You keep wishing the clips were longer who wouldn’t want an hour and a half just of “Electric Company” scenes with Moreno playing against Morgan Freeman (who shows up as one of the talking heads here)? Some personal-life elements seem even more breezed over: In the early narrative, there’s little follow-up on the provocative question of whether she was traumatized when she and her mother left the rest of the family behind to come to the U.S.
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She was put into a succession of “island girl” roles, often wearing “makeup the color of mud,” even after she got a choice non-“ethnic” role in “Singin’ in the Rain.” For her career-making turn in “West Side Story,” she appeared in an embarrassing brown-face that mars one of the otherwise great musicals of all time.īut after a mysterious career drought after winning the supporting actress Oscar for that performance, Moreno came back and conquered the EGOT mountain with projects as disparate as night and day - her performances in Broadway’s (and the movies’) bathhouse-set “The Ritz,” and in TV’s kids’ series “The Electric Company.” Those twin comebacks seem like they’ve established her breadth once and for all, till the doc gets to her run as the mousy-looking but stoically fierce nun-shrink in “Oz,” where Moreno forever proved that she could get small, too.
These harrowing but not atypical moments of misogyny give way to some unique problems Moreno faced as the face of Latinas on the big screen for quite some time. Years later, when she’d made a name for herself, Moreno’s agent raped her, she says, and “I still let him be my agent, because he was the only one that was helping me in my so-called career.” There’s not much evidence here that Moreno has a dark side, which makes it especially bracing when she does suddenly switch out of charm mode to frankly and unflinchingly address the more sinister sides of Hollywood she encountered on her way up as “a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor.” She describes early would-be mentor Harry Cohn as “a distinctly vulgar and crude man” who thought “You know I’d like to f- you” was a workable come-on. Her thoughtfulness notwithstanding, Moreno makes no bones about it: She lives to be vivaciously entertaining, on- and off-screen. “I may be petite, but I’m big,” she says late in the film, talking about her long marriage to a husband who wished she would tamp down her outsize personality. In or out of glam mode, though, it’s clear that Moreno is just about always “on,” and as far as we can see, that’s a good thing. Soon enough, we do see footage of Moreno before she cleans up so good, as she arrives on the “One Day at a Time” set on the Sony lot - echoing her early days as an MGM starlet - to do her own makeup. The star looks impossibly glamorous for her principal interview. The setup has Moreno planning her own festive birthday party, as is apparently her wont, with a jaunty jazz score that suggests we’re about to see a feature-length enshrinement of a Grande Olde Dame.
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