Product: Julia (1971)
Rating: 4.0
Very good movie... despite being a big fat lie!
Turns out compulsive liar Lillian Hellman made up the "Julia" story and passed it off in her memoirs as "history" in order to bolster her image as a moral do-gooder pushed by her noble friend to take a risk to battle evil Nazis. Even though the story's a big fat lie, it makes for a very good movie. Horse-faced Hellman is played by screen-beauty Jane Fonda. And fabricated but radiant Julia is played by true and radiant Vanessa Redgrave. There are some corny, cliche "struggling artist" scenes, like Hellman tossing her typewriter out the window to show how hard it is to be a writer, but then there are some scenes that elicit goosebumps--like a a simple shot of Redgrave walking among the Gothic spires of Oxford with a Fonda voice-over to the effect: "There is a time in a woman's life when everthing comes together and she'll never look better. That's what happened to Julia that year." By the end, with Julia murdered and her baby daughter vanished (how convenient for Hellman's self-agrandizing purposes) you start to feel like maybe the character of Julia was just a "red herring" to advance Hellman's story about her noble self. Guess what? (PS: Mr. Johann was played by the great Maximillian Shell, not the great Max von Sydow, as a previous post claims.)