Oscar-winning romanticism

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The film columns of the bourgeois newspapers have received Julia with high praise.

Newsline, • paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, gave it a sycophantic reviewnot unexpectedly, since Vanessa Redgrave is still a leading WRP member.

Redgrave herself has made it known that she actually identifies with the character Julia, and has won a best supporting actress' Oscar for the part.

The film is based upon the recollections of authoress Lillian Hellman (played by Jane Fonda) of her relationship with Julia from childJulia's death at the hands of Nazism in the late 1930s.

Both are children of the ruling class, but Julia is the more "exceptional' of the two, exhibiting praiseworthy moral concern for the poor and starving whom 1 She stumbles across occasionally whilst on holidays abroad with her incredibly rich grandparents.

As Hellman sets about becoming a successful authoress, Julia becomes involved in the resistance to Nazism while studying in Austria.

The film deserves compliment for the striking scenes depicting che Nazi take over of the 1 iniversity in out the mindless petty bourgeois hysteria that characterises fascism as a movement.

Hellman meets Julia, heavily plastered and bandaged after this violent episode, and but for one further occasion this is the last we see of the character who gives her name to the title of the work.

Hellman

Much of the film centres on the trials and tribulations of up-and-coming authoress Hellman, who despite unease in the company of some of the more repulsively seedy and warped representatives of high society, gets on quite Redgrare Lines like "I'm the toast of the town", "I like being famous" and (ugh!) "I'd look swell in a sable coat" sum up the tedious success story subplot that occupies a central part of the film.

The dry wit of Hellman's occasional lover, thriller writer Dashiel Hammet, (of Maltese Falcon fame), is the only saving grace of this section.

Amidst all this Hellman's constant concern for, and desire to contact, Julia, lost somewhere in the stormy European political situation, is somewhat incongruous.

As Hellman chalks up a The two women have moved into worlds and classes apart, and while it was possible to imagine a bourgeois authoress finding Julia's world a subject for romantic fantasy, it is hard to see how Julia could have considered Hellman's world as anything other than beneath contempt.

The two finally meet in Berlin, after Hellman, through a system of carefully arranged contacts, has agreed to smuggle $50,000 (for bribing out prisoners of the Nazis) to Julia.

The warmth of the brief encounter stands in contrast with the reality of a bourgeois woman, taking a relatively small risk after much indecision and a revolutionary minded women, now crippled by her fascist enemies and shortly to be dragged from her bed and brutally killed.

That Hellman recollects being warned Try not to be heroic' is perhaps the most .a.. in tha fil acress and Fonda so well chosen that they in no way appear to disrupt the continuity of the plot. The camera work is superb.

The overall result then is a tolerable evening out for anyone with one to spare for watching an excursion into sentimentalism.

It is only a disappointment to those who would go in the belief that a film in which a self-styled 'Trotskyist' appears, and which touches upon European fascism in the 1930's should have a serious bearing upon anything of importance.

In so far as Redgrave identified with Hellman's picture of 'Julia', this only goes to show the extent to which a woman once a "romantic Tory' now sees political commitment to the working class movement through the 'romantic' idealist spectacles of middle place radialien