Word: lilliane
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...with the 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...
Julia settles in Vienna while Lillian throws temper tantrums about writing blocks in her oceanside home and dramatically suffers through her first failures and successes. Cantankerous Dashiell Hammett, Hellman's long-term lover (Jason Robards), calmly listens as Hellman agonizes over such moral dilemmas as whether to contribute part of her unexpectedly large royalties to a good political cause or to buy a sable coat. (We never rind out which she opts...
...outweigh its flaws. Although Zinnemann occasionally lapses into such cliches as juxtaposing plush hotels with Nazi terror to make statements about inequality--a gimmick that should have gone out with War and Peace--his direction is usually sound and the cast generally rises above any momentary awkwardness. To some, Lillian Hellman is a heroic cult figure; to others she is a commercialized martyr. In Julia, though, she is simply human, retracing in her memory a cherished portrait...
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...
...cinematic challenges that Julia raises. Instead, they misguidedly reproduce Hellman's convoluted narrative, all the while padding the story with superfluous scenes that add literal-minded psychological footnotes to the action. The movie that emerges is a glossy bio flick that superficially charts the rise of Lillian Hellman, Young Leftist Playwright...