Marsha Hunt, Century Call for an American Progressive and a Global Humanitarian

Cinema, Performing arts, Politics

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

On the 17th of this month US film actress with a social conscience Marsha Virginia Hunt turned 100, joining the illustrious company of Olivia de Havilland and Kirk Douglas – a trio of Hollywood film centenarians all still alive! (Libby and the dimpled Kirk both reached their triple figure milestones during 2016).

(Photo: Mansfield News Journal)

Adulation for Marsha’s momentous achievement haven’t reached the stratospheric fanfare, the hype and media attention of Kirk Douglas’ 100th bash last December or of that of another Hollywood mainstay, Bob Hope. Of course it would not be expected, Marsha has never achieved the limelight that those other centenarian luminaries demanded in their Hollywood careers. She was a serious actress but never got the star ‘creds’ that others in the business did☸…but the elusiveness of stardom for Marsha wasn’t down to a shortfall in her acting ability – rather the explanation for this lay in the intervention of external factors which were to impact on her career.

Marsha does Jane Austen

Ms Hunt’s film career from its start in the Thirties looked promising, but in the super-charged, competitive stakes for the glamour female roles she came close without ever quite clasping the big prize…especially in 1939 when she tested impressively for the much sort-after part of Melanie in Gone With The Wind but narrowly lost out to (fellow centenarian) Olivia de Havilland. The following year Hunt did score a supporting role in the prestigious period movie Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier.

After World War II the grubby, gutter politics of McCarthyism dealt a savage blow to Marsha Hunt’s career…as it did to numerous other Hollywood liberals during that time when it was the fashion de jour in America to go full-throttle after citizens who were merely alleged or implied to be communists (truly a “Dark Age of guilty until proven innocent” witch-hunts!) For a fuller account of Hunt’s story see my earlier blog on this site (June 2014) Marsha Hunt, Lifelong Social Activist: Not your Average Hollywood Role Model .

With her reputation unfairly besmirched (tantamount to no more than implicit guilt by association!), Hunt was punished by being inexorably squeezed out of the Hollywood film mainstream. Potential parts in A-movies disappeared and the public saw her relegated to B-pictures and eventually to television and theatre (few good roles in theatrical movies came her way after 1947, the 1948 film noir Raw Deal and the much later Johnny Got His Gun (1971) were rare exceptions for the Chicago-born actress).

Marsha Hunt today

After being blacklisted by HUAC in 1950 after having made around 50 films since 1935, Hunt only featured in three films during the next eight years [‘Marsha Hunt (actress, born 1917)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. By the Fifties and Sixties Hunt was finding work only easy to find in television – in a minor-note series Peck’s Bad Girl and in numerous guest roles on Zane Grey Theater, The Twilight Zone and so on ad infinitum.

Marsha Hunt: Life lived forwards…
After her semi-retirement in 1960 Hunt stepped up her active involvement in progressive causes including support for same-sex marriage, ending global poverty, raising awareness of climate change and promoting peace in Third World countries [Memos, Roger C. (October 17, 2014). “Honoring Actress – Activist Marsha Hunt on her 97th Birthday!”. Sherman Oaks, California: Patch.com. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved May 14, 2016]

In a series of interviews last week in honour of her 100th birthday Miss Hunt reflected on her career and on the missed stardom, which seemed to have touched her but only lightly. Hunt merely remarked of her Hollywood years that she was grateful for being allowed to be an actress and show her versatility on the screen✳…or as she put it in her characteristically humble, unassuming way, she is “a grateful girl of 100!” [J Kinser, ‘Marsha Hunt at 100: The Actress Recalls the Blacklist, Film Noir and Being Cast in Gone With a The Wind‘, Movie Maker, 13-Oct-2017, www.moviemaker.com].

JE Smith seems to have summed up the essence of Marsha Hunt and the paradoxes in her movie persona and career fairly well in the title of his interview with the centenarian, “American girl, Un-American woman, upstanding centenarian” [JE Smith, ‘Marsha Hunt: American girl, Un-American woman, upstanding centenarian’, Sight & Sound, 17-Oct-2017, www.bfi.org.uk].

(Source: Alt Film Art)

Once vilified by HUAC along with other progressive Hollywood actors as “Un-American”, Hunt’s longevity and achievements are testimony to all that is good about American society – an authentic patriot but also a defender of freedoms for all citizens – whilst repudiating all that is bad about American society. At the same time we have Hunt’s unceasing activism as a humanitarian concerned for the world as a whole and its future well-being, a tireless advocate for peace and progress, and for a more fair distribution of resources and safeguards for the environment.

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☸ IMDB proffers an interesting take on why she never scored the plum roles that other lauded Hollywood female stars were given: “Perhaps her work was not flashy enough, or too subdued, or perhaps her intelligence too often disguised a genuine sex appeal to stand out among the other lovelies” [Marsha Hunt biographical entry, www.imdb.com]

✳ the unstated inference is clear…rather than being factory-made into (an overhyped) star!

Malice in Tinseltown: Hollywood’s Role in the Cold War and the Spy Sub-genre

Cinema, Media & Communications, Society & Culture

Like the ‘Hot’ War (WWII) preceding it, the Cold War has always been fertile ground for the stuff of Hollywood drama (and melodrama). Right through the era the alleged plots of communists, whether identified explicitly or implicitly, provided inspiration for writers and directors of both film and television. The persona of the vilified communist agitator neatly slotted into the ‘bad guy’ role once occupied by the native American Indian in Westerns, particularly conveniently so at a time when the Western was starting to lose its mass entertainment appeal on cinema and TV screens.

The Avengers’: Gentlemen’s bowler hats & sexy black leatherwear

In the political aftermath of the Second World War the USA and the USSR found themselves locked into an international power struggle for global supremacy with the capitalist system pitted against the communist one, culturally as well as militarily and economically. In the prevailing atmosphere of tension and mutual distrust, espionage and counterintelligence flourished. Inevitably the new international “spy game” found its way on to the pages of novels, comic books and into films and television. In the 1960s the interest in the espionage/sabotage dimension of the Cold War escalated into a “spy craze” on both the big and the small screens. On television two successful British spy series, Danger Man and The Avengers❈, both preceded the first film of the cinematic espionage game-breaker, the James Bond series.

The espionage/spy film sub-genre of course did not begin in the 1960s but can be traced back to the pre-war era with its first-wave popularity established to a large extent by suspense king, Alfred Hitchcock, with films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent and Sabotage [AMC Film Site, (Suspense/Thriller Films), www.filmsite.org ]. The driving force for the popularity of the 1960s Spy movie was the extraordinary (and enduring) success of the James Bond Agent 007 series franchise. The Bond movie phenomena spawned a flurry of imitators, including parodies (some good, some mediocre or worse), from the mid-sixties, eg, Our Man Flint, The Silencers (Matt Helm series), The Ipcress File, Agent 8¾, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Spy with a Cold Nose, Torn Curtain, A Dandy in Aspic, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Get Smart, etc.

Despite the Communism (Soviet Russia) V Capitalism (America) conflict being at the core of the Cold War drama,it’s cessation by the early 1990s did not result in the demise of the TV and film spy genre, far from it! James Bond, post-Soviet Union, pits himself against “an (unnamed) international terrorist network far more amorphous than the KGB”. The ongoing success of the Jason Bourne series of movies in a post-9/11 world sees special agent Bourne foiling the evil schemes of one terrorist ring after another, some with a seemingly Slavic hue to them, others projecting something more generally Middle-Eastern in flavour. It seems, as Tony Shaw put it, “that the Cold War had never really gone away, at least not from our cinema and television screens” (T Shaw, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21, No 1, Jul. 2008).

The original on-screen preoccupation with the theme of the Cold War has its origins in the McCarthyist intrigues in Hollywood. From 1947 the House Committee of Un-American Activity (HUAC), spearheaded by Junior Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, turned its attention on Hollywood with a view to systematically weeding out communists and “fellow travellers” from the film industry. As the fear and paranoia generated by the ‘Red Scare’ impacted on Hollywood, the studio moguls responded to HUAC’s pressure by voluntarily climbing on board the anti-communist witch-hunt for ‘subversives’, commissioning films with an undisguised anti-communist message. The upshot of the Committee turning the torch on Tinseltown was sadly the ‘blacklisting’ of many promising actors and behind-the-camera practitioners. Rising actors like Larry Parks and John Garfield had their careers truncated or ended by the activities of HUAC, as did the group of writers, directors and producers known as the Hollywood Ten.

Emerging post-war social realism films stymied
The big studio heads’ decision to focus on films exposing the supposed communist infiltration of the United States also had an adverse effect on social realism films which in that same year (1947) were starting to have an impact. Hollywood’s enlistment in the war against internal communism largely put paid to the trend towards “problem pictures” dealing with social issues such as anti-Semitism (Gentlemen’s Agreement), alcoholism (Smash-Up) and schizophrenia (Possessed)[Daniel J Leab, ‘How Red was my Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist‘, Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1), Jan. 1984].

Following 1947 there was an ongoing sequence of crudely propagandist “Reds under the bed” films with titles like Walk a Crooked Mile, The Red Menace, Conspirator, I Married a Communist, Invasion, U.S.A., The Jet Pilot. The movies and especially ones like John Wayne’s Big Jim McLain and My Son John (both 1952 releases) overtly attacked the communist lifestyle and sought to show that subversives were actively at work undermining the American fabric of life. Most of the stock standard B-movies seeking to exploit the Red Scare were abysmal, often completing losing the plot and portraying Communism more as “a variety of gangsterism” than as an alternative ideology systematically trying to achieve world domination [ibid.].

Hollywood domestic shock/horror & scandal 40s & 50s style

Other US anti-Red films took a more indirect if thinly-veiled approach. Them (1954) employed the allegorical device of megasized mutant ants threatening society to convey the communist menace. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was thematically similar, depicting emotionless alien clones (read ‘Communists’ infiltrating Planet Earth). California Conquest (1952) put the issue into a historical context: Spanish Californians circa 1840 thwart a Russian attempt to take over the Pacific Coast colony [ibid.]. I Married a Communist (1950) took the laboured, crude message to a new height (perhaps that should be depth!). This RKO film was a pet project of Howard Hughes, the only Hollywood studio boss who fully shared HUAC’s conviction of the ‘Red Peril’ to heart, fervently launching his own anti-communist crusade within RKO. Hughes went so far as to remove the individual credits from industry persons he suspected of being communists [ibid.].

The television arm of Hollywood similarly wasted no time in jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon. From the early fifties right through the decade the studios turned out a slew of short-lived, jejune Cold War TV dramas with homogeneous-sounding names such as Shadow of the Cloak, The Door with No Name, Foreign Intrigue, I Spy (two distinct series used this title 10 years apart), Secret File, U.S.A., Top Secret, Passport to Danger, Behind Closed Doors. Counterspy was another one, interesting only because it had started life as a WWII radio drama with Nazis as the villains, only to be upgraded in the Cold War, swapping Nazis for communists as the new villains [‘Commie Fighters of the ’50s’, www.for-your-eys-only.com ]. The sole stand-out fifties spy series with any kind of longevity was I Led Three Lives, which dramatised the real-life experiences of American double agent Herbert Philbrick [‘The anti-communist spy as TV entertainer’, www.jfredmacdonald.com].

By around the end of the fifties the Cold War films and TV series of this ilk with their crude, oversimplistic and formulaic style, as West versus East propaganda had become out-of-date. McCarthyism was on the downward slide, détente had started to thaw out international relations with the Eastern Bloc. The ideological enemy to Americans was no longer a singular one, Communist China had cemented itself as the new bogeyman for the self-appointed guardian of democracy. The perception was now, mixing racism with politics, that a yellow threat to the Free World was a factor along with the earlier red one [Leab, op.cit.].

The Iron Petticoat’ 1956

The flip side of the McCarthyist-inspired pictures of the 1950s which were driven by the hysteria and paranoia of the communist witch-hunt was a whole host of movies which sought to exploit the Cold War for laughs. Among these pseudo spy/espionage comedies was My Favourite Spy, The Iron Petticoat and The Mouse that Roared (1950s), Carry On Spying and The Russians are Coming,The Russians are Coming (1960s), through to Spies Like Us and Stripes (1980s). These sort of movies tended to portray Russian agents and military types as often bungling, humourless semi-robots (or if female, stereotyped as cold, charmless and unsexed).

Casino Royale’ 1967

Note: the ‘spoofiest’ of all Bondesque films was the one based on the book written by the Bond author himself, Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953) (Ex-agent Fleming’s first James Bond novel), with David Niven (Sir James Bond) and Woody Allen (little Jimmie Bond) as the most absurdist of James Bond incarnations! Also see PostScript.

The Cold War has been the subject or inspiration for countless films and TV episodes over the past 60-plus years. The form of the sub-genre has shifted over time. In the black-and-white 1950s we had the crude, sombre “Reds under the bed” films and television programs. In the 1960s the hysteria diminished and celluloid representations of espionage were generally less bleak than in the preceding decade. The Ur-secret agent James Bond Agent 007 was the measure and model of the sub-genre, the unbroken series of films kicking off with Dr No in 1962.

PostScript: Spy Spoofery
The secret agent trope was in itself inverted with the advent of spy spoofs on cinema and TV screens (most famously Get Smart, but also Austin Powers, Johnny English, Spy Hard). The TV and movie spy satires weren’t really interested in peddling an anti-communist message, their creators just wanted to exploit the Cold War genre for all its comedic worth!

With the demise of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the slick, transparently escapist Bond film (not to mention it’s myriad of imitators using or misusing the skills of actors like James Coburn, Dean Martin and Dirk Bogarde) reinvented itself by discovering new (non-Soviet) antagonists and dangers, and the franchise continues to be mega-profitable, churning out a new Bond film for a receptive and insatiable global audience every couple of years.

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❈ Christopher Bray makes an intriguing comparison of the motives (or lack thereof) of The Avengers and James Bond. Whereas Bond’s rationale was clear cut, to stop Spectre from achieving its goal of world domination, Steed and Mrs Peel enter a Kafkaesque world each week to avenge the murders of public servants by villains acting for some ‘unseen’ and ‘unknown’ powers whose seem utterly motiveless, Christopher Bray, 1965: The Year Modern Britain Was Born (2014)

Marsha Hunt, Actor and Lifelong Social Activist: Not your Average Hollywood Role Model

Biographical, Cinema, Politics, Society & Culture


Marsha Hunt – film star with a social conscience


I’ve always thought it absurd that the average punter in the street raises up movie stars (whether it be Hollywood or any other derivative film community) to the status of demi-gods (as they do with pop and rock stars and elité sportspersons). Yes I know that it was ever thus, film stars in the silent era were arguably even more venerated by society given that at that time they did not have to compete with popular singers and sporting stars for the public’s kudos.


The media is of course deeply complicit in this with its obsessive focus on Hollywood box-office stars, especially the popular gossip mags’ hanging on every utterance and info snippet of headline-grabbing Hollywood A-listers like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt – a custom which is jejune and banal in the extreme. If these overblown ‘celebs’ make even a shallow pronouncement on environmental or human rights issues or announce their latest Third World orphan acquisition projects, this receives an inordinate amount of drooling media attention.


This ultra-reverence is ridiculously inane given that the great majority of movie stars are not necessarily exemplars of propriety and moral rectitude, and sometimes behave like pampered prima donnas in their overweening self-centredness. Proportionate to the rest of society, movie stars often behave badly, they have equally-manoeuvrable morals, they take drugs, they drink too much and beat their wives, extravagantly waste money, are unfaithful, get divorced (disproportionately to society at large in this case!), they are after all only actors! And yet media outlets continue to elevate them to the loftiest reaches of societal respect, as if some special higher wisdom is implicit in their trade.


Notwithstanding all this, there have been films stars and actors who do merit the very highest accolades for their principles and unselfish activism in the devotion to the betterment of humankind. Sadly, these actors, and their achievements, are usually not well known by the public at large, or certainly not as well known as they should be! One such American actor I want to mention in this context is Marsha Hunt. Marsha (born Marcia Virginia Hunt – not to be confused with the African-American singer and novelist also named Marsha Hunt) is still alive at 96 years-of-age, going on 97, and compared to the lavish praise heaped all-too-easily on some celebrities, is pretty much an unheralded hero, even in her homeland. Chicago-born Hunt commenced acting in Hollywood films as a teenager in the mid-1930s. As she tried to establish herself as a leading actress in films, at the same time she committed herself to the support of liberal causes in an America that was becoming alarmingly and increasingly illiberal.

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Despite the risks to her professionally, Hunt was prominent in the Committee for the First Amendment⌺ in support of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ (screenwriters and directors ostracised for alleged pro-communist activities). At the onset of McCarthyism, as the US lunged savagely to the Right, Hunt with other liberal Hollywood figures petitioned US Congress to overturn the iniquitous ideological witch-hunt of liberal and progressive Americans in the film industry. Hunt was also active during WWII in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.


Consequently she was ‘outed’ by the McCarthyists in ‘Red Channels’ (a right wing publication blacklisting suspected ‘subversives’ in the arts and media) and her burgeoning film career suffered accordingly❀. Hunt was a gifted actor, and an accomplished singer. She was also the composer of about 50 songs including one she wrote in the early 1960s, ahead of its time, on the subject of same sex equality in love and marriage – later a hit in the US in the 1980s.


In 1944 she was voted one of the Hollywood ‘Stars of Tomorrow’. However, like others in the industry who refused to recant their earnestly-held political convictions, roles for Hunt dried up. First she was relegated to B movies, then not even that and her film career was effectively over by the time she was 40. From the ’50s, Hunt, like many other Hollywooders including Ronald Reagan (180 degrees apart from her politically) found TV work her only reliable source of income and expression.


Peacenik, social activist
Marsha Hunt, friend to all Democratic presidents from FDR on, was and still is an activist with a capital ’A’. Outside of acting Marsha has pursued a concern for a host of vital humanitarian issues on the global stage—pollution, poverty, peace and population growth—as well as actively working against the blight of social homelessness and supporting the right of same sex equality. Hunt has never lacked for courage or for determination in anything she has done. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The 2014 film documentary, Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity, illustrates the 60-plus years (and ongoing) of active international work (world hunger campaigns, a staunch supporter of the United Nations, UNICEF and other UN humanitarian projects, etc) by a woman known to admirers as a “Planet Patriot“.

MVH at 95


Today despite her great chronological seniority she is as committed to and active in the causes of ordinary people as she ever was! Marsha is still in her own principled way making a difference for the planet. Marsha Hunt, talented actor, indefatigable activist, world citizen, a refined woman of principles, a great humanitarian and advocate for universal civil rights – a truly great American.

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⌺ Hunt is the only surviving member of the Committee for the First Amendment

❀ whilst other, more illustrious Hollywood liberals abjectly backed down in the onslaught of HUAC bullying, Hunt was one of the very few ‘Tinseltown’ stars to put her film career on the line by refusing to apologise for her support of the blacklisted ‘Ten’ and for her role in progressive activist causes