The young Lillian Hellman and her friend Julia, daughter of a wealthy family being brought up by her grandparents in the United States, enjoy a childhood together and a very close friendship in late adolescence. Later, while medical student Julia attends the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna and studies with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Lillian, a struggling writer, suffers through revisions of her play with her mentor and lover, famed author Dashiell Hammett, at a beach house.
Julia's university in Vienna is overrun by Nazi thugs, and she is severely injured trying to protect others. Lillian receives word of Julia's condition and rushes to Vienna to be with her. Julia is taken away for "treatment", and Lillian is unable to find her again since the hospital denies any knowledge of her being treated there. She remains in Europe to try to find Julia but is unsuccessful.
Later, during the Nazi era, Lillian has become a celebrated playwright and is invited to a writers' conference in the USSR. Julia, having taken on the battle against Nazism, enlists Lillian en route to smuggle money into Germany to assist the anti-Nazi cause. It is a dangerous mission, especially for a Jewish intellectual on her way to Russia.
Lillian departs for the USSR via Berlin, and the movements of her person, and the placement of her possessions (a hat and a box of candy), are carefully guided by colleagues of Julia through border crossings and inspections. In Berlin, Lillian is told to go to a cafe, where she finds Julia. They speak only briefly. Julia divulges that the "treatment" she received in the hospital in Vienna was the amputation of her leg. Julia tells her that the money she has brought will save 500 to 1,000 people, many of them Jews. Lillian also learns that Julia has a daughter, Lilly, who is living with a baker in Alsace. After Lilian leaves Julia in the cafe and boards the train to Moscow, a man tells her to avoid passing through Germany again after she leaves the USSR.
When Lillian reaches Moscow, the atmosphere is gloomy and oppressive. She receives word that Julia is dead. Returning to London, she is told that Julia has been killed in the Frankfurt apartment of a friend by Nazi agents, although the details of her death are shrouded in secrecy. Lillian unsuccessfully looks for Julia's daughter in Alsace. She returns to the United States and is reunited with Dashiell Hammett. She is haunted by Julia's memories and is distraught at not finding Julia's toddler. She is shocked that Julia's family pretends not to remember Lillian as Julia's friend, clearly wanting to excise from their memory a granddaughter who refused to conform at a time when conformity caused the murder of many innocent people.
The film ends with an image of Lillian Hellman many years later seated in a boat alone, fishing. She reveals in voiceover that she continued to live with Hammett for another thirty years and outlived him.
Julia was shot on location in England and France. Although Lillian Hellman claimed the story was based on true events that occurred early in her life, the filmmakers later came to believe that most of it was fictionalized. Director Fred Zinnemann would later comment, "Lillian Hellman in her own mind owned half the Spanish Civil War, while Hemingway owned the other half. She would portray herself in situations that were not true. An extremely talented, brilliant writer, but she was a phony character, I'm sorry to say. My relations with her were very guarded and ended in pure hatred."[3]
The film was based on the "Julia" chapter of Hellman's memoir Pentimento. On June 30, 1976, as the film was going into production, Hellman wrote about the screenplay to its producer:[4]
This is not a work of fiction and certain laws have to be followed for that reason ... Your major difficulty to me is the treatment of Lillian as the leading character. The reason is simple: no matter what she does in this story–and I do not deny the danger I was in when I took the money into Germany–my role was passive. And nobody and nothing can change that unless you write a fictional and different story ... Isn't it necessary to know that I am a Jew? That, of course, is what mainly made the danger.
In a 1979 television interview with Dick Cavett, author Mary McCarthy, long Hellman's political adversary and the object of her negative literary judgment, said of Hellman that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."[5] Hellman responded by filing a US$2,500,000 defamation suit against McCarthy, interviewer Dick Cavett, and PBS.[5] McCarthy produced evidence she said proved that Hellman had lied in some accounts of her life. Cavett said he sympathized more with McCarthy than Hellman in the lawsuit, but "everybody lost" as a result of it.[5]Norman Mailer attempted unsuccessfully to mediate the dispute through an open letter he published in the New York Times.[6] At the time of her death in 1984, Hellman was still in litigation with McCarthy; her executors dropped the suit.[7]
In 1983, New York psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner became involved in the libel suit between McCarthy and Hellman. She claimed to be the model for the character named Julia in Pentimento, and in the movie Julia based on a chapter of that book. Hellman, who never met Gardiner, said that "Julia" was somebody else.[8]
Gardiner wrote that, while she never met Hellman, she had often heard about her from her friend Wolf Schwabacher, who was Hellman's lawyer. By Gardiner's account, Schwabacher had visited Gardiner in Vienna. After Muriel Gardiner and Joseph Buttinger moved into their house at Brookdale Farm in Pennington, New Jersey in 1940, they divided the house in two. They rented half of it to Wolf and Ethel Schwabacher for more than ten years.[9]
Many people believe that Hellmann based her story on Gardiner's life. Gardiner's editor cited the unlikelihood that there were two millionaire American women who were medical students in Vienna in the late 1930s.[8]
Reception
Julia holds a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 30 reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The consensus summarizes: "Julia is a handsomely crafted and stirringly performed meditation on friendship and political activism, although its tasteful formalism often undercuts the multifaceted passion of these historical figures."[10] On Metacritic, the film earned a weighted average score of 75 out of 100, based on 10 reviews, signifying "generally favorable reviews".[11]
Variety gave it a positive review, praising Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave as being "dynamite together on the screen", Richard Roth's production as "handsome and tasteful", as well as the period costumes and production design.[12] Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality & Practice described the film as "extraordinary", writing: "Julia gives us a genuine and affecting portrait of a friendship between two women who confirm each other and strengthen their bonds over the years."[13]
The film received some criticism as failing to adequately portray the friendship between the two leads. Roger Ebert called the film a "fascinating story", but felt the film suffered from being told by Lillian Hellman's point of view. "The film never really establishes a relationship between the two women," he wrote. "It's awkward, the way the film has to suspend itself between Julia – its ostensible subject – and Lillian Hellman, its real subject." He gave it two and a half out of four stars.[14]
John Simon said of Julia "Very little of what happens in the film is intrinsically interesting."[15]TV Guide gave it three out of five stars and declared it "Beautifully crafted, nominated for 11 Academy Awards, a big hit at the box office--and a dramatic dud ... If you like red nail polish, faux-cynicism, painfully brave smiles and European train stations, Julia may be your kind of cocktail."[16]
The film earned $7.5 million in North American rentals.[17]
After Redgrave was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Jewish Defense League objected to her nomination because she had narrated and helped fund a documentary entitled The Palestinian, which supported a Palestinian state. They also picketed the Oscar ceremony.[19]
Notes
↑ Marcel Durham is listed as an editor for the film in some credit listings for Julia, including the credits database of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS). However, he is not listed as a nominee for the Academy Award in the AMPAS awards database.[18]
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Watch on the Rhine is a 1943 American drama film directed by Herman Shumlin and starring Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. The screenplay by Dashiell Hammett is based on the 1941 play Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman. Watch on the Rhine was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Paul Lukas won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Kurt Muller, a German-born anti-fascist in this film.
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Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist views and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belonged to the Communist Party.
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Muriel Gardiner Buttinger was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.
Wolf Schwabacher was a prominent Jewish entertainment lawyer, a partner in the New York City law firm of Hays, Wolf, Schwabacher, Sklar & Epstein, whose clients included the Marx Brothers, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell.
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Pentimento: A Book of Portraits is a 1973 book by American writer Lillian Hellman. It takes the form of an autobiographical work, focusing on "portraits" of various people that had effects on the author throughout her life.
Dash and Lilly is a 1999 American biographical drama television film about writers Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. The film was directed by actress Kathy Bates, written by Jerry Ludwig, and stars Sam Shepard and Judy Davis. It aired on A&E on May 31, 1999.
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Haywire is a 1977 memoir by actress and writer Brooke Hayward, daughter of theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan. It is a #1 New York Times Best Seller and was on the newspaper's list for 17 weeks. In Haywire, Brooke details her experience of growing up immersed in the glamorous and extravagant lifestyle afforded by her parents’ successful Hollywood and Broadway careers and tells the story of how her privileged, beautiful family and their seemingly idyllic life fell apart.
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References
↑ Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Scarecrow Press, 1989 p258
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