There is some spectacularly bad acting in 1945’s My Name Is Julia Ross but it’s worth a look in spite of that. And at only 65 minutes, it’s not exactly an investment. To sell it a bit harder, it hums with weirdness, is very nicely directed by Joseph H Lewis, who was renowned for spinning straw into gold (or at least gold plate), and it also has some very good acting in it, too, mostly by Dame May Whitty (most famous for being the titular lady in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes). George Macready, who plays her son, is pretty good too.
The set-up is this: Whitty and Macready play a pair of fruitloops trying to kidnap an innocent woman – Julia Ross (Nina Foch) – and spirit her off to Cornwall. There they plan to kill her in order to exonerate Ralph, the son, of killing his wife, whom Ross resembles.
The why just about makes sense but the how isn’t really that clear, and it certainly isn’t entirely obvious why mother and son want Julia to believe she actually is the dead woman before they kill her, but they do.
The plot is potboiler Hitchcock – Ross is a second Mrs De Winter, if you like, from Rebecca (also set in Cornwall), the new “wife” standing in for the dead wife. Or looked at from another angle she’s Kim Novak in Psycho, being groomed into being a replacement perfect woman. Or then again she’s one of the blondes in Psycho (Vera Miles or Janet Leigh, take your pick) with Ralph as a Norman Bates figure, a guy too in love with his mother by a very long way.
Throughout, Ralph is coded as gay. It’s claimed that there’s a financial irregularity behind the death of his wife but that doesn’t quite ring true and in any case Macready is playing “weak” Ralph as a man who is, to use the old expression, very light on his feet.
So, the terrible acting. Nina Foch as Julia Ross is awful. She has the oversized head of a film star and great legs but her performance here let’s the side down. It’s her screen debut so we can maybe cut her some slack. As housemaid Alice, Queenie Leonard is not exactly setting the screen on fire either. Hers is a role meaty enough to merit a listing in the credits but she doesn’t get one, so maybe she was taking her revenge.
And the good stuff. Whitty, really excellent as the old harridan mother shading malice into every line of fluted delivery. Lovely stuff. She was made a dame on account of her theatrical work, but is excellent on the screen too.
The acting isn’t important, though, it’s the way Lewis handles the material. While stock music amps up the melodrama to hysterical proportions, Lewis weaves visual poetry out of his material, starting with his opening off-kilter shot (he was known for them) and working up the atmospherics with tight framing. And stylish lighting, by director of photography Burnett Guffey, who goes wild with the geometric shadows in a few key scenes – he lit everything from In a Lonely Place to Bonnie and Clyde.
It’s often referred to as British noir, on account of it being set in England, but it’s about as British as Rebecca, which was shot in California, as this (probably) was. There’s a little scene set in the Cornish village near the house where Julia is being held and it looks about as British as a Hershey bar. And the mood-setting shots of waves washing along a sandy beach seem more Big Sur than Mousehole.
A real mixed bag. The good stuff is great, the bad stuff is properly bad but it’s entirely fascinating, and like I say, it isn’t long.
My Name Is Julia Ross (as part of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics III, with The Mob, The Burglar, Drive a Crooked Road, Tight Spot) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
