Review of Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, directed by Alexandra Dean

What some people might not know about me in my personal life is that I love old Hollywood. I don’t romanticize it for the movies or the studio system, but the history behind this time period is absolutely fascinating.

The parties, the gossip, the fact that the Christians were trying to get the scandalous pre-Code movies shut down—I want to learn all the ins and outs of this specific period in time.

Hedy Lamarr is one of the actresses and faces I knew, but I didn’t really know about her. Only the movies she was in was on my radar, although I have read biographies of other influential women at the time and got a hint of who she was through her interactions with them.

So when I spilled tea all over my computer and was stuck with my iPad, I sat down with this documentary one night after watching Poisoned, which a review is on my blog as well. I didn’t know this documentary existed before I stumbled upon it through Netflix, but I am seriously glad I accidentally found out by doom scrolling one night. Such a brilliant woman she was.

Anyways, here’s my review.

Not only was Hedy Lamarr an actor, but she was a prolific inventor as well.

This is a documentary that combines a multitude of sources to tell the story, and we get first at the beginning of her life. Lamarr was born to Austrian Jews in 1914, and growing up she had a fascination with acting and the theater.

She began taking acting classes as a young girl after forging a note from her mother agreeing to them, and then she had her first parts in the early thirties, although they were small, minor ones in local films.

Her rise to fame was in 1933, when she was eighteen, and she appeared nude in the movie Ecstasy. There were also some controversial scenes where the camera was right up on her face as she simulated an orgasm, which, as you can imagine, caused quite the scandal.

Not long after that, Lamarr married a well-known arms manufacturer in Austria, and he was almost twice her age. She lived lavishly with him, attending the parties of the other elites in Vienna at the time, but World War II was beginning and she was a Jew.

By 1937, Lamarr decided she needed to escape her marriage and country, and the documentary presents the story that she took all her jewelry, a maid’s costume, and snuck out in the middle of the night to England.

There, she met the head of MGM, and despite not knowing English, she eventually charmed him into letting her come into his company.

The rest is history when it comes to her Hollywood story, but one of the more remarkable narratives that emerges, and the documentary goes into, was how she inherited a love for inventing things from her father.

Despite being known as a pretty face around the world for her movies, and probably not for her intellect in any way whatsoever, Lamarr was a genius. She didn’t really care for the spotlight, and even hid from some people at times.

She had ideas that would be revolutionary for the period, and one of her big ones is why we have bluetooth today. When she tried to join the Inventors Council during the war years, she was denied and told her pretty face would sell the bonds better, which would help the army.

She patented the technology for her frequency hopping, as she thought that radio-controlled torpedoes could help the war effort.

Eventually her patent expired and the US Army supposedly did nothing with it, but when years passed, it was revealed they did use her technology, never paid her or her partner that helped create it, and they had no acknowledgement.

In her later years, Lamarr was recognized for her work, but she had retreated into seclusion at that point. She received plastic surgery to try and hold onto the youth she had lost throughout the years, and she didn’t really talk to anyone. It was really sad to see this on-screen, although this really did happen to her in her final years.

Overall Thoughts

I’m so glad I watched this documentary, as I’m so sad the world doesn’t know more about the brains and intellect behind a woman who people literally gasped when they saw her looks.

I think that there are so many brilliant women that are boiled down to their looks, and that’s so sad to see on the global stage. Women have brains too.

Regardless, the documentary does a good job in interviewing the people who knew her and using primary sources to explain each stage of her life. Watch it if you haven’t already!

Follow me below on Instagram and Goodreads for more.