Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Good concept, poorly executed.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Lillian Hellman wrote some great, nuanced plays in her life, so it's odd her own life story is written so flatly and unevenly. While the acting is good, there is no arc or drama in the whole movie. (Spoiler) The introduction and original title of the memoir hints at that there is a chance she will "repent" and change her mind, betraying her friend or something like that...but we know she won't, or else there is no movie (it's one of those films where you know exactly how every character will play out in the first five minutes). That would have made a more interesting film, but Julia is essentially a spy-caper with a Dashiell Hammett cameo. Instead the movie builds to a dramatic point where the protagonist stumbles into an anti-climactic money-smuggling ring on a train. And the then her friend dies and never tells where her baby is.We don't even know whether there is a baby at all or if that was just a ploy to smuggle one more kid out of Nazi Germany (which would have made a more interesting plot point: a dogmatic woman disavowing her past and social conventions, manipulating and duping her weaker friend in emotional blackmail, adopting a needy orphan) but that's clearly not how it was intended to be interpreted. It's so po-faced and morally pristine the only characters I really enjoyed were the two scumbag incestuous aristocrats played by John Glover and Meryl Streep.

"Julia" is a great picture indeed. Performance of Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda are amazing. Ladies rule the Picture. Vanessa Redgrave's performance is superb especially in the scene of her meeting in the restaurant with Jane Fonda; the looks of her eyes, control of expressions, and commitment to her cause ...were all visible from her eyes. I think this is one of the best performances I have ever seen from an actress. Do not mind but I think that Jason Robards, though he is a great actor, but this time was lucky to win an Oscar for his performance just like winning of Oscar by Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar Baby! One of the most noticeable thing is the performance of young Julia played by Lisa Pelikan. She is just amazing; no doubts.

The late Lillian Hellmann may have been a gifted writer, but it has often been alleged that her purported biography "Pentimento" is her most complete work of imaginative fiction; Mary McCarthy famously said of her that "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the' ". "Julia", based on a chapter of that book, was marketed as a true story, but it has been claimed that it is pure fiction and that Hellman's supposed close friend Julia never actually existed. The film tells the story of Hellmann's alleged relationship with Julia from their childhood in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. Julia is said to be the daughter of a wealthy American family. After studying at Oxford and the University of Vienna she becomes involved with radical left-wing politics and rejects her family's bourgeois attitudes. The catalyst for her political conversion is said to be the shelling of the working-class districts of Vienna in 1934, although the film, possibly deliberately, conflates three separate events, the Austrian Civil War of 1934, the unsuccessful attempt by the Austrian Nazis to overthrow the Austro-Fascist Dollfuss regime later the same year and the successful Nazi Anschluss of 1938. The idea that one could simultaneously be a Fascist and an opponent of Nazism (as Dollfuss and his successor Schuschnigg undoubtedly were) is probably too complex for the film's rather simplified political view; much easier to blame the assault on the Viennese working class on Hitler. The script also omits the fact that Hellmann was a committed communist and admirer of Stalin; in the film her politics are simply anti-Nazi. Hellmann is by now a successful playwright, so celebrated that people even recognise her "when she goes out to buy mayonnaise". (An in-joke and possibly a disguised piece of product placement, playing on the well-known brand Hellman's Mayonnaise). When she is invited to a writers' conference in Moscow she is contacted by her old friend Julia, now a member of an anti-Nazi movement in Germany, who asks her to smuggle money into the country for the benefit of the cause. Despite the dangers involved in her mission, Hellmann does not hesitate to accept. Does it matter whether the story is truth or fiction? One who thought it did was the director, Fred Zinnemann, who accepted his assignment in the belief that he was directing a true story and who implied that he would have made it in a different way had he believed it to be fiction. Of Hellmann himself he said that she was a "phony character" and that their relationship "ended in pure hatred". My own view is that the factual accuracy of the story it tells is not always the most important thing about a film; there are, after all, plenty of good films, even great ones, which have played fast-and-loose with historical fact. "Amadeus" (to take only one example) is a wonderfully imaginative film, but I would not recommend it to anyone looking for an accurate account of the lives of Mozart and Salieri. Julia, however, has its faults even when seen as a piece of film-making rather than a piece of historical biography. The "smuggling money into Germany" plot sounds like something from a thriller, but seen as a thriller the film is too slow-moving and lacking in tension; it would have needed someone like Hitchcock to make it exciting. As a statement about Nazism, it does not analyse the nature of Nazi tyranny in any depth. As a study of friendship it is too one-sided. It may be entitled "Julia" but it should have been called "Lillian" as there is far more emphasis on Hellmann than on her friend. Vanessa Redgrave, who plays the ostensible title role, was only nominated for a "Best Supporting Actress" Oscar (she won) whereas Jane Fonda who plays Hellmann was nominated for "Best Actress" (she lost, to Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall"). Jason Robards, who plays Hellmann's lover Dashiell Hammett, won "Best Supporting Actor". In her controversial Oscar acceptance speech (controversial because of certain remarks she made about Zionism), Redgrave said that in this film she and her close friend Fonda had done "the best work of our lives". Fonda is certainly good, if one can overlook the fact that she looks nothing like the real Lillian Hellmann, even if this is not in my view her best film. I felt, however, that there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about Redgrave's performance, although I will suspend my comments on the justice or otherwise of her Oscar win until I am more familiar with the performances of the other actresses who were in contention in 1977. As for Robards, I can think of at least one actor (Alec Guinness in "Star Wars") who was more deserving of the "Best Supporting Actor" award. One thing that did impress me was the quality of the photography; there are some wonderfully evocative scenes, such as the one of Hellmann fishing from a boat on a lake which opens and closes the film, the shots of Hellmann and Hammett on the beach by their seaside home on Cape Cod, and all those trains arriving at a station in a cloud of steam or puffing through a wintry landscape. Overall, however, I feel that, despite all its Oscar nominations, "Julia" must rank as a minor example of Zinnemann's work, especially as he was responsible for such masterpieces as "High Noon", "From Here to Eternity", "The Nun's Story" and "A Man for All Seasons". 5/10

Author and playwright Lillian Hellman surely gave us some wonderful stories and plays for stage and film in the early to middle 20th century. But, this was not one of them. Indeed, its claim to be a story of her own experience from WWII has since been shown to be untrue. Shortly after the film's release, Hellman was proved to have pirated the story from another writer. Soon, a number of other people attested to her falsehoods about several claims she had made about herself. For more on this, see any of several bios of Hellman online, including the IMDb accounts, Wikipedia and some other more detailed accounts. It seems as though Hellman may have become too enamored with herself over time. Indeed, some more revealing historical accounts of her life have shown more intimidating times of her past. She opposed political asylum in the U.S. for some early Russian communist leaders while giving unashamed support for Joseph Stalin — even knowing of his execution of many Russians.So, what about the film, "Julia?" The fact that Hellman did not experience this so-called chapter in her life may be why it comes across as so poorly scripted. And why the actor playing her, seems so dubious in the role. This should be apparent to anyone who knew much about Hellman and her feisty, self-assured, at times belligerent character. If Jane Fonda was playing Hellman, then Hellman didn't even get her own character right. That, or the script was written without the passion that someone who really experienced it would have known. Either way, it really showed in the choppy and abrupt changes of scenes. The story could have been one of great intrigue, but for the distractions caused by the poor scripting and almost droll acting by Fonda. I can't imagine that a number of the silly moments of forgetfulness by Fonda would be in the script. What was Hellman thinking? To what purpose? Fonda's forgetting to leave the box of chocolates on the train, forgetting to put on the hat, and a few other such incidents of memory loss were quite glaring considering that these were covered with such explicit instructions for her. All that forgetfulness just made me focus on how little the main person (Hellman/Fonda) paid attention to her friend Julia; and how simple- minded she could be. She just didn't seem to grasp the reality of what was going on around her. Could that have been the intended portrayal of the Fonda role? Hellman writing Hellman to be such a dumb ox — I doubt it. All of the acting was not poor. Indeed, Vanessa Redgrave was excellent as Julia. But that the film received so many other Oscar nominations, including one for Fonda as best actress, only reflects the poor quality of films from Hollywood for the year. Only a handful of movies competed for most of the major awards, and none of them were great films. Compare 1977 to most years in the previous four decades when many, many films competed in different categories, including those years when one or two huge blockbusters ran away with the bulk of awards. (Look at 1962, for instance. Nearly two dozen films got Oscar nominations, and a dozen truly great films competed for top honors.)As I said at the start, Lillian Hellman gave us some great and enduring stories in her time. But in her later years she seemed to give way to a type of grandiosity that had her writing completely fabricated events from her life in her autobiography. Her last few years were not proud ones for this once great writer as the truth about her fabrications became widely known. It's interesting to me that in 1977, Hollywood would still put this film out with a claim to its authenticity as lived by Hellman, in the face of the public challenges that had been made. It would still have been okay as a piece of fiction or otherwise; but the poor scripting and poor acting by the main character just leaves this as a mediocre film.My six stars are for the lone top performance by Lynn Redgrave and for the intrigue that was still able to be felt in spite of the acting distractions and script shortcomings.