Monday, December 14, 2020

Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity, directed by Roger Memos (2015)

This film was made when Marsha Hunt was 98 (she's still around) and most of it consists of her talking about her career and what happened after she was blacklisted in 1950, with supporting comments from Victor Navasky, Norman Lloyd, Valterie Harper and others.  She started making B pictures for Paramount in the thirties -- she made seven films in 1936 -- and then went on the character parts for MGM, with an impressive ability to disappear into her character.  Just before she was blacklisted in 1950 she made some of her best films, some of the few of hers I have seen. working on relatively low-budget independent films with excellent directors:  Anthony Mann's 1948 Raw Deal (a terrific film noir), Edgar Ulmer's Carnegie Hall (1947) and Andre de Toth's  None Shall Escape,1944, a brilliant film that foresaw the Nuremberg trials).

Hunt is impressively vibrant and reflective, describing in non-bitter detail how some of the blacklisted behaved while she stuck to her guns that she had done nothing wrong other than supporting the first amendment and donating to political causes that had nothing to do with the communist party.  She was able to continue working in theatre and television and eventually, when she retired, devoting herself to the United Nations and combatting world hunger. 

No comments:

Post a Comment