Product: Julia (1971)
Rating: 3.0
Lives of the saints
Fred Zimmerman's 1977 film based on one of the sections of Lillian Hellman's memoir PENTIMENTO has not aged so well, despite some lovely compositions and the undeniable star power of Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as her lover Dashiell Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as the titular heroine, a wealthy young woman who was Lillian's best friend in childhood and has grown up to fight injustice in general and the Nazis in particular. The film was made with Hellman's assistance (that's the real Hellman in the rowboat fishing in the framing shots), and you can see why almost immediately. Both Lillian and Julia are basically enshrined in the film as ideal heroines, brave, brilliant, beautiful, and resolutely heterosexual. (Fonda decks John Glover for implying she and Julia are lesbians in one scene that seems specifically included to forestall the audience getting any funny ideas.) There's not much plot except for a long Ambleresque sequence where Hellman is sent into Germany to smuggle in money to bribe officials to save victims of the Nazis; it's much more interesting than the rest of the film, which mostly alternates scenes of the young Julia (the lovely Lisa Pelikan) being saintly alternating with Fonda sulking at the typewriter, trying to please Robards's hardbitten Hammett. There's been quite a bit of controversy whether Julia ever existed, whether she's a composite of women Hellman knew, or whether she was the famous psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner who shared a lawyer with Hellman (but whom Hellman herself never actually knew).