My Name Is Julia Ross Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

My Name Is Julia Ross Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 27, 2019

If you’re old enough that you go back to the “Dark Ages” of the early VHS and VCR years, do you remember what the first movie you rented to bring home and watch was? Because I am an unapologetic and inveterate geek about such things, I remember my first rental. Before even any major chain arrived in Portland, a number of smaller “mom and pop” video rental shops popped up, including one right by where I was working at the time, and I was extremely excited to go over there on a lunch hour one day and plunk down my two dollars (or whatever it was) for my first ever rental of a VHS movie, Dead of Winter. Dead of Winter owed its genesis to My Name is Julia Ross, a spare but rather unsettling noir from 1945 that helped promote both star Nina Foch and director Joseph H. Lewis (kind of cheekily, one of the villains in Dead of Winter is a character named Joseph Lewis). While I may invite the umbrage of fans of My Name is Julia Ross, I personally find Dead of Winter to be the more disturbing viewing experience, both due to some rejiggering of plot elements which arguably make the underlying conceit at least a bit more believable, but also due to at least one absolutely horrifying addition (or removal, as the case may be, for those who know Dead of Winter and a “surgical” subplot it memorably features). That said, what’s kind of interesting, at least for those who have seen Dead of Winter but not this film, is how My Name is Julia Ross manages to stuff so much content, including some fascinating if tangential supporting characters, into a running time that barely gets to the hour mark. It’s perhaps unavoidable that My Name is Julia Ross’ relative brevity means that contextualizing and background information is awfully on the slim side at times, but for a perceived “B-movie”, My Name is Julia Ross is often surprisingly visceral and it perhaps has a bit of subtext relevant to its era that is pretty much entirely missing from Dead of Winter.

Note: My Name is Julia Ross is one of those films that is probably most fun to view "cold", without the courtesy of a potentially spoiler laden plot summary. For those unacquainted with either this film or Dead of Winter, I personally recommend skipping down to the technical portions of the review, below.

Julia Ross (Nina Foch) is a single woman trying desperately to make ends meet in post-World War II London. She’s harangued by her apartment house’s cleaning lady Bertha (Joy Harrington), a harridan who seems to take special delight in pointing out Julia has received a letter from a former beau announcing his engagement (this character kind of magically returns, unmarried, to provide a bit of romantic interest as well as a suitable hero to rescue what will become a damsel in distress). In desperate straits, Julia answers an ad from an employment agency which is seeking a secretary where a perhaps slightly sinister seeming lady named Mrs. Sparkes (Anita Bolster) outlines the job duties while kind of oddly making sure that Julia has no close relatives lurking around. Julia is offered the job as secretary to the apparently sweet elderly Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty), and is asked to move immediately to the Hughes home. A quick reveal after Julia leaves to pack suggests that Mrs. Hughes, her son Ralph (George Macready) and Mrs. Sparkes have more on their agenda than merely hiring a secretary.

That hunch about ulterior motives plays out when Julia recovers from a probable drugging to awaken at an isolated Cornwall estate that overlooks a roaring ocean, and is "informed" she's actually the wife of Ralph and has suffered a nervous breakdown. Now it's here that My Name is Julia Ross' conceit may not withstand the same sort of scrutiny as can the similar plot device in Dead of Winter. As becomes evident after a while, Julia has been chosen not just because she has no close relatives, but because she resembles Ralph's late first wife. The whole employment agency was a setup in order to find the "right" candidate, but it all seems almost ludicrously far fetched. In Dead of Winter, the Julia character, now called Julie (Mary Steenburgen), is an actress answering a casting call for a particular type and look, something that may help (if only a bit) elide some of the premise's more tenuous underpinnings. The whole reason why Julia (and/or Julie) is even "needed" is also arguably better handled in Dead of Winter.

All of this said, there's some really fascinating content here for noir fans. That "cultural zeitgeist" subtext I referred to above is mentioned in passing in the appreciation of the film and Lewis included on this Blu-ray as a supplement, in terms of women who had been working during World War II being forced to return to a more domestic role once the men returned. Here, that basic idea is presented as a perhaps even more relevant "bait and switch" where Julia is offered a supposedly meaningful job as a secretary and then is shoehorned into being somebody's "wife" instead. Also kind of interesting in terms of cinematic analogs are certain comparisons that could be made between this 1945 "quickie" and a probably better known and better appreciated classic from just a year later, Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, including the plot point of an isolated female dealing with a nefarious "husband" and his overbearing mother.

Because everything is telescoped so dramatically in the probably too brief film, the tension really is more vignette driven and therefore may not build as much as possible. Even the climax may strike some as a little underwhelming, with an arguably too quick reveal and then dismissal of Ralph's subterfuge, and then an equally quick appearance of Julia's friend Dennis (Roland Varno) and some police as a veritable Deus ex Machina to set everything right.

My Name Is Julia Ross Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

My Name is Julia Ross is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Academy with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.34:1. Arrow's insert booklet only contains some relatively generic verbiage about the transfer:

My Name is Julia Ross is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1 [sic] with mono audio. The film was transferred in High Definition and supplied to Arrow Films by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

The back cover offers a little more info by stating that the transfer is culled from a "2K restoration of the film by Sony Pictures". While perhaps not at the top tier of the often fantastic looking restorations and high definition presentations that Sony Columbia has provided fans over the years, I personally don't think fans of this film will have much if anything to complain about. The grain field is a little gritty quite a bit of the time, something that's probably only increased by pretty nonstop use of optical dissolves from sequence to sequence. Contrast is generally solid, and gray scale looks nicely modulated. There are still a few signs of age related wear and tear, including some rough moments in the optical dissolves, and there's some noticeable if minor and not especially distracting flicker that tends to be most apparent against lighter backgrounds. But detail levels look very good to excellent throughout, with some fine detail like the herringbone patterns on some suit jackets resolving without any issues.

My Name Is Julia Ross Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

My Name is Julia Ross features an LPCM 2.0 mono track that has a bit of wobbliness and crackling distortion in some of the music cues, but which otherwise offers dialogue and effects (like the storm tossed seas outside of the Hughes estate in Cornwall) without any major issues. The sound design of the film is pretty minimal, aside from a few ambient environmental effects from the outdoor material, but little bursts of energy, like a mirror that shatters when Julia throws an object at it reverberate with decent force and accuracy.

My Name Is Julia Ross Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary by Alan K. Rode


• Identity Crisis: Joseph H. Lewis at Columbia (1080p; 21:35) is a really interesting analysis of both Lewis' directorial style and some themes of My Name is Julia Ross by Nora Fiore, also known as The Nitrate Diva.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:37)

Additionally, Arrow has supplied its typically nicely appointed insert booklet.

My Name Is Julia Ross Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you've never seen Dead of Winter, I highly recommend queueing it up as a double feature with My Name is Julia Ross. The earlier film probably suffers from being too rushed, with not quite enough development offered to its interwoven plot strands, but it's still quietly disturbing in its own way. Arrow has provided a release with generally solid technical merits and some enjoyable supplements. Recommended.