Wealth & Money Quote by Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr’s line lands with the clean sting of someone who has watched a roomful of men decide, silently and in sync, what kind of value they’re willing to recognize. The setup is almost anthropological - "as a group" gives her the cover of observation rather than accusation - and then she drops the two-item list that reduces masculine ambition to a marketplace: cash and the female body. It’s funny because it’s blunt, and it’s blunt because politeness would let the problem off the hook.

The subtext is richer than the punchline. Lamarr was marketed as a face, a torso, an exportable fantasy; she knew exactly how American culture could worship a woman’s image while refusing to take the woman seriously. So when she says "money and breasts", she’s not just dunking on male shallowness. She’s naming the twin engines of postwar American masculinity: status and consumption, conquest measured in dollars and in women. The joke is also a complaint about the limited roles men offer themselves - and the limited roles they offer everyone else.

Context matters: this is an immigrant star, widely treated as an object, speaking from inside the dream factory that perfected objectification as an industry. Coming from Lamarr, who also helped pioneer frequency-hopping tech later essential to modern communications, the line reads like a quiet indictment: imagine what gets lost when a culture can’t see past the currency of bodies and wealth. The "narrow outlook" is the real burn - not immoral, just small.