some of these other accounts, this documentary traces the arcs of Lamarr’s personal and professional lives, which by turns harmoniously converged and wildly veered in opposite directions. Whatever happened, it was rarely dull. The daughter of assimilated Jews, she married a munitions magnate who came with a castle and did business with Mussolini. When she decided to ditch her husband, she staged (or so she claimed) an escape that turned her into the heroine of her own thrilling adventure.
  
  
  Lamarr’s subsequent tenure in Hollywood comes across as tame by comparison. There were tasty and dreary roles, missed opportunities and heartbreak. She married again (and then four more times) and raised a few children, one of whom she treated unspeakably. She also tinkered and she invented. At home, Lamarr had what her biographer Richard Rhodes, one of the movie’s on-camera experts, describes as an inventing table. Howard Hughes gave her a small version of this setup, Mr. Rhodes explains, that was kept in the trailer she used while shooting films. Hughes also lent her a few of his chemists for one of her projects; for her part, Lamarr counseled him on a plane design.
  Ms. Dean relates Lamarr’s ventures, those onscreen and off, with savvy and narrative snap, fluidly marshaling a mix of original interviews and archival material that includes film clips, home movies and other footage. Ms. Dean’s most valuable resource, though, are Lamarr’s taped interviews with Fleming Meeks, a journalist. In a 1990 Forbes article, he helped refurbish her legend by recounting how some 50 years earlier Lamarr — who wanted to contribute to the war effort — created a communication system with her friend, the composer George Antheil. What she was after was a radio-controlled torpedo that couldn’t be jammed. Her solution: randomly switched frequencies.
  
  
  By the time Mr. Meeks wrote about Lamarr, she was in her 70s and no longer of use to Hollywood. That part of her story is bleakly familiar; it’s a sad, maddening movie-industry refrain, especially for older actresses. Another hurdle, as “Bombshell” makes clear, is that a female performer who subverted expectations — who was smart and not just lovely — wasn’t welcome in the world. Some of the period coverage of Lamarr’s invention attests to this. “It does seem incredible that anyone as beautiful and as fragile-looking as the luscious Hedy could be mechanically minded,” one 1942 magazine story trumpeted, adding that “she can sing, has a flare for designing and interior decorating.”
  
  
  Over Lamarr’s lifetime, the brilliance of her discovery was overshadowed by the spectacle of failure as her stardom gave way to forgettable roles, misfires, catastrophes and more scandal. “Bombshell” sympathetically tracks her downward spiral without reducing her to the sum of her misfortunes. That’s a relief and seems right given how tough and proud Lamarr can sound in the interviews. Back in 1942, in that breathless story about her invention, Lamarr insisted that she hadn’t changed. “I’ve always been as I am today,” she said. “If I am a ‘new Hedy’ as some say, it is because they are seeing me as I really am, not looking at the outside of me.” History finally figured out that she was right.