Customer Reviews

Dishonored Lady [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Hedy Lamarr plays a professional editor for a women's glamour magazine involved in a murder investigation. As police probe, suspicions turn her way. She's not the person she is believed to be. Also starring: Dennis O'Keefe, John Loder

We love Hedy Lamarr. In real life, she is the reason behind the cellular phone technology. During WWII, she patented a means to help navy devise a radio-signal to guide torpedoes that would the Germans couldn't blow up. She suggested a shifting sequence, as in the signal of one device would synchronize like a musical song with another. If you didn't know the song, you couldn't jam the radio signal. She never collected a dime. After her patent expired and ignorance died out, the navy re-looked at her idea. Hedy Lamarr-- the lovely actress with a clever mind!

Despite Boyer's unfounded criticism of Hedy's acting ability, this is a wonderful film in which she displays a range of emotions including perhaps the hardest thing to act, being tipsy. She is a good actress and is totally gorgeous as a NYC "modern woman" with a promiscuity problem in this film. Through the Providential intervention of a wise shrink, one wonders if she will overcome it and find true happiness as a simple doctor's wife--or revert to life as a well-paid, hi-fashion mag. editor... Helen Gurly Brown should be so lucky to have Hedy's looks!

One of her six husbands and the father of two of her children, John Loder, is in this film as well. If you like Hedy, you'll like this film and you'll like seeing John Loder get dead.

Katharine Hepburn is breathtakingly beautiful and a wonderful actress to boot in this, her very first film. BUT, this film is terrible. One wants to smack all of the characters for needlessly throwing their lives overboard. I'm a sympathetic girl but only to a point. It's impossible to sympathize with the motivations of Hepburn and the whole lot.

Hedy Lamarr at her BEST. After her production role of the fascinating and morally complex STRANGE WOMAN (see my separate 5 star review for that), Hedy was awarded this great murder mystery, based on a true story, DISHONORED LADY.
I saw this on a very poor VHS transfer (not purchased through Amazon). The script is wonderful - a bit melodramatic, the casting is great, but the post production aspects, especially the music are a real disappointment because Hedy shines in this film with HER FINEST ACTING WORK ON FILM. In another role that is complex and real in its portrayal of a "party girl" trying to straighten out her life, her self, when she becomes a murder suspect.
This is a real "slice of time" film in that it deals with women who were working, "like men" who "thought like men" i.e. enjoied and wanted careers; which was considered a real social problem at the time as men came back from the war and wanted their jobs back. Women were meanwhile enjoing the freedom of having their own jobs their own independence, and this was seen as transgressive, especially if the woman, like this one, was also sexually liberated.
The script hits all these notes appropriately, but the awful operatic music hammers away. Fortunately, that wasn't on the set. Hedy gives a layered, thoughtful, and - a rarity - a relaxed, humorous, and joyful performance. She has a "drunk scene" that is playful and completely real, a very subtly funny portrayal of being "pleasantly inebriated." All this makes me think this must be who she truly was. She had just finished a film she had fought for, and was working on this fantastic character who liked working and was interested in science (as she was herself). It is simply a MUST see for any Hedy Lamar film (as is THE STRANGE WOMAN for other reasons)- for a glimpse of her entire range.
Looking at her bios, this was a turning point where she started her disenchantement with roles she was being offered. She is beautiful and tempestuous in the later SAMPSON AND DELILAH, but her heart is not in that the way it is in this film. And she slowed down her acting quite a bit after these.
See this to see Hedy Lamar the actress surrounded by a great supporting cast (including Margaret Hamilton - Dorothy's wicked witch), in a film which I feel is her finest work.