Stanley Kauffmann

"....What saves the writing scenes here, and the reading-and-opinion scenes, is that Jane Fonda is Hellman and Jason Robards is Hammett. They concentrate so hard and well, knowing that they are bucking every composer-and-teacher painter-and-master film ever made, that they legitimate the scenes, even if they can't really make them overwhelming.

“Fonda, not made up to look like Hellman but certainly looking less than her usual knockout self, always has a base-line of authenticity in her acting beneath which she simply cannot go--she is just too instinctually sound. But there are corners smudged in her performance here, lines not etched quite sharply enough, actions and reactions "told" us, rather than fulfilled. For instance, in here scenes with Julia's courier in Paris--played agreeably by Maximilian Schell--I kept wondering about Hellman's feelings, instead of feeling them. The stabs were missing: I saw only the knife flashes. Generally I felt I was watching Fonda work toward the part: I kept wishing that most scenes had been filmed about two weeks later….

“I expected the casting of Fonda and Redgrave to be a wonderful match. It turns out to be a bit one-sided, not in contest but in art. Fonda, as I was early to say and still know, is exceptionally gifted; but here Redgrave cuts finer and goes further, even allowing for the fact that she has the better part.”

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, 1977