ABSTRACT
Like Pola Negri, with whom she was sometimes explicitly compared, Hedy Lamarr epitomized the Continental exotic to a generation of moviegoing audiences. As Dorothy Kilgallen would write in 1952, ‘Hedy Lamarr became this generation’s version of the Vamp – a synonym for the woman who launches ships, wrecks homes and sends countless men to glory or to doom.’1 Unlike Negri, Lamarr was established as sufficiently elastic to be claimed as an American – yet while fan magazine and other publicity discourses constructed a patriotic, domestic, maternal Hedy Lamarr, her association with a repressed exoticism and a scandalous European past kept Lamarr’s ‘good girl’ status always slightly open to question. In this respect, the actress’s Austrian ethnicity could be camouflaged, but never fully eradicated, an important fact when we consider the relation between ethnicity and gender in the studio era, where ethnic femininity seems increasingly capable of advancing a positive vision of American nationalism.
