Like many other people, I read about the unusual twist in the life of this major Hollywood star in various articles. This documentary has a very high Rotten Tomatoes rating so I thought it might be a good way to round out the story. Unfortunately the case for LaMarr being an accomplished inventor and scientist seems weaker than activists may have wished for and though this documentary tries to burnish her credentials, she remains first and foremost a movie star.

This is pretty much a standard biography that introduces her as both an inventor and a movie star before recounting the story of her life in chronological order. Born to prosperous, she was known for her beauty early on and seemed to have always wanted to be a star. After appearing in a number of small European films, she subsequently became world famous for her role in Ecstasy, now known as the first feature film with nudity. She then got married to a rich Austrian arms merchant who despite being Jewish himself supplied Italy and Germany. She then ran away, first to London and then on to New York, meeting and impressing Louis B. Mayer along the way. Her claim to scientific fame came when she wanted to help the Allies to find a weapon against Germany’s U-boats. With the help of her friend composer George Antheil, she proposed a frequency-hopping radio system to guide torpedoes. The idea was novel enough for them to get a patent for it but it was difficult to implement and it seems that the U.S. military only put it to use well after the war without her knowledge.

This documentary plays up other bits of her sideline in the sciences, such as how her marriage to Friedrich Mandl might have helped her learn more about war technologies as she toured his factories, her tinkering with a carbonated drink made with a tablet, her relationship with Howard Hughes who could talk shop with her and encouraged her. Even so, my opinion is that while Lamarr wanted to be appreciated for more than just her beauty, she still saw herself as a film star first and an inventor second. She always knew that her beauty was her best asset and didn’t seem to have any reservations about making the most of it. That applied not just to getting roles in films but also to snagging wealthy husbands. It’s also notable that in her declining years when her career had stalled, she seemed to have lost all interest in the sciences but still went to extraordinary and even harmful lengths to attempt to preserve her beauty for as long as possible.

It’s inarguable that she did get awarded the patent and I agree that she deserves credit for coming up with the idea of frequency hopping and articulating how it would work. Still I’m one of those who maintain that patents shouldn’t be awarded just for ideas and that a working implementation of the idea must be a necessary condition. Awarding patents for ideas that haven’t been implemented even as part of a prototype is one of the causes behind the patent troll problem and it’s clear that in this instance there was no way Lamarr and Antheil could have implemented their idea using piano rolls. She deserves to be credited and remembered for her contribution but I don’t think she deserved to get that patent.

Since this is one of those laudatory documentaries, it never really wants to say anything bad about Lamarr. Even when she was abusive towards her own children, it blames it on her drug habit which the narrative here claims got started by the studio bosses. The angle it takes is that Lamarr was a famous movie star who also happened to have a lesser known side career as an inventor and both sides of her life deserve to be better known. This might be true but this would have been a more interesting documentary if it had dared to take a bolder stance. Perhaps the tragedy here is that she became a movie star at all especially when she kept getting type casted into the exotic beauty role without having the chance to do anything more substantial. Imagine what a person with her intelligence and interest in the sciences might have achieved if she had received a scientific education and had a full career as a scientist without all of the drama and trauma of show business. But is that who Lamarr really wanted to be?