Composer
George Antheil was influenced by Igor Stravinsky, jazz, and industrial rhythms.
He might sound like an unlikely collaborator for Hedy Lamarr, but instead of a
movie musical, they worked together on some of the most disruptive technology
of the last two centuries. Yes, that Hedy Lamarr. She was not merely an actress
and sex symbol. She was also a patriot and an inventor. Alexandra Dean
chronicles her remarkable life and work in Bombshell:
The Hedy Lamarr Story (clip here), which screens during the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
Okay,
so she was married and divorced six times. You can definitely say the Austrian
immigrant adapted to life in Hollywood. Her first husband, Friedrich Mandl was
an Austrofascist rather than a National Socialist, but they still had very
different political ideas. His embarrassment over her notorious nude scenes in
1933’s Ecstasy probably did not help
their marriage much either. Regardless, as soon as Lamarr reached Hollywood,
she ardently embraced anti-Nazi causes. However, when America, her beloved
adopted nation, entered the war, Lamarr believed she had better ways to support
the war effort than selling war bonds.
Lamarr
always had an inventor’s mind and thanks to Mandl she knew a little something
about torpedoes. Decades ahead of her time, Lamarr developed a “frequency-hopping”
method of guiding torpedoes through submerged waters and signal-jamming interference
that Antheil would help her refine into a deployable technology. Unfortunately,
the U.S. Navy just didn’t get it. As a result, they mothballed technology that
would eventually become they cornerstone of wi-fi and Blue Tooth communications
systems. For real.
Dean’s
approach is straight forward all the way, but that is how Lamarr’s fans would
want it. Indeed, Bombshell is exactly
the sort of classy package we expect from American
Masters productions. For her one eccentric touch, she elicits occasional
commentary from Lamarr-super-fan Mel Brooks.
In
all honesty, Lamarr’s story is so fascinating, there is no need to dress it up.
However, it leaves us wanting to know more about Antheil, who is arguably even
more unsung than Lamarr, the box office icon. His compositions are richly,
idiosyncratically intriguing, but not exactly the stuff of weekend pops
concerts (check out his Jazz Symphony in
particular). Indeed, it would be intriguing to examine the frequency-hopping
invention at greater length from his perspective.
