Julia

Julia (1977) explores the dubious friendship of playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her eponymous childhood friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave). (It's disputed that Julia even existed.) According to Hellman, Julia fought against the Nazis, and even roped Hellman into her cause by having her smuggle money from Paris to Berlin (in a drawn-out but tense sequence on a train). It’s hard to imagine this is the same actress that gave such a groundbreaking performance as the worldly wise call girl Brie in 1971’s Klute. It’s not that Fonda is bad, but she spends most of the time taking orders from other people and acting mildly nervous. The only life in her performance comes when we see her as Hellman the tormented playwright, pounding away at the typewriter to no avail. (In one scene she even chucks it out the window in a fury of writer’s block.) She's also pretty good in the last act, when she's given a little bit more of an active role in her movie. (It's not called Lillian for a reason: this movie is about one person's obsession with another person. But I don't mean to use that word in a suggestive or sensationalistic way. And the film dances around suggesting that Julia and Lillian's friendship was something deeper.) Fonda gives the same tense, uptight performance she would later reuse in 9 to 5, when she was clearly upstaged by the sharp Lily Tomlin and the bubbly Dolly Parton. In Julia there’s no one to upstage her. Everyone is deadly serious because this is a serious movie about a lot of serious themes. The tasteful direction of Fred Zinneman—from a script by Alvin Sargent—is fine, but nothing in Julia really stands out. Fonda narrates, breathing mournful intonations over Zinneman's camera. The scenes, which are well-constructed, aren’t vivid or powerful, and given the subject matter, Julia should have been more affecting. It’s also not particularly strong as a study of a friendship, as it purports to be. We’re never sure why Lillian and Julia are friends: Julia seems to put up with Lillian, whose worship of Julia doesn’t transcend to the level of an equal. And Vanessa Redgrave, who’s a fine actress, doesn’t do much to warrant the Academy Award she got from this. Some of the flashback scenes of the girls wandering the English countryside are attractively done, even haunting, but they don’t linger either. The film is haunting too, but it feels incomplete, dramatically undercooked. With Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett (Hellman’s long-time beau), Maximilian Schell, Hal Holbrook, Rosemary Murphy, John Glover, and, in her first film, Meryl Streep.

From Here to Eternity

If you've never seen From Here to Eternity (1953), you've probably at least seen that image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr pawing at each other on the beach (either the real thing or a parody of it). Their torrid love affair isn't really the most interesting thing about the film, however, and at times the movie seems to forget about that romance altogether. From Here to Eternity is essentially an army soap opera, set in Hawaii in 1941. I'm sure you can guess what major historical event the movie is leading up to. Until the big showdown at Pearl Harbor, Eternity--which was adapted from the James Jones novel by Daniel Taradash and directed by Fred Zinneman--is about two soldiers and their struggle against the machinery of the army and civilization: Lancaster plays a sergeant who's trying to move up in the military world by doing what's expected of him (and pulling the strings by proxy when he can). The trouble for him begins when he starts sleeping with the corruptible captain's wife. She's played with pouty sumptuousness by Deborah Kerr. Montgomery Clift is the other soldier, the loner-cum-rebel Robert E. Lee Prewitt, whose claims to fame in the army are his top notch bugle and boxing skills. (He shows off his bugle talents in an amusing scene in a night club, and then later when he plays "Taps" to try and tug at our patriotic heart-strings.)

Fortunately, there's no actual boxing in this movie, or I might have turned it off. But there are a few fight scenes, all of them involving Montgomery Clift, who seems too small to actually defeat any of the gorillas he's up against. Despite all the scuffles, Prewitt refuses to participate in any organized fighting, much to the chagrin of his superior, who proceeds to make his life a living hell. Prewitt befriends an amiable private played by Frank Sinatra and falls in love with a girl (Donna Reed) he meets at a gentleman's club. Even though Montgomery Clift's performance is striking, it's never completely clear why someone so fiercely independent as his character would want to join the army in the first place. One can accept Lancaster's rule-following sergeant much more easily.

Eternity juggles more stories than it seems able to, but the finale is exciting and the film still holds up: the actors are all generally interesting, and the presumably steamy aspects of the Jones novel seem to at least have gotten through here via dialogue (and that famous beach make-out scene), even if it's pretty tame by today's standards. The supporting cast includes Philip Ober (as the disreputable captain), Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Warden.