BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY

BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY is a beautifully put together concise documentary about a one-time Hollywood star who felt trapped by her beauty and her reputation and under-appreciated for her intellect.  

Hedy was born in 1914 in Vienna to a middle-class Jewish family, with a beloved father who encouraged her interest in mechanics and invention.  As a teenager she became a beauty, and in decadent pre-anschluss Vienna, she felt free enough to express that in nude photos and a notorious film called Ecstasy, in which she appeared nude and faked an orgasm on screen. All this before she turned twenty. She marries a rich industrialist who happens to be supplying the Nazis with munitions, becomes a bored trophy wife, and escapes to England then America, where she enters another kind of prison, on a contract with Louis B Mayer.  He categorises her according to her reputation for Ecstasy, giving her bad parts that sell her looks but not her acting skills. Despite this she has a few hits, and is widely lauded as a beauty, but it never quite sticks.  She makes a bad second marriage to a philandering screenwriter - the second of many. And by the 1950s is washed up, a single mother, taking bad parts, addicting to the pills MGM gave her to keep her on the treadmill in her popular years. The worst part is that while she spent her entire life trying to be valued for her brains, not her beauty, she too gave into that metric as measure of her worth, indulging in more and more extreme plastic surgery until the results forced her to become a recluse, dying alone, being buried in an unmarked grave in her beloved Vienna.

And so the brains. Hedy had no higher education but had a fascination with science and engineering and a bold willingness to solve problems. During World War Two, she wanted to help the Allies who suffering horrific losses in the Battle of the Atlantic.  And so, with musician George Antheil, she invented a system of radio Frequency Hopping that would allow Allied boats to communicate with torpedoes securely, and to evade German U-boats jamming their communications.  It is appalling that such a revolutionary idea would be filed away by the US Navy.  It's even more appalling that she was condescendingly told to be a good pretty little actress and to sell war bonds by auctioning off kisses. And the final insult was that her patent was seized by the US government because she was an "alien" rather than a patriot, and exploited for military and commercial gain without her seeing a dime. To be clear, the consequences of her invention were immense - it's the concept behind the secure communications in wi-fi and bluetooth! 

There are so many ideas and emotions in this short film that it takes some time to really settle and unpack it all - what it means to have your patriotism questioned as an immigrant - the difficulty of being taken seriously as woman in Hollywood - the emotional damage of a persona - drug abuse. That alone would make it worth watching, apart from the technical skill of assembling some very high quality vintage footage. 

BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY has a running time of 88 minutes. The film is rated 12A for modest sex references and nudity. The film was released in the USA and Spain last year and was released in the UK this weekend in cinemas and on demand.  It will be released in Germany on March 22nd.

The Producers - Ulla dance now!

(posted by guest reviewer, Nik)

I was naturally skeptical. How could the modern version of The Producers simultaneously live up to the critical acclaim of 1968 Mel Brookes original as well as being faithfully in keeping with its subsequent Broadway adaptation? Moreover, could Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick match the exceptionally high standards of Mostel and Wilder as a pair of social inadequates and misfits - unwittingly and incompetently making the best bad play in history?

Happily, the answer is "yes" on all counts. Broderick and Lane develop a wonderful on screen chemistry from the very start - Broderick is totally convincing as the bumbling accountant looking naively to the lights of Broadway (and manages to be sufficiently distinctive from the Wilder depiction not to draw unwanted comparisons) - Lane eases in the part of the smoozy Max Bialystock, corrupting Bloom, lusting after Ulla, and boning various and sundry octogenarians. Moreover, the film is absolutely true to its roots, maintaining the overt homoerotic love story between the two male leads - as well as the total campness throughout.

The supporting cast is good too - Uma Thurman especially plays an excellent all singing, all dancing, all parts jiggling Ulla - Swedish and brazen in her "If you've got it, flaunt it" role. Gary Beach plays a convincingly gay Roger de Bris, and an excellent Hitler - and Will Ferrell acts within himself but perfectly adequately as flagrant homosexualist Nazi Franz Liebkind. Whereas the film cannot take credit for the score, which was developed for Broadway, it is all well performed and befits the adaptation.

Ironically though, the best and funniest scene and song of the film remains from the original - Springtime for Hitler (and Germany). I remember watching the Brookes version for the first time at 15 years old and tears streaming down my face at dancing Swastikas and prancing SS-guards - it would have been a real let down if the modern version didn't do this scene justice. Fortunately, Stroman goes to town, unleashing a lavish, bright and wonderfully shot stage scene that is true to the original but nevertheless full of modern touches, and brought to life by the charms of Beach as Ze Fuhrer! It made me laugh, that's the main thing.

Finally, the interplay between Ulla and Bloom is interesting, especially given their discordant physical size, and adds to the sense that the real lovers in this play, the true couple, happily reunited at the end, are Bloom and Bialystock.

Don't get me wrong now, this film doesn't replace or supplant the original, nor indeed should it discourage us from visiting the Broadway show. Rather it compliments both, and brings the joy of the big stage to a worldwide audience. I even managed to enjoy it sitting next to a couple of loud, annoying American girls who insisted, despite my protestations, on a running commentary.

Buy your chocolate raisins, stock up on your popcorn, visit the toilet beforehand, take front row seats, and enjoy!

THE PRODUCERS is on general release in the UK and US. It goes on release in Austria on the 24th February, in France on the 8th March and in Germany on the 16th March 2006