## The Samson and Delilah of It All
DeMille’s Samson and Delilah opens with the words “Before the birth of Christ…” and proceeds for nearly two hours through what is essentially the most elaborately produced Biblical spectacle of the late studio era. Victor Mature as Samson is a broad, physical performance that somehow works within the conventions DeMille required. Hedy Lamarr as Delilah is something else entirely.
She was thirty-four when the film was made, and by studio-era standards, thirty-four in a lead role was already something that required justification. DeMille justified it by making Delilah’s manipulative intelligence — her ability to read people, to manage power through apparent submission — the center of the film’s characterization. Lamarr played this with a stillness that was, by this point in her career, a controlled technique rather than an accident of the camera’s fascination with her face.
The film’s commercial success — approximately eleven and a half million dollars in North American grosses against a production cost of just under three million — made it the highest-grossing film of 1949. It also made it, retrospectively, the peak of Lamarr’s career in terms of public impact. She never made a film that reached that many people again.
What is interesting about the Samson and Delilah commercial moment, in the context of her invention story, is its timing. The film was released in December 1949. The patent US 2,292,387 had been sitting in the public record for seven years. Within a few years, military engineers would begin adapting frequency-hopping concepts to solid-state electronics. By the time those systems reached deployment, Lamarr would be in the years of her career decline, and the connection between the actress on the movie poster and the inventor on the patent would be invisible to almost everyone.