Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story

Hedy’s Hoppers

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story
USA 2017
Directed by Alexandra Dean

Just a brief note of a review to give some praise to this film, which had a short theatrical release last year in the UK. Written and directed by Alexandra Dean, Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is a kind of love letter of a documentary to the once famous Hollywood star and is a culmination, it seems to me, of various people trying to redress the balance of a life once lived where a person's beauty and public personae was a blindfold to the true genius of the individual in question. It also reveals how the US government, it seems, cheated that star out of both reward and recognition for something which was secretly put to good use and which, when one looks at the benefits of just one of her achievements, has been a boon to mankind since the lady in question first put her mind to it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little.

This documentary starts at her beginning, shortly after Hedy’s birth as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 and highlights the things which helped shape her personality... such as her inventiveness being due to her admiration for her father, who meant a great deal to her. Also, it mentions her experimentation with the effects of her beauty on people and her frequent visits to a local photographer to take various shots of her... many of them ‘arty’ in nature (and by arty, perhaps I also mean revealing). Then the determined pitch to be in movies in her own country which, of course, built up to her infamous nudity and orgasm scenes in Ekstase (1933).

The film also documents her various marriages including her first, to a prince, which was so stifling that she eventually slipped a sleeping draft into one of the maid’s drinks, swiped her clothes and rode off into the night on her bike to avoid discovery as she exited that marriage and then tried to get into motion pictures... at first turning down Louis B. Mayer of MGM’s offer before then hopping onto his ship going back to Hollywood (along with a load of cheaply signed starlets going with him) and ensuring she got herself noticed enough by him that she could almost name any deal she wanted. The film also documents her decline in later years, as the hardworking Hollywood ethos of drugs to keep you awake and then make you sleep, such as what was being done to many of the workers to keep them going (famously, even child actors like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney), took their toll on her personality and her status as a single mother in the 1940s. Not an easy life to live.

And, of course, the film also makes much of her brilliant invention, co-created with composer George Antheil, where she came up with the idea of frequency hopping to stabilise the course of guided torpedos and stop them from being jammed. The military turned the patent down but evidence has since come to light that they were using these ideas on their stuff all the time and, when it was later followed up to get the patent back from the Navy, the word came through that it belonged to them and they could do what they liked with it because, technically, Lamarr was an ‘alien’. This shocking attitude towards somebody who was, by this point, a lady and patriot of America. Someone who had sold unbelievable millions of dollars in war bonds for the American government due to her appearances (something which a lot of movie stars were doing at the time).

The film is presented to us by various people giving commentaries... a few of them famous movie personalities themselves such as Diane Kruger and Mel Brooks. However, the majority of the interview clips are from relations of the lady, such as her son who the film focuses on quite a bit and, surprisingly for a film of this type, from the lady herself as a reporter, who is also in the film a lot, has unearthed a lost, taped interview he conducted with Hedy many decades before and which is used as a complement to the voice-over narrative on the film. So you do hear a lot of her, ‘in her own words’, so to speak, looking back over her life.

The film is pretty interesting and just about varied enough in its execution and enthusiasm not to get dull and to hold the interest throughout. Much is obviously made of her unique invention of ‘frequency hopping’, which is used as the basis for mobile phone technology, bluetooth, satellite navigation etc and all that stuff is really interesting. All that being said, though, we don’t get to hear about many of her other inventions throughout the documentary and I really wanted to know more... although I think the cooling cube which she thought of as a failure due to information she was unaware of about the difference in water between various states, was a pretty cool idea. I mean, she was so often coming up with stuff that her friend Howard Hughes set her up with a miniature version of his own laboratory when she thought up the concept of swept back wings to help make his planes go faster, after doing a bit of research on fish and birds (which is deftly illustrated in this film)... so it would be really nice to see what else she was dreaming up.

Jeremy Bullock and Keegan DeWitt’s score is a little like the music of Philip Glass in its approach and that’s not a bad thing... but everybody seems to be trying to sound like Glass or sometimes Nyman in their documentary movies these days and it seems a shame that this is the only kind of score we are getting for these kinds of things at the moment. That being said, you can’t fault it and I would have quickly plonked down the money for a CD of this thing, had one been available.

Well, I said this was a short review and I wasn’t lying. Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is extremely entertaining and informative, at least to the point where it whets your appetite and makes you want to go and read one of the books currently available about the lady. On the surface it would seem that this is not the most likely subject for a documentary movie but, once you step back and think about the import of Ms. Lamarr’s contribution and her legacy to the world we live in, it does make you stop and think how long it would have taken for somebody else to come up with the idea. Definitely worth a watch as this lady’s story deserves to be better known. 

Cold Weather

Katz Pyjamas

Cold Weather

USA 2010

Directed by Aaron Katz

Axiom Films Region 2

Warning: The spoiler here is that

there really isn't able to be any spoilers!

Wow! This is an absolutely amazing little film for lovers of leisurely paced cinema where not a lot really happens... and I mean that in the nicest way. This movie is a thing of beauty and I’m gonna tell everyone I know to take a look at it.

Unassuming and quietly persistent, the film is, perhaps, a trifle hard done by if I conclude, as I just did, that nothing really does happen in it. That’s patently untrue... stuff does happen I guess... but as you’ll see as I review it, the stuff that happens, the little incidents that add character to the rich palette of personalities on screen, is all about the quiet weight of their gradual occurrences and is not about servicing a story. It does have a story... but it also doesn’t.

I’m going to have to explain this a bit more aren’t I?

Cold Weather tells the “story” of Doug, who has gone to stay with his seemingly friendless and hard working sister after he has dropped out, probably from lack of interest by the feel of it, from College where he was studying forensic science. He gets a job hauling heavy loads at an ice factory which astonishes his sister Gail, who already knows what slowly sinks into the audience as the film progresses, that Doug is a bit of a gentle genius and is kinda wasting himself.

Doug makes friends with a work colleague and fellow ice lugger, Carlos, who starts to hang around with him and Gail and Doug’s ex-girlfriend Rachel, who turns up for a while. Doug is a fan of classic detective literature, especially Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and so he lends a collection of some of the stories to Carlos, who also starts to get into the adventures of the classic English detective. Carlos also starts to get into Rachel quite heavily, after taking her to a Star Trek convention.

And then Rachel goes missing and the three friends - Doug, Gail and Carlos - find themselves involved in a real life adventure story. Shenanigans follow as our heroes try to find out where Rachel is, why she has gone missing and, after Rachel resurfaces, how they can best help her with the trouble she has gotten herself into.

Except... that isn’t it at all.

You see, the mystery story which seems to be the actual point of the movie just kinda stops half way through as the movie ends... which will probably leave a lot of people either confused or angry as most people will want to know what happens next. Actually though, the point at which the story is just dropped does actually leave it somewhere that you can draw some conclusion and partial closure from, if you so desire... although the way it is left does kind of set it up for what happens next... which turns out to be the roll of the credits actually.

What’s happened here is the story is purely used to be something to hang on a series of small incidents to better develop the chemistry of the characters. It’s a movie about the way people are with each other and how they co-exist and make allowances for each other. Most of the little sequences do not serve the “story” in any way, shape or form, they just exist as a window to the foibles and whims of the characters. Sometimes this kind of film-making is accused of being indulgent but... well I’ve never really understood why that should be a criticism of art. In the case of Cold Weather, too, we’re talking about great art. Surely one wants the writer, director and performers to indulge themselves a little (or even a lot). The movie is the sum of the artists working on it... it doesn’t all have to be the “cause and effect” mode of “Hollywood storytelling” which seems to have, unfortunately, caught on over the years. This movie is better than that.

Let me give you an example...

Doug wants to be a private detective. When he’s deep into trying to solve the mystery, Doug decides to take up smoking like his literary hero Sherlock Holmes. So he goes to buy a pipe, eventually finding something in his “less than modest” price range. As Gail drives him home from the pipe shop, he realises that he’s not bought any tobacco. So they stop somewhere else and he gets some. This would be considered a pretty pointless moment by most cinema audiences and certainly is not a scene necessary to carrying forward any story. What it does do though, is lend further weight to the use of the pipe as a symbolic metaphor for the focussing of thought as opposed to the normal purpose a pipe is used for. This is a moment about character motivation... not story. And this film is full of those lovely little moments which add substance to the characters but which do not serve any real purpose other than that. And when Doug gets home and tries smoking the pipe, it doesn’t do much for him anyway... although Carlos seems to get into it a little later on in the film. Pointless but absolutely brilliant... now this is good movie making.

The film is just totally amazing. The photography is truly beautiful and very clean and clearly defined. The colours used aren’t primary but they’re very interesting and not quite neutral palettes being used... the film is called Cold Weather, though, and some of the colour choices are in sympathy with this, I feel. It’s got a catchy, addictive and simplistic score by Keegan Dewitt which you’ll have going through your head for a while... and it’s just filled with beautiful little moments like those I’ve described above... it’s a film which is about people, not story. Sure, there is a story element involved, but that story is used to as a framework to purely explore elements of the characters in the story, in situations that might not usually come up, rather than as an end unto itself. Or, to put it another way, the characters are the story... and don’t serve any larger goal than that.

If I was to compare this film to any other director working today I think I’d have to conclude that, dialogue style aside, the film is a close spiritual cousin to the movies of Hal Hartley... and to be honest I could think of no greater compliment than that, Hartley is my directing hero.

Cold Weather, if you haven’t already guessed this by now, comes with one of my highest recommendations for movies. If you like the laid back and gentle style which has come to be associated with a lot of US Independent film then this movie is right up your alley. The characters will stay with you long after the movie has finished.