The Silver Screen Oasis

I thought others might enjoy this post from Salon.com about Hedy Lamarr's fascinating role in creating the technology that most of us use each day:

“Hedy’s Folly”: The movie star behind your cellphone

Moira,

Thanks for sharing this with us. I had read about this in the past and Hedy Lamarr should had deserved better! I have certainty admire her a lot. Not only she is breathtaking beautiful, but that lovely woman is way ahead of her time - literally!

I will be definitively getting that book.

I read a biography of her a while ago. What an enigma of a woman, obviously very bright but somewhat unfulfilled and stunningly beautiful. Brains and beauty, you think that would make any girl happy but in her case I'm not sure it did.

I heard about this on a quiz show on public radio earlier this year, and have been wanting to learn more ever since. Looking forward to checking it out.

I also heard (on that same station) that Theda Bera was a math whiz!

I didn't know about the maths whizz but she was known as being quite clever.

When she wasn't inventing stuff, Hedy Lamarr used to punch in regularly at MGM, where she made movies. Perhaps you've heard. Tonight brings a pair of Hedy Lamarr's most entertaining movies on TCM:

8:00 PM (ET)
White Cargo (1942)
A sultry native woman ignites the passions of workers on a rubber plantation. Walter Pidgeon, Richard Carlson, Frank Morgan play the men who are toyed with (and sometimes destroyed) by Lamarr.


Above: Hedy, making time with Walter Pidgeon in White Cargo. He doesn't melt as quickly as the other Caucasian men-sicles. This stuff was old-fashioned fun even when they made the first version of the story in 1929--though I think they should have kept the original title of Ida Vera Simonton's novel, "Hell's Playground."

9:45 PM (ET)
H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)
Hedy Lamarr, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey.
Lamarr creates one of the few nuanced characters she ever had a chance to play. Young is very good as a man questioning his choices. A real fave of many SSO members and a rare film that suggested that there might be more to a woman's life than hearth and home.