Pride and Prejudice

This lush, Oscar-winning film from the heyday of MGM is the most entertaining of the many screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s best-loved novel. Laurence Olivier plays Mr. Darcy, Greer Garson is Elizabeth Bennet, and they give definitive performances as the archetypal battling lovers who set the model for almost every rom-com of the future. The supporting cast includes Edmund Gwenn, Mary Boland, Edna May Oliver, and Maureen O’Sullivan, Marsha Hunt, Ann Rutherford, and Heather Angel as the other four marriageable Bennet daughters. Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin wrote the witty, literate screenplay.

Our special guest, joining us for a Q&A before the screening, will be the only surviving member of the movie’s cast and crew, actress Marsha Hunt. Ms. Hunt made her film debut 80 years ago, in 1935. She was under contract at MGM in the 1940s, and among her many other films are Born to the West with John Wayne, Panama Hattie with Ann Sothern and Red Skelton; Blossoms in the Dust and The Valley of Decision with her Pride and Prejudice co-star Greer Garson; The Human Comedy with Mickey Rooney, and Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman with Susan Hayward. In 1950, however, Hunt was one of many performers blacklisted during Hollywood’s most shameful period. After that, she acted in the theater and made a few other film appearances, notably as Timothy Bottoms’ mother in 1971’s Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war film written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, the most famous of the Hollywood Ten. More recently, Hunt wrote her autobiography, and just this year is the subject of an acclaimed documentary, Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.