My Name Is Julia Ross

My Name Is Julia Ross

1945. USA. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Screenplay by Muriel Roy Bolton. With Nina Foch, Dame Mae Whitty, George Macready. An unexpected hit for Columbia in 1945, Julia Ross was among the first of many postwar films to blend the fatalism of film noir with the sentiment of gothic romance. Nina Foch, in her breakthrough role, is the lonely young woman who accepts a job as a private secretary to a wealthy old woman (Whitty) but wakes up one morning to find herself a prisoner of her employer’s softly menacing son (Macready, working his way toward his unforgettable performance in Gilda). The veteran B director Joseph H. Lewis films with unrestrained noir panache, creating dense patterns of shadow and wildly distorted spaces. 65 min.