Jack Kroll

“….[N]o actresses could be more appropriate, professionally and symbolically, to play these roles than Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, both remarkable performers, both born 40 years ago, both members of distinguished theatrical families, both controversial women who insisted on playing highly visible roles in left-wing politics. In "Julia," Fonda and Redgrave are close to perfection, and the pathos and power of friendship they create is the movie's great virtue.

"...."Julia" is moving in its glowing commitment to the power of friendship. The climax of the film is Lillian's last meeting with Julia in a Berlin restaurant, a powerful scene staged definitively by Zinnemann and acted stunningly by Fonda and Redgrave, who create a heartbreaking interplay of emotions without a taint of sentimentality. Lillian and Julia will never see each other again, but in the paranoid air of Nazi Germany in 1937 they can't fully express their feeling. They exchange information tersely about the latest events in their lives--Julia has had a baby, Lillian has had a Broadway success. This enforced casualness forces their faces into dramatic emblems--Julia's luminous, valedictory smile and Lillian's bitten-back, angry tears....

“Aliveness and immediacy are what's most important about Jane Fonda. She's never used her acting to project any kind of ideology or dogma; it's always the electric impact of observed life that comes through sharp and clear.... [Fonda] is likely to be the most important figure in this latest, uncertain cycle [the re-emergence of women in central film role] in a notoriously cycle-happy industry. In the end, a Jane Fonda is more important for the pleasure and enlightenment of audiences than the unseemly scrambling of moneymen. Her career already has the shape, the grace, the movielike drama of the most interesting female movie careers, like Hepburn's or Lombard's. She's a fine actress whose very behavior seems to mean something to us even before we connect it with the role she's playing. And despite her sometimes strident radicalizing that angered many Americans in a divided time, she's an image in the American grain--direct, clear, appealing, with the resilience of the old American optimism, good faith and high spirits in her movements and her voice.

"In this, she's very much her father's child...."

Jack Kroll
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