Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story(2017)

Storyline

• Hedy Lamarr . Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood movie star who was hailed as the most beautiful and glamorous in the world. However, that was only the surface that tragically obscured her astounding true talents. Foremost of them was her inventive genius that a world blinded by her beauty could not recognize as far back as her youth in Austria with her homemade gadgets. This film explores Lamarr's life which included escaping a loveless marriage on the eve of Nazi Germany's conquest of her nation to a new career in Hollywood. However, her intellectual contributions were denied their due even when she offered them in the service of her new home during World War II. Only after years of career and personal decline in her troubled life would Lamarr learn that her staggering aptitude created brilliant engineering concepts that revolutionized telecommunications, which forced the world to realize the hidden abilities of a woman it had so unfairly underestimated. — Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com) A profile of Hedy Lamarr is presented, it largely based from some found audio recordings of Lamarr herself, the information corroborated by other sources. She is most remembered for being a glamorous Hollywood movie star in the 1940s after emigrating to the US following a somewhat infamous movie career in her native Austria, but that Hollywood career which was never fully realized like many of her contemporaries due to circumstances, despite she possessing characteristics to the umpteenth degree revered with Hollywood actresses of the time. What is also presented is her turbulent personal life, which included six marriages, the general lack of romantic love in her relationships, addiction to cosmetic surgery late in her life, and the long estrangement with who was her oldest offspring, "adopted" Jimmy Loder . But arguably what may come as the biggest surprise about her to the documentary's viewers is her inherent scientific intellect, her biggest achievement in that regard being awarded a patent for an invention developed as part of the US war effort (WWII), but for which she never got the credit - financial or otherwise - the invention itself deserved, especially as it is the basis for the technology used in many of the electronic devices of today. — Huggo