Motion Picture Herald (Oct-Dec 1956)

HOT TIP ON M-G-M’s JULIE ! By Philip K. Scheuer in the Los Angeles Times. He caught the Coast Preview! Any picture you can think of would be hard put to match “Julie” ’s 95 minutes of unalloyed, unrelieved suspense— and that goes for “Diabolique,” “Wages of Fear,” “The Bad Seed,” the individual and collected works of Hitchcock and even last year’s top “little” thriller from “Julie’s” own writer-director— “The Night Holds Terror.” The writer-director is Andrew Stone, whose assistant and film editor, once again, is his wife Virginia. The producer is Martin Melcher and the feminine star is HIS wife, Doris Day. Her co-stars are Louis Jourdan, Barry Sullivan and Frank Lovejoy. M-G-M is releasing. Not a shot was filmed at M-G-M or any other studio. As with “The Night Holds Terror” and at least partially with his two preceding suspense dramas, “Blueprint for Murder” and “The Steel Trap,” Stone worked entirely on “actual” locations in Los Angeles, Carmel, Monterey, San Francisco, Victorville and aboard a commercial airliner in flight. Its feeling of documentary, on-thespot realism reaches and holds an extraordinary pitch of tension, in both filming and tight intercutting. Dipping into his voluminous police files, Stone came up with a disturbing theme, one new to movies: The dilemma of a citizen — the woman Julie in this case — who is threatened with bodily harm yet under existing laws has no protection against it. Here the threatener is her husband, an insanely jealous man (Jourdan); but there are no witnesses and the police are helpless to interfere in a husband-wife “quarrel.” After all, it is her word against his and NO CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED. Nor are the police able to act even after the wife confirms a growing suspicion that her first husband died a murder victim and not a suicide. The verdict was suicide, the case is closed and cannot be reopened without new evidence. Julie (Miss Day) has none — only, again, the verbal confession of Jourdan. Lovejoy, as the Los Angeles homicide chief, is sympathetic to her plight. Two jealous husbands kill their mates every week in this city alone, he acknowledges. “Change your identity,” he advises Julie, “and get away as quickly as possible.” Quickly, in Julie’s case, is not quickly enough. Stone’s picture is a reporting job from start to finish. He doesn’t take time to try to “explain” Jourdan, psychologically or any other way. The man is a simple, murderous— and murdering— fact. He is impulsive but he is also cunning. Stone tells his story straight, using amazingly few artifices. Opening Sequence In the opening sequence a distraught Julie hurries from the Del Monte Lodge to her convertible. As she drives off Jourdan leaps in from the other side and clamps his foot over hers on the accelerator. The car careens around one hairpin turn after another. When the frantic woman reaches for the ignition key, his hand is there before her. Julie survives that one (as does the spectator, but barely). At the end of the picture Jourdan is still trying to take her for a ride. Just when it seems as if Stone has at length exhausted his suspense possibilities he switches to a new crisis — this time in the skies— and whips one into a lather all over again. You haven’t time to be incredulous at this airplane sequence— isn’t it happening right before your eyes? And fliers and field men have vouched for the authenticity of the technical details shown. The casting of Miss Day in her role is its own justification: she looks it and makes you share her harrowing ordeal. Her only singing is that of the title piece over the opening credits. Jourdan, a concert pianist by profession, is heard or at any rate seen in Leonard Pennario’s stirring composition, “Midnight on the Cliff” (playing by Pennario). Sullivan is Julie’s friend, a cousin of her late husband. His performance, like all of them in this superadroit, thought-through thriller, seems drawn from life itself.