Mention her name, and anyone who has seen Blazing Saddles will smile and say, “That’s Hedley!” But if it was Mel Brooks who brought the actress eternal fame and instant recognition, Bombshell is out to set the record straight. At 18, actress Hedy Lamarr grabbed headlines when she appeared nude in the Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy. MGM put her under contract based on her looks, but what they (and everyone else) overlooked was that as an actress, Lamarr was a brilliant inventor. “Wifi and Bluetooth — that’s my mother’s technology,” attests her son, Anthony Loder. Oh, and during World War II, she came up with a way of frequency hopping that made it impossible for the Germans to jam the signals of radio controlled missiles. But perhaps the film’s biggest revelation is that Hedy Lamarr was Jewish. Not surprisingly, this documentary based on her real-life exploits proved to be more fascinating than many of the scripts she was saddled with by Metro’s story department. (2018) — Scott Marks
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