Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton

is most striking about the film's politics is its refusal to punish Eva for her sexuality, either for abandoning her husband or having an affair with the engineer. Whichever ending we see, she remains in control, a figure of nature and an object of desire, but equally a strong, independent young woman, who cedes authority neither to her father, nor her husband, nor her lover. If her association with water and horses are representational cliches, the film's narrative, such as it is, never seeks to contain her or limit her freedom of choice.

      Aesthetically, Machaty's film is strikingly beautiful. It could have easily been a silent era production, and it comes as a surprise when the characters talk to each other (the entire film contains fifteen lines of dialogue).

      The two key scenes that garnered the film such publicity, and a misleading reputation for pornography, were the nude swimming sequence and a close-up of Hedy's face as she simulates orgasm. All this was filmed, according to Hedy, without her being aware of the consequences of what she was doing: “The director shouted ‘If we do not do this scene, the picture will be ruined, and we will collect our losses from you!’…‘I won't. I won't take off my clothes!’ I was thinking of my parents…not to mention the crew we were shooting with, and the public, later on. Impossible!”⁶

      She did take off her clothes: “I remember it was windy but warm, and the breeze was refreshing on my body as I undressed gingerly behind the broadest tree I could find…One deep breath, and I ran zigzagging from tree to tree and into the lake. My only thought was ‘I hope they get the splash.'” Evidently not; Machaty was behind the microphone, urging the young actress to do one more take: “I wanted to refuse, but there was no turning back now. Shivering, I scooted back to the first tree. Mysteriously, somebody had put a terrycloth robe there. I dried off, and waited for the damned gun. It had jammed! After a moment, the megaphone voice shouted, ‘Go!’ Again I zigzagged, probably breaking all speed records, again I swam a bit, and then stuck my head up.”⁷ This time the take was good.

      Hedy also insisted that she had not known what a zoom lens could accomplish or that the script contained nude scenes.⁸ Subsequent comments by the production crew suggest that she knowingly agreed to do the nude scenes: “As the star of the picture, she knew she would have to appear naked in some scenes. She never made any fuss about it during the production.”⁹ That a nude performance was expected of the film's star was confirmed by Lupita Kohner. According to her, her future husband and then producer, Paul Kohner, had proposed her for the part of Eva. Lupita Tovar (as she still was) was already working in Hollywood but traveled to Berlin to meet Machaty, anticipating the role would be hers. However, when Kohner saw the script, which made it clear that nudity was expected, he insisted Lupita not take the role.¹⁰

      Hedy's next test was the lovemaking scene. Machaty was looking for a sequence that would suggest beyond doubt that the expression on her face indicated to the audience that she had reached orgasm: “I was told to lie down with my hands above my head while Aribert Mog whispered in my ear, and then kissed me in the most uninhibited fashion. I was not sure what my reactions would be, so when Aribert slipped down and out of camera, I just closed my eyes.” Machaty was not impressed. Mumbling about the stupidity of youth, he looked around until he found a safety pin on the table: “You will lie here,” he said, “I will be underneath, out of camera range. When I prick you a little on your backside, you will bring your elbows together and you will react!”11 Numerous pinpricks later, a howl of agony from Hedy gave Machaty the shot he was looking for. If the nude bathing had not been enough, here was a scene that made the film censors of the world draw a collective breath.

      • • •

      The descriptions of the shoot from Ecstasy and Me were written (by Hedy, we may assume) many years after the event and in the knowledge of the effect the film had on her reputation, being both her making and her undoing. At the time, however, she prevaricated over her participation in Machaty's picture. She told one interviewer that this film would finally allow her to demonstrate her acting skills on screen, and that she was lucky to be in the hands of such a talented director as Machaty.¹²Elsewhere she said her part offered good opportunities and was from quite a different mold than her previous two films. In the same interview it was also reported that “officially” she and Aribert Mog were “unofficially engaged.”¹³ A few days before the premiere, however, she gave an interview to the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, where she clarified her feelings about her role. She was just, the paper explained, recovering from a bout of flu that had kept her from working for several weeks. Going back over her casting in the film, she insisted that Machaty had been clear that there were nude sequences in the film, but these were very brief and she would be covered by leaves and flowers. When shooting started in the Carpathians, she found herself to be the only woman on set. When the nude scene was announced, she refused to participate but Machaty produced her contract and insisted. “What else could I have done all alone in the godforsaken Carpathians?” she demanded. Hedy first saw the finished film in Prague and wasn't too upset by what she saw, since no one knew her there. In Vienna, however, the situation was extremely embarrassing as all her friends and acquaintances would see her performance. Now she wanted Machaty to remove the sequences but he refused.

      She also claimed a body double had been used for some of the sequences (indeed, it seems that a body double was deployed in certain of the scenes, although not in the swimming shot). Perhaps most surprisingly Hedy announced that she was shortly going to Berlin and then would return to Vienna before leaving for America with her mother, where she had a contract with Paramount and would soon be appearing in Hollywood films.¹⁴

      In another interview she said that she was never paid for the role and had taken it, “because I was in love with somebody.” This “somebody” was presumably Aribert Mog. Even more salaciously, a further rumor claimed there was a version of the film where the two really made love.¹⁵

      This is after all the story of Adam and Eve, with the emphasis on the pleasure rather than the punishment that temptation brings. Hedy's nudity is associated with the outdoors and freedom, sentiments that might have recommended it in Germany, where naturism was enjoying a boom and where Machaty hoped the film would reach a wide audience.

      “In the 1920s,” according to Chad Ross,

      organizations and publications—often working in tandem—that advocated nudism proliferated at a fantastic rate. As befits the first great age of mass culture, during the Weimar Republic nudism became a mass cultural phenomenon in which millions of Germans participated, whether as members of nudist leagues or more simply (and far more likely) as weekend beachgoers. Furthermore, nudist ideologues and proponents made use of the latest technology of the day—photographs, cinema—to further their movement.¹⁶

      The difference, of course, was that German nudism (and its equally popular Austrian counterpart) was inspired by a moral outlook that equated the naked body, male or female, with a healthy, wholesome lifestyle. Machaty's ambition was to dispense with the conventions of bourgeois decorum; the heavy-handed Freudian symbolism that saw Eva's first encounter with Adam marked by wildly galloping horses was just one detail in a creation that would test the limits of the art film across Europe.

      Hedy's parents must indeed have been horrified. Across their hometown, posters announced that Ecstasy was the “Talking point of Vienna” and promoted the film with the slogan “An erotic play of uninhibited natural drives.” The film's premiere was held on 18 February 1933 and it opened in four of the city's biggest cinemas. In a two-week period Ecstasy attracted audiences, so the publicity posters claimed, of 71,000. Viennese cinemagoers were able to see the uncut version of the film, though it may have been altered after its release.¹⁷ The reactions of the Viennese film critics were mixed. In the Neue Freie Presse, the reviewer noted that it was Hedy Kiesler's beauty and the expressiveness of her fine, spirited face that was the artistic achievement of Machaty's film. Otherwise, the writer continued, the film was confusing and a failed experiment in form, but striking in the beauty of its images. The nudity, he said, was tasteful, and nothing people had not already seen in pictures of lake and river bathing. The Wiener Zeitung reviewer Edwin Rollett also found fault with Machaty's ambitious attempt at a new kind