Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna. She entered cinema young and caused a scandal with a European film. She married an arms manufacturer; military meetings were held in the house and she sat at that table. She left, escaped to London and went from there to America. Hollywood used her as a face. But in the evenings she was doing something else: working at a drawing table and inventing. During the war she developed a system with a composer; frequency hopping would be used to guide torpedoes. A patent was granted and shelved. Alexandra Dean directs. Mel Brooks, Diane Kruger and Lamarr's children speak in it. It is an American production. At its centre is a recording long thought lost; the journalist Fleming Meeks spoke with Lamarr by telephone at the end of the eighties and kept the tapes. The documentary uses them and Lamarr tells her own story in her own voice. The method she developed was not used during the war; after the patent expired similar principles appeared in wireless communication technologies. Lamarr received no payment for the invention and recognition came only in her old age. The matter it treats is being left in the shadow of appearance; while her beauty was discussed her work was not. The documentary also tells her last years; the surgery, the debts and the withdrawal. Its limit is structure; the narrative is a conventional chronology and the technical side simplified. Who it is for: anyone curious about the history of cinema and of science. Who it is not for: the structure is conventional, the technical account shallow, and the register at times reverent.