Julia (1977 film)

Julia
Theatrical release poster by Richard Amsel
Directed by	Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay by	Alvin Sargent
Produced by	Richard Roth
Starring	Jane Fonda Vanessa Redgrave Jason Robards Hal Holbrook Rosemary Murphy and Maximilian Schell
Cinematography	Douglas Slocombe
Edited by	Walter Murch Marcel Durham
Music by	Georges Delerue
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date	October 2, 1977 (1977-10-02)
Running time	118 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$7.84 million
Box office	$20,714,400

Julia is a 1977 drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann, from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. It is based on Lillian Hellman's book Pentimento, a chapter of which purports to tell the story of her relationship with an alleged lifelong friend, "Julia," who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II. The film in DeLuxe Color was produced by Richard Roth, with Julien Derode as executive producer and Tom Pevsner as associate producer.

Julia was received positively from the critics and was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Fred Zinnemann and Best Actress for Jane Fonda. It ended up winning three awards, Best Supporting Actor for Jason Robards, Best Supporting Actress for Vanessa Redgrave, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Alvin Sargent's script. Julia was the first film to win both supporting actor categories since The Last Picture Show six years earlier in 1971, and would be followed by Hannah and Her Sisters nine years later in 1986.

Plot

The young Lillian and her friend Julia, daughter of a wealthy family being brought up by her grandparents in the U.S., enjoy a childhood together and an extremely close relationship in late adolescence. Later, while medical student/physician Julia (Vanessa Redgrave) attends Oxford and the University of Vienna and studies with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Lillian (Jane Fonda), a struggling writer, suffers through revisions of her play with her mentor and sometime lover, famed author Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards) at a beachhouse.

Later, during the Nazi era, Lillian has become a celebrated playwright, and is invited to a writers' conference in Russia. Julia, having taken on the battle against Nazism, enlists Lillian en route to smuggle money into Nazi 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 Russia via Berlin and the movements of her person, and placement of her possessions (a hat and a box of candy), are carefully guided by compatriots of Julia through border crossings and inspections. In Berlin, Lillian is told to go to a cafe where she finds Julia. They are able to speak only briefly. Julia tells her that the money she has brought will save 500 to 1,000 people. Lillian also learns that Julia has a daughter, Lily, who is living with a baker in Alsace. Julia advises Lillian not to return through Germany.

Shortly after her safe return to the United States, Lillian is informed that Julia has been killed. The details of her death are shrouded in secrecy. Lillian unsuccessfully looks for Julia's daughter in Alsace. She also discovers that Julia's family wants nothing to do with the child, if she exists. They even pretend not to remember Lillian clearly wanting to excise from their memory a daughter who refused to conform at a time when nonconformity could prevent the murder of many innocent people.

Cast

• Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman
• Vanessa Redgrave as Julia
• Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett
• Maximilian Schell as Johann
• Hal Holbrook as Alan Campbell
• Rosemary Murphy as Dorothy Parker
• Meryl Streep as Anne Marie
• John Glover as Sammy
• Lisa Pelikan as Julia (younger)
• Susan Jones as Lillian (younger)
• Lambert Wilson as Walter Franz

Production and veracity controversy

The film 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."

In 1983, New York psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner became involved in the libel suit between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, when she claimed that she was the character called Julia in Hellman's memoirs, Pentimento (1973), and in the movie Julia based on a chapter of that book. Hellman, who never met Gardiner, claimed that "Julia" was somebody else.

Gardiner wrote that, while she never met Hellman, she had often heard about her from her friend Wolf Schwabacher, who was Hellman's lawyer. In Gardiner's account, Schwabacher had visited Gardiner in Vienna and, after Muriel Gardiner and Joseph Buttinger moved into their house at Brookdale Farm in Pennington, New Jersey in 1940, the house was divided in two with the Gardiner-Buttingers living in one half and Wolf and Ethel Schwabacher in the other for more than ten years.

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.

Julia features the first film performances of Meryl Streep and Lisa Pelikan.

Reception

The film earned $13,050,000 in North American rentals.

Awards

Academy Awards:

• Jason Robards for Best Actor in a Supporting Role
• Vanessa Redgrave for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
• Alvin Sargent for Best Adapted Screenplay

Academy Award nominations:

• Best Picture, Richard Roth (producer)
• Fred Zinnemann for Best Director
• Jane Fonda for Best Actress in a Leading Role
• Maximilian Schell for Best Actor in a Supporting Role
• Douglas Slocombe for Best Cinematography
• Anthea Sylbert for Best Costume Design;
• Walter Murch for Best Film Editing.
• Georges Delerue for Best Music, Original Score

After Redgrave was nominated 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.

Accepting her Academy Award, Redgrave said:

My dear colleagues, I thank you very much for this tribute to my work. I think that Jane Fonda and I have done the best work of our lives, and I think this is in part due to our director, Fred Zinnemann.

And I also think it's in part because we believed and we believe in what we were expressing--two out of millions who gave their lives and were prepared to sacrifice everything in the fight against fascist and racist Nazi Germany.

And I salute you, and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you've stood firm, and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.

And I salute that record and I salute all of you for having stood firm and dealt a final blow against that period when Nixon and McCarthy launched a worldwide witch-hunt against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truth that they believe in. I salute you and I thank you and I pledge to you that I will continue to fight against anti-Semitism and fascism.

It also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film.

External links

• Julia at IMDb
• ‹The template AllMovie title is being considered for deletion.› Julia at AllMovie
• Julia at the TCM Movie Database
• Julia at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• Julia at Box Office Mojo
• Julia at Rotten Tomatoes