Oh! Oh! Oh! Delilah

Ervell E. Menezes

Talk about femme fatales, she’s the ultimate one and Hollywood movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille brings this love story throbingly to life in Samson and Delilah, a classic I watched in my schooldays.

Yes, Hedy Lamarr plays Delilah and gets top billing over Victor Mature’s Samson and even if she did not figure in any other role she would yet have achieved immortality. Described as the most beautiful woman in the world by some of her directors, she later grew weary of her femme fatale status.

“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid,” is how she puts it. She wanted to be known for her intelligence which there was enough of as we shall soon be aware of. But first things first. It is Google who noted that November 9 (who else but Google?) would have been 101 and put up an animated doodle on Google’s Search page and that of course resurrected yesteryear’s wonder woman. She died in 2001 at the age of 86.

Born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in Vienna (the land of waltzes), she had a brief career in Germany and came to attention in the Czech film Ecstasy where there is a shot of her face as she is experiencing an orgasm. That she fled Germany and her abusive husband to become Hedy Lamarr is now history.

The story of Samson and Delilah hardly needs repetition and the scene in which Samson brings down the pillars of a Philistine temple is still etched deeply in my mind. That Delilah also perished in that temple makes it even more tragic because it was she who betrayed him by cutting his hair where his strength lay. Russ Tamblyn, who later rose to fame as a kind of stuntman, had a brief role in the film. Samson and Delilah was made in 1949 but the 1940s were full of films that gave her top billing — Ziegfeld Girl (1941), White Cargo (1942), The Strange Woman (1945) and Dishonored Lady (1947). One could well imagine her as an earlier-day Marilyn Monroe or Jane Russell and her name on the marquee was a sure sign of Housefull board springing up at cinemas. Even the now — famous “femme fatale” term was yet to be coined in those distant days.

But not many today know of Hedy Lamarr’s remarkable double career — actress by day, inventor by night. She did the groundwork for modern techniques like bluetooth, GPS and wi-fi which came to be known decades later.

The Second World War drew upon her interest in science and military technology — gained in part through her first marriage to an arms dealer — to help devise a system to prevent the Nazis from blocking signals from radio-controlled torpedoes. Lamarr teamed with composer George Antheil to create a frequency system that would keep enemies from being able to detect radio messages.

Hence the Google doodle did much to bring to light the cerebral aspect of an actress till now known only as an exotic seductress. All this much before women’s lib was born.

Qudos, Hedy Lamarr.