VFF Best of The Fest: BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY

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Thursday, March 8th, 2018
5:30 PM to 7:00 PM

If you heard a story that involved the most beautiful woman in Hollywood secretly developing a radio system during WWII that paved the way for WIFI and Bluetooth, would you think, oh more Hollywood silliness? What’s on offer in Bombshell is a look at a complicated and conflicted woman.

Feminist, brilliant and gorgeous, Hedy Lamarr could walk into a room and stop the conversation. Six marriages and affairs with Clark Gable and Howard Hughes sit alongside her remarkable films Ecstasy (1933), Algiers (1938) and Samson and Delilah (1949), all of which were considered her claim to fame. But the story goes beyond her allure and delves into an unexpected territory.

Director Dean crafts a remarkable story from archival material and makes it sing with the recent discovery of four cassette tapes of interviews done with Lamarr in the 1980s. A self-taught inventor, Lamarr’s interest in mechanics started at the age of 5 and hit its peak when she and composer George Antheil adapted the mechanism of player-pianos to develop a system that used spread spectrum and frequency-hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming. The two were granted a patent in 1942, but the Navy rejected it, putting her to work entertaining the troops instead. A version of the design was later used in the Cuban Missile Crisis. After the patent expired, the invention worked its way into practically all modern wireless communications technologies.

Bombshell is a timely film about a well-rounded remarkable woman’s life that was deterred by sexism. Sat, Feb 24 at 4:00 pm Sun, Feb 25 at 7:00 pm BEST OF THE FEST

https://www.victoriafilmfestival.com/box-office/vic-films/bombshell-the-hedy-lamarr-story-2/