Julia

Lillian Hellman's tight autobiographical story about memory and friendship gets the full Zinnemann gloss-wash. Julia, disaffected Anglo-American aristocrat, strides into womanhood wearing golf shoes and that brave Redgrave grin. Swept up in the anti-Fascist movement, she persuades Hellman (Fonda) to smuggle money to Berlin. One-legged and a liability to any underground movement, Julia is murdered. Hellman returns to Dashiell Hammett (Robards) for grizzled comfort. Suckers for frontier drama, trains, NY literary society and the '30s will enjoy. Zinnemann blows it most of all in the Fonda-Redgrave relationship, and no credibility is given to Hellman's ferocious talent and dominant personality. Reverential to the end, a suggestion of homosexuality is laughingly tossed off in one glittering scene. No one bothers to mention that lesbianism is central to 'The Children's Hour', the play Hellman is trying to write while, as per synopsis, 'her memory returned again and again' to Julia.