Word: hellman
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...station creating a bland industrial backdrop. Monet omitted the smiling women, painting only the dark, smoky blue train station; and the opening shot of Julia is a technicolor replica of his ominous image--an image that is repeated frequently throughout the film. Julia is the story of Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her childhood friend (Vanessa Redgrave) whom she christens "Julia," who together lost the insular beauty of their adolescence as the Third Reich came into power...
Exactly a century after Manet painted his picture, Hellman published Pentimento, a series of autobiographical vignettes. Julia's story, included in the book, is at times both sentimentally nostalgic and self-righteous, but Hellman recounts it without becoming offensive. In this filmed version, Alvin Sargent's adaptation and Fred Zinnemann's direction usually retain Hellman's balance. At times, however, the women's deep friendship becomes cloying, subtly but soppily suggesting an adolescent lesbian relationship, an implication Hellman worked to avoid. And in the movie Hellman-and-Julia's admittedly courageous antifascist actions are presented as historically unequalled acts...
Julia and Hellman met in their early teens and remained close friends until Julia's death. The scenes of their childhood games, their visits to Julia's family estate and their austere dinners with Julia's wealthy Upper East Side grandparents-- who serve sherbet at dinner after eating fish to clear the palate before the meat course--are among the best in the movie. In these sequences, the basis for the girls' later actions is established. Julia becomes innocently but intensely aware of the inequalities that will attract her to a workers' community in Vienna, shaking her head sorrowfully...
...letter of acceptance, Hellman said, "I am for sentimental reasons going to say yes. I feel obligated to Harvard for the past years I have spent here." Hellman taught at Harvard...
That seems to be the idea behind Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest," now at the Lyric Stage in Boston. The Hubbards are a juicy enough bunch: the miserly patriarch with a shadowy past; his wife, a religious fanatic; one son who schemes ruthlessly; another who whines and steals; and a daughter who compares unfavorably with Scarlett O'Hara. While Alabama in 1880 isn't a Danish castle, at least it provides a set of usefully poor neighbors and the Ku Klux Klan...