My Name is Julia Ross

One of the first collections on the Criterion Channel is "Columbia Noir," which features films from that studio deemed to be film noir. I've gone on and on about what is noir and what isn't, and My Name Is Julia Ross is not noir. It is a passable psychological thriller, and at a trim 65 minutes is hard to get upset over.

Nina Foch is the title character. She's looking for a job, and is interviewed by a hatchet-faced woman for a secretarial position. The requirements are that she have no family and no young man. That should have set off alarm bells in Foch's head, but she's desperate for work.

She meets her employer, Dame May Whitty, and her son, George Macready. It's a live-in position, so she goes to sleep, but awakens in a house in Cornwall, perched on top of a cliff. Everyone is referring to her as Marion Hughes. Slowly she realizes that Macready killed his wife in a fit of anger, threw her into the sea, and now they need a woman to die of either accident or suicide to furnish a body.

Foch is trapped, unable to leave the premises, and no one believes her. A man who lived in her boarding house is her only hope, and in a bit of Hitchcockian suspense, she tries to mail a letter to him. Will it get there in time?

The film was the debut of Joseph H. Lewis, who would go on to make the seminal noir film Gun Crazy. He worked almost exclusively in B pictures, but managed to give them a flourish of style that set them apart from most. Another of his films will be discussed tomorrow.