Marsha Hunt

A friend of the blog, Julie, requested that I write something about Marsha Hunt who died last month at the age of 104.  I had once briefly considered doing so but decided against it because not only did I know little about her but I was fairly certain the same applied to many of you.  Julie said Hunt was one of the most remarkable women who ever lived.  Well, that was compelling and so I decided to check out the actress and found that I would be hard-pressed to find fault with Julie's comment.  So here we are.

The actress made 61 big-screen films and we will highlight only a dozen of them.  The truth is she never ascended to the top ranks of her profession and I'm not sure why.  She hit all the right notes as a dramatic actress.  She handled comedy well and she could sing.  She was never the female lead in a big film and in fact she didn't make but a handful of big films.  When she did, the best she could hope for was second female lead.

I have seen her in maybe a half dozen movies and while I liked all of them and her in them, for some reason she never quite clicked with me.  Admittedly I have gravitated toward actresses who were strong personality types (the bad girls of noir come to mind) or who were gorgeous or sexy or who were French.  Ms. Hunt was none of these although I did find her attractive.  Perhaps her wholesomeness was just too bland to capture my attention.  (How then can I ever explain my tender feelings for Joan Leslie?)

Hunt is most famous for two things.  The first is her being backlisted during the Red Scare that crippled Hollywood and some of its actors, directors and writers circa 1947 and gathering steam in the early fifties.  Secondly, while Hunt had always been a patriot, she became a super patriot, in some ways, as a result of this fearful, vicious, paranoid time.  She became a champion of equal rights, human rights and she was never too bland asking for what she wanted or seeking it.  It is surely this period time that makes her the remarkable woman of whom Julie spoke.

Well, we'll get to more of that but we have those 12 movies to handle.  First, however, let's put 1917 Chicago in your brain, when life began for her.  She was the second of two daughters born to an attorney and a vocal coach.  Her father generally kept his own counsel though a highly-intelligent man, a scholar and a Phi Beta Kappa.  Mama was fairly liberated.  It was a religious family by all accounts.  Together parents were strong, loving and united.  They hoped their daughters would make a mark in the world.

While she was still a young girl, the Hunt family moved to New York City.  Marsha enrolled in the Horace Mann High School for Girls at age 16.  Soon the teenager told her parents she didn't want to go to college as they had wanted but instead would pursue acting.

She found work as as a model for the John Powers Agency and within no time was one of its top models.  She also took acting lessons and earned some extra money by singing on the radio.

She had not thought much of movie acting but those in her class and friends thought she should try the movies.  In 1934 she and her sister Marjorie moved to Los Angeles.

Talent agent Zeppo Marx saw a picture of her and through connections at Paramount Pictures got Hunt a 7-year contract.  It couldn't have been easier.

Though she was pretty with a fresh-faced sensitivity and without a smidgen of threat, she moved quickly into ingenue roles.  She made 12 movies for the studio but never had the fire they were apparently looking for.  After all this was the studio of Colbert, Dietrich, Mae West, Frances Farmer, Veronica Lake and Betty Hutton... not a docile one among them.  Hunt's contract was terminated (early) in 1938 and she went on to work at the Poverty Row studios (Republic, Monogram, etc) in some not very good movies. She was disappointed but hopeful that something wonderful would come her way.  

But before that happened, in 1938 something occurred that she would never forget and it broke her heart.  Old blowhard producer David O. Selznick asked Hunt to come to his office which she excitedly did.  He asked her to read a passage from his Gone With the Wind script for the part of Melanie.  After she did so, he told her she was wonderful, just what he was looking for and that she had the part.  He wanted her to keep quiet about it.  She did, however, tell her mother.  A couple of days later Mama called her and asked if she'd seen the papers.  She said no and her mother said Olivia de Havilland had been signed for the role.

Also in 1938 Hunt married Jerry Hopper, then an assistant head of the editing department at Paramount and after their 1943 divorce a movie and television director.  She claimed he was the handsomest man she ever met.

Despite 18 films, none of which did anything to make her stock rise, the tide turned when in 1939 she made an Andy Hardy movie at MGM. The studio liked her work and offered a contract.  After the studios she'd been working at, to be hired at the premier studio was pretty heady stuff.

Hunt has always credited her 1939 appearance in These Glamour Girls as the time her career took off.  She was glamorous, too, although most of the attention in that department went to costar Lana Turner whom the studio was trying hard to mold into a star.  (Here's an example of what can happen when a studio is fully behind a performer.)  The story concerns romance and class issues at a snobby college.  Apparently Hunt's role was written especially for her.  

She would go on to play one of the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice (1940) opposite Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.  Here she managed to be in a prominent movie but was far down in the cast. It was the first of three films in which Hunt would work with Garson.

When I caught up with some of her films years after she made them, it was due to the fact that she appeared in some film noirs.  We already know I tried to see every one ever made.  One of them was Kid Glove Killer (1942), a B film all the way but sprightly performances from Hunt and Van Heflin (he's a crime lab expert)who are out to solve a murder.

She became a semi-regular on USO tours for a few years, singing her heart out and being part of little comedy routines. The soldiers may have had sexy pictures of Grable and Hayworth in their lockers but they missed wives who were far more like Hunt.

She was also one of the many actresses who helped out at the Hollywood Canteen where she sang and danced with the visiting soldiers while listening to their life histories. She was so real, some said, a lot more like the girls back home than a movie actress.  

She had a great year in acting in 1943 with five movies released. The studio was solidly behind her, saw that there was promise and ability.  One contemplates how she handled hearing she was their youngest character actress.  They assigned her to a little comedy-drama nugget called The Human Comedy (1943). It concerned a young man (Mickey Rooney) in a small town and the events that shape his life during WWII.  Hunt was the romantic lead. She got good notices.  She and the studio were happy.  MGM head Louis B. Mayer says it was his favorite movie.  For your trivia file: it was Robert Mitchum's film debut.

The were two movies in 1943 concerning nurses in WWII. Paramount released So Proudly We Hail with Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake and Paulette Goddard.  MGM offered Cry 'Havoc' with Margaret Sullavan, Ann Sothern and Hunt.  Both were good although I prefer Paramount's offering.

Also in 1943 was Lost Angel starring 6-year old MGM phenom Margaret O'Brien, the studio's answer to Shirley Temple in the 30s.  Hunt and James Craig play the adult leads in a tale concerning a runaway child. 

In 1945 her MGM contract expired.  They liked Hunt and she liked them. She thought they taught her and cared about her although she had no allusions that Greer Garson, Margaret O'Brien and some others garnered more attention from the bosses. They fulfilled their contract with her and got her plenty of work but that was that.  It was quite nice but we can't make more out of it than was actually there. 

Hunt joined the board of the Screen Actors Guild in 1946. She had never been particularly politically active but she soon riled conservative board members.  When a set directors' strike disrupted Warner Brothers, she urged them to stop speculating about alleged communist agitators and focus instead on the workers' grievances.

She married a second and final time in 1946 to Robert Presnell, a writer and director.  He was the love of her life and their marriage endured for 40 happy years until he died. Her only child was born in 1947 and died a day later.

With Susan Hayward: someone's about to get slapped

She signed for Smash Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) for independent producer Walter Wanger.  The film noir stars Susan Hayward as a singer who turns to booze when her husband's career eclipses hers.  Sound familiar?  Third-billed Hunt has a juicy role as a nasty secretary... a rare bad-girl role for her.  This is my favorite Hunt role, I think.  Could I be more transparent... the perennial good girl becomes a bad girl?

Then it happened. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings on the political activities of 19 writers and directors. Hunt was among the Hollywood celebrities who chartered a plane and flew to Washington in protest. 

Hunt is on the left with white collar

 

When they returned, some of the stars, including Bogart and Bacall, who more or less championed the protest, back-pedaled, calling their involvement ill-advised.  Not everyone offered apologies and Hunt and her husband were two of those.  That decision kept her on a watch list of sorts.

Hunt moseyed over to lowly Republic Studios for the lead role in The Inside Story (1948), a didactic comedy about the importance of money. Apparently it was cuter than it sounds.

Hunt in between Claire Trevor & Dennis O'Keefe

Directed by Anthony Mann before he steered all those famous Jimmy Stewart westerns, Raw Deal (1948)is a decent film noir about a prisoner (Dennis O'Keefe) who busts out and goes on the lam with two women who love him and dislike one another... good girl Hunt and bad girl Claire Trevor.  Raymond Burr and John Ireland are in there to menace.  Knowing I was going to do this piece on Hunt, I found this movie, watched it and liked it. 

Also in 1948, as the movie offers weren't coming as fast as they used to, Hunt debuted on Broadway in Joy to the World.  She had a good success with it and would bounce the boards a few more times in the future. 

Back in the late 30s and early 40s she signed a number of petitions espousing liberal ideas and was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment.  In 1950 Hunt was shocked to find her name in a pamphlet called Red Channels which exposed suspected communists and subversives. 

She was in good company. Langston Hughes, Edward R. Murrow, Pete Seeger, Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker, Edward G. Robinson and Lena Horne were among the 68 actors, 44 writers, 28 musicians, 18 directors, 11 commentators, three announcers and a music critic, accountant and lawyer. She was cited for six allegedly unpatriotic actions.  

Although she and her husband were never called to testify before the committee, their names were nonetheless smeared across Hollywood and into the darkest caverns of the sound stages of all the studios. I never testified, I was never a communist, I was never a figure of public controversy, she said, but she and her husband were blacklisted. 

She did occasionally find some movie work in the fifties but never again would she work as she had prior to the mess. 

The Happy Time (1952)takes place in 1920s Ottawa and concerns a French family and a young teenage son (the oh-so-talented Bobby Driscoll) who becomes infatuated with the family maid (Linda Christian)with comical complications.  Hunt and Louis Jourdan are the parents and Charles Boyer the grandfather.

During the making of The Happy Time she had an unhappy time when she was pressured to sign a full-page ad declaring her opposition to communism.  She said thanks but no thanks.

I am pretty sure Blue Denim (1959)was the first Hunt film I saw.  She plays the mother of teenage Brandon De Wilde who gets Carol Lynley pregnant. 20th Century Fox banged the drums about its release and while I enjoyed it, it turned out pretty bland.

With Macdonald Carey and Brandon De Wilde

By the 60s, Hunt became a fixture on television and on stage.  She was in six Broadway plays and in 39 regional plays.

Hunt hadn't made a movie in a number of years when she suddenly showed up in the controversial Johnny Got His Gun (1971).  She is the mother of a soldier (Timothy Bottoms) who becomes blind, deaf, mute and limbless as the result of an artillery shell attack and looks for ways to end his life. Critics seemed to rave about it but it never interested me.

Certainly a fascinating facet to her appearing in this film is that it was directed by Dalton Trumbo who also wrote the original novel and then wrote the screenplay.  Trumbo, of course, is arguably the most well-known of the Hollywood 10, those artists who saw their livelihoods and reputations tarnished.  I am sure I heard Trumbo and Hunt were friends but it was so touching to know she was asked to be in his film.

For the rest of her life... and that meant 50 more years... she was involved in many things that brought her much solace.  There were so many things she cared about.  Hunt devoted herself to civil rights causes and humanitarian efforts such as the Red Cross, March of Dimes and UNICEF.  She became actively involved with the United Nations.

She worked tirelessly as an advocate for the mentally ill, homeless, refugees, world hunger and in more recent years, marriage equality.  

In the 1980s she took up songwriting.  In 1993 she published a book titled The Way We Wore: Styles of the 30s and 40s and Our World Since Then. Her career and life are deliciously presented in a 2015 documentary called Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity.  I just watched it on TCM.

In 1998 Hunt was awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award for her many selfless efforts.  She and Mrs. Roosevelt had been friends.

For years I have seen a mention of her age on her birthday (September 7).  I thought she was going to live forever but she passed away this year at age 104 in her Sherman Oaks (CA) home.  From all I have read, I am certain she would have said it was a life well-lived.

It's so her to have said... the only real regret I have is that I may be remembered more for having been blacklisted than for the work that I have done as an actor. 

Well, Julie, you were right.  In all I have learned about Marsha Hunt, she truly was a remarkable woman... and a great patriot, humanitarian and activist and a grand human being. Thanks.

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A yummy little noir