CALLING HEDY LAMARR d: Georg Misch
December 16th, 2004 by Andre Soares
Calling Hedy Lamarr (2004)
Director: Georg Misch.
MY PHONE LADY
Shot in digital format, Georg Misch’s documentary Calling Hedy Lamarr has the look of a well-crafted home movie and the feel of a quirky independent film. That is hardly the sort of approach one would expect to find in a documentary about one of the most beautiful, most glamorous, and most synthetic film stars of the 20th century. Yet, Misch mostly gets away with it. What Calling Hedy Lamarr lacks in terms of production values and depth of analysis is compensated for by a sly, offbeat look at the cult of celebrity in American culture.
In Calling Hedy Lamarr, several friends and family members of Austrian-born actress and phone addict Hedy Lamarr (1911 or 1913-2000) get together in a conference call to talk about the legendary movie star. Among those are Lamarr’s South Florida neighbors, a journalist, and the actress’ son and daughter.
They reminisce about Lamarr’s famous beauty, her quirky traits, her film career, her numerous husbands and lovers, and her creative mind. (She and a friend, George Antheil, patented the concept of "frequency hopping," currently used in cell phones, certain "smart" bombs, and other devices.) One friend recalls one of Lamarr’s outings at a local fast-food place. Another mentions the actress’ sense of humor. And another says she may have been a spy. Lamarr’s children remember their mother more as aloof movie star than caring mom.
The phone conversations are interspersed with snippets from Lamarr’s interviews and TV appearances; with the actress at home doing a Sunset Boulevard send-up; with clips from Lamarr’s films, including Ekstase / Ecstasy, in which she has a brief nude scene, and Algiers, her first Hollywood vehicle; and, mostly, with long sections about the actress’ son, Anthony Loder, who discusses both the ephemeralness of his mother’s fame and his own failure at becoming a film personality.
Throughout it all, the editing at times suggests that Hedy Lamarr herself is somehow taking part in the conference call.
Reviewed at the 2004 AFI FEST
Fifty-minute interview with Hedy Lamarr friend Roy Windham.
Notes:
Hedy Lamarr’s six husbands were: Munitions dealer Fritz Mandl (1933-1937), writer-producer Gene Markey (1939-1940), actor John Loder (1943-1947), bandleader and part-time actor Ernest "Teddy" Stauffer (1951-1952), oilman W. Howard Lee (1953-1959; he later married another dark-haired beauty, actress Gene Tierney), and attorney Lewis J. Bowles (1963-1965), Lamarr’s lawyer in the divorce case against Lee.
Husband #1, Fritz Mandl, unsuccessfully tried to buy all copies of the notorious Extase / Ecstasy (1933), in which Lamarr (then known as Hedy Kiesler) appears nude. (In its review of the film, Variety referred to her closeups under "emotional stress" as "extremely audacious.")
Extase was banned in Germany. According to author David Shipman, the film was banned because Hedy Kiesler was Jewish—a detail that goes unmentioned in Calling Hedy Lamarr—though the sex and the nudity were likely the main reasons for the ban. (Lamarr’s Jewish background was a matter of conjecture for quite some time.)
Extase was a huge hit when shown at the 1934 International Film Exposition in Venice, so much so that Pope Pius XI had the official Vatican newspaper condemn it.
In the U.S., Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., requested that Extase be banned as indecent and morally dangerous. An edited version of the film reached American shores in 1937.
Fritz Mandl held the young Kiesler prisoner in their mansion until the mid-1930s, when she managed to escape disguised as a maid.
MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer was an ardent admirer of dark-haired, silent film siren Barbara La Marr (1896-1926, born Reatha Watson), known as The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful. When MGM imported Hedy Kiesler in the late 1930s, Mayer changed the name of the new dark-haired sensation to Hedy Lamarr.
According to Lamarr herself, the name change took place aboard the ship that brought her to the United States. Mayer was trying to find a more glamorous name than "Kiesler," but was unable to come up with an appropriate surname until Hedy jokingly suggested "La Mer" ("The Sea" in French). That triggered Mayer’s recollection of his fallen idol, Barbara La Marr, and thus Hedy Kiesler became Hedy Lamarr.
Ads for the 1939 Hedy Lamarr vehicle Lady of the Tropics blared, "You too will be ‘Hedy’ with delight and your verdict will be ‘Lamarrvellous.’"
Hedy Lamarr’s biggest financial success was the 1949 Paramount release Samson and Delilah, which earned the studio $11.5 million. Her best film performance, however, may well have been in a now largely forgotten 1941 romantic dramedy with James Stewart, Come Live with Me.
Other Hedy Lamarr films include Algiers (1938), opposite Charles Boyer in this remake of the Jean Gabin vehicle Pépé le Moko (1937); the blockbuster Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and Spencer Tracy; Comrade X (1940), a poor man’s Ninotchka, also with Clark Gable; Ziegfeld Girl (1941), co-starring with Judy Garland and Lana Turner in the second (or third or fourth or fifth) remake of Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), that old warhorse about three girls on Broadway; Tortilla Flat (1942), improbable as a Mexican; The Conspirators (1944) with Paul Henreid; and My Favorite Spy (1951) with Bob Hope. She stopped making movies in 1957.
According to a handful of sources, Lamarr came out of retirement for a cameo in the little seen Instant Karma (1990). In reality, she is only seen in a brief old film clip.
Ingrid Bergman owes much of her stardom to Hedy Lamarr, for the latter refused Casablanca (1942), Gaslight (1944), and Saratoga Trunk (1946).
In 1965, Hedy Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting, but she was later cleared of the charges. (Even so, she lost a small role in Picture Mommy Dead because of that incident. Zsa Zsa Gabor replaced her.)
There was another shoplifting charge in 1991 in Florida, this time for $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. Her attorney stated that the shoplifting was actually a case of absentmindedness. Lamarr, 77, had been shopping with two other friends, and had in fact paid for the other items she had bought at the store. She could have contested the charges, but preferred to plead "no contest" so she would not have to appear in court and face a barrage of tabloid reporters. Through her attorney, the quite wealthy former actress promised she would refrain from breaking any laws for a year, and the charges were dropped. Rumors that Hedy Lamarr was a kleptomaniac seem to have absolutely no basis on reality.
Lamarr filed a US$21 million lawsuit against ghostwriters Leo Guild and Sy Rice, alleging that they had turned her (purportedly auto-) biography Ecstasy and Me: My Life As a Woman (1966) into a book that was "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene."
Hedy Lamarr died of natural causes, apparently in her sleep, in a suburb of Orlando, Florida, on January 19, 2000.
VOCES INOCENTES / INNOCENT VOICES
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