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My Name is Julia Ross
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… Or Is It?
The phenomenal
world captured on screen is not as important as people like André Bazin once
thought. It does not lend quality or originality either to a specific film, or
to cinema in general. Because the phenomenal has to do with the familiar and
the unoriginal, rather than with renewal and change.
– Alain Masson, 1988
What a body
doesn’t know don’t hurt ‘em, I always say.
– My Name is Julia Ross
An establishing shot of old London town. But with an
added detail that soon becomes apparent, once the credits have ended: in the
same shot, it starts to rain. This is an odd, pleasing twist – and a sign of
many more twists, small and large, to come. From the rain, the film takes us to
another water-drenched image: a striking composition, with a prominently
foregrounded object, framing a woman walking toward a boarding house. The
depth, the angle, the play of textures: everything adds an extra touch of
interest to this simple, expositional moment. The woman then climbs the front
stairs, rings the bell, enters, walks down the corridor … but it will be over two
minutes before we see her face (it’s Nina Foch as Julia) from front-on.
Every detail – and every way the film has of showing that detail – hides an intrigue,
a secret in My Name is Julia Ross.
It is a pure lesson in cinema – and the principal
master of this lesson is the film’s director, Joseph H. Lewis (1907-2000). In
the essay by Alain Masson that I have cited above, it is suggested that some lovers of
film place far too much faith in the “imprint of phenomenal reality” caught by
the movie camera. Why would we really want to see, doubled on a screen, the
everyday world that is already known and familiar to us in all its banal
details? Cinema, rather, is the place where mundane places, people and
situations are “led astray” from the realm of mere appearance, tricked into
revealing another side, another face. And this is precisely what makes a film
narrative clever, surprising, exciting: it engineers ways to renew or refresh
the overly recognisable elements of reality – it produces originality out of everything
that is given, generic, unoriginal.
Working largely in the heavily conventionalised and
codified realm of the B movie, Joseph Lewis was particularly keenly fixed on
this awesome responsibility to twist the unoriginal into the original. And in
his greatest films, including Gun Crazy (1950), The Big Combo (1955) and this one, he
succeeded beyond all our wildest dreams.
My Name is Julia Ross covers so much ground
in a brisk 65 minutes, it becomes a dizzying experience. (The same cannot be
said, alas, for the creaky 1987 remake, running all of 100 minutes, handled by
Arthur Penn: Dead of Winter.) Within
the first two sequences – scarcely ten minutes in screen time – Lewis and
screenwriter Muriel Roy Bolton (working from Anthony Gilbert’s 1941 novel The Woman in Red) complicate the central
point-of-view structure of the plot twice over, in two different directions.
The embittered cleaning lady, Bertha (Joy Harington), who Julia encounters upon
entering the boarding house, carries a clear symbolic function: she stands for
the working class, for all those ordinary folk who are pragmatic, cynical – and
understandably resentful of those with elevated social opportunities, such as
Julia herself. But Bertha also hijacks the plot for a moment: the second that
Julia is out of the frame, she tears up the letter left behind, and pockets her
overdue rent money – planting a spot of complication for our heroine up ahead.
This is only a small kink, however, in comparison with
the over-arching knowledge we have already been tipped to, again beyond Julia’s
perception, in the inaugural interview scene at the fake employment agency:
everything about this new job is a set-up (anticipating the elaborate
mechanisms of trickery and conspiracy in later films by Alfred Hitchcock and
Brian De Palma), a trap into which Julia is going to fall.
Here, what’s “given” is duly taken – including Julia
Ross herself. When the film does a geographical flip at the 16 minute mark, Julia
finds herself not only in a new bed in a new location (Cornwall), but also
treated as a new person with a new identity: Marion Hughes, wife of the nervy
and clearly pathologically troubled Ralph (George Macready), whose little
drawer of assorted knives is a real worry for we spectators. The rain of London
has transmuted into a raging sea just beyond the ornate window that is inside a
mansion located high atop a cliff.
And the film’s genre has itself, in this drugged
ellipse, now also shifted: from a mystery-thriller that had just kicked off an
investigation (a private one mounted by Dennis [Roland Varno] into Julia’s
sudden disappearance), we dive into the full, paranoid nightmare of the Female
Gothic – that specific “woman’s melodrama” inflection of the broader, looser
family of movies known today as film noir.
The shadows darken into expressionistic patterns
across Julia’s face; expensive, antique objects gleam and sparkle with menace; pleasant
teacups that may contain hideous poisons loom large in the frame; and the touch
of a supposedly loving husband becomes an imprisoning, abusing grip. Understandably,
Julia – not yet getting much further than her bed 25 minutes into the film –
starts hallucinating strange presences in the dark. Or
maybe someone, a stealthy prowler, is really getting into her room without her
noticing. My Name is Julia Ross here
raids elements from contemporaneous Female Gothic successes such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) or Suspicion (1941), as well as
anticipating later mutations and hybridisations of the form, such as the tale
of Satanic horror spun by Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s
Baby (1968).
Julia has to turn into an investigator, too – the
curious Pandora figure trying to figure out the lineaments and determinations
of her own cage-like box. Are there any hidden panels or secret doors in her
boudoir? It’s that kind of world, after all: even the sea, we will later hear,
harbours “many secrets”. As in Hitchcock’s variations on the Female Gothic, all-pervasive
threat comes not only from the male representatives of patriarchy, but also from
the even more fearsome matriarch (Dame May Whitty as Mrs Hughes) seemingly
pulling all the strings. “Why doesn’t someone believe me for once, instead of listening to her
all the time?”, pleads Julia to a gaggle of uncomprehending villagers who come
politely calling at the Hughes household.
So Julia appeals to the maid, Alice (Queenie Leonard),
for help – Alice being (we hope) the more kindly variation on the service-class
earlier incarnated by the treacherous Bertha. The screenwriting manuals of today
sometimes preach the need for a strong “midway point” more or less exactly
halfway through a movie. Joseph H. Lewis didn't need to read any manual to
arrive, by his own keen wits and solid intuitions, at a superb mid-film
crunch-point: Julia at the closed gate to this mansion, scribbling and tossing
out a note that cries for help, so near and yet so far from freedom …
In some Female Gothic stories, women fall prey to the
comforting and comfortable illusion that has been custom-built for them – when
they should have paid heed to that accursed fate once evoked so well by
philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the course of his famous 1987 film school lecture,
“What is the Creative Act?”, a sentence best translated as: “Beware of the other person’s dream, because if you're caught in that other person’s dream, you’re fucked”. But can we entirely blame these
women? Sometimes, their new life can seem better than the old, banished one …
so why not just go with the flow? There is, usually, one very good reason to
resist it: beyond the “best alibi” scenario of fake-marriage and fake-family,
there is often the spectre of all-too-real murder lurking as the next, as yet
unannounced step in the overall Gothic plot.
Julia, for her
part, takes another route. She tries to seize back possession of the narrative
that was stolen away from her in those opening sequences of the film. She
begins to feign her acceptance of the identity thrust upon her, acquiescing in
a belief in this state of “sickness” that everybody around her keeps invoking
and attributing to her ad nauseam. In
a superb pas de deux of bodies staged
before a typical backdrop of the Female Gothic Noir – a projected arrangement
of sea, sky and rocks – Lewis inverts the usual Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre expectation
of a possible romantic clinch, as Julia patiently needles and probes her
increasingly twitchy “husband”. When one turns away from the camera, the other
turns toward it: Lewis can do a lot with a few, small moves of mise en scène.
But when Ralph,
in this conversation, turns the screw and gains the upper hand – hinting
heavily at the tragic, water-logged fate of Julia’s predecessor – Lewis alters
his shot-plan to frame Julia’s face dwarfed by Ralph’s shoulder and silhouette
in blurred profile, her speaking voice pictorially erased. “Why not try to
remember more pleasant things?”, he darkly advises her. “Like our honeymoon”.
Only then does the familiar movie clinch occur: but it’s a kiss that bites into
Julia’s lip rather than seducing her, and she flees, in vain.
The cinematic
sign that Julia is getting her hands back on the controlling reins of this
story is the repeated use that Lewis makes – modest, but telling and effective
– of short track-ins to Foch watching, thinking, sizing up, plotting. Who needs
a mile of tracking rail when Lewis and his great cinematographer Burnett Guffey
(Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) are calling the shots and utilising
every inch of available space and décor for expressive effect?
Nonetheless, Julia
still has several rude shocks and setbacks to endure. A superbly compressed
moment within the brief space of a single shot – Ralph, at the bottom of a
flight of stairs, exposing his awareness of Julia’s escape scheme, to which she
reacts with a short, sharp scream – forecasts the painful humiliations that the
domestically-imprisoned heroine of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha (1974) will suffer almost three
decades later. And meanwhile, signs of Ralph’s horrid lust keep getting more
violent in nature …
So far, I have been following My Name is Julia Ross in this piece more or less as it unfolds on
the screen: it’s the type of film that rewards such close, moment-to-moment perusal.
But now I will hold off on the final 20-minute rondo of plot revelations, for
the sake of any lucky person yet to experience them.
Let’s return, rather, to the sinister charm of the
film’s overall milieu – Britain as cleverly imagined and conjured by Hollywood
on a small budget, with the usual national stereotypes turned to their best
advantage (such as the dapper office landlord who not only lectures Dennis on
what “a body doesn’t know”, but also advises him that “night’s for play” – an
ironic line, considering that, the night before, a woman has just been drugged
and kidnapped!). And let’s ponder the further double-faces that this typically
“transvestite” production shelters: like the actors Foch and Varno, both Dutch
by birth; or the source-author “Anthony Gilbert” who was really a
woman-working-in-a-man’s-genre, Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973). Nobody is
who they seem to be in or behind My Name
is Julia Ross!
I have suggested that Joseph Lewis’ art and skill as a
film director lies in leading appearances astray, and always providing a twist
on unfolding events. This ingenious method finds its correlative in a recurrent
detail of dialogue phrasing – a pattern of casting ambivalence and doubt upon
even the simplest utterance. Certain things get said twice: either turned in a
different direction in their asserted meaning, or magnified in their essential
mystery. “Thanks for nothing … thanks for something”, spits Bertha to herself
as she pockets Julia’s rent money in the opening minutes of the film. Also
early on, Dennis and Julia dance around the subject of their real or potential
relationship: “Well, I’m not your young man”, comments Dennis. “Or am I?” Julia
replies, after a pregnant pause: “I don’t know … are you?”
In the cinema of Joseph H. Lewis, people only get to
the bottom of appearances by completely plunging into them – body, mind and
soul.
© Adrian Martin March 2018 |
