Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2018) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director Alexandra Dean digs into a woman the studios sold as the most beautiful face in the world — while she quietly sketched inventions after dark.

The film leans on recently surfaced audio of Lamarr telling her own story: fleeing Austria, a marriage to an arms dealer, an MGM contract, stardom in the 1940s. Off-set she and composer George Antheil drew up a frequency-hopping signal system, patented in 1942 — the same idea that later fed Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Diane Kruger fill in the rest.

Dean refuses the tidy hero arc. The patent expired before anyone paid Lamarr a cent, and credit arrived decades too late. Worth your time if you like overlooked women in science and the machinery of old Hollywood. Stream Bombshell (2018) online on iFILM.