Lamarr’s career at MGM is most coherently understood as a series of experiments in what her image could support. The studio tried her in romantic melodramas (Lady of the Tropics), in action films with male stars (Boom Town, which paired her with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy), in prestige productions (H.M. Pulham, Esq., directed by King Vidor), and in exotic-spectacle roles (White Cargo, Tortilla Flat, Ziegfeld Girl). She was almost uniformly good when the material was adequate. She was occasionally remarkable — H.M. Pulham, Esq. gave her a performance of real subtlety — but the studio did not follow up on what worked. It circled back to what was safe.
The studio’s marketing centered relentlessly on her appearance. This was not unusual; the marketing of female stars in the studio era was almost universally appearance-centered. But the particular nature of Lamarr’s appearance — the quality of stillness, the perfection that cameras sought and audiences returned to — made it simultaneously her greatest commercial asset and her greatest professional trap. Directors and producers defaulted to putting her in beautiful settings doing things that required her to be looked at. The underlying assumption was that looking was enough.
She knew it was not. Experiment Perilous (1944), in which she played a woman trapped in an abusive marriage — an echo, whether conscious or not, of her own history — was the kind of film she did well, and the reviews acknowledged it. But by 1944 the studio’s investment in her was declining. She was thirty, which in the studio era’s cruel arithmetic was already something to work around rather than capitalize on.