My Name is Julia Ross

B-film maverick Joseph H. Lewis delivered a low-rent yet brilliantly stylized reply to REBECCA and GASLIGHT starring a sensitive Nina Foch, in her debut role, as a young woman abducted to a seaside mansion to play the role of an already dead woman and victim of a sinister scheme. With George Macready as a knife wielding psychotic man-child and Dame May Whitty as his coddling elderly mother, MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS releases the Gothic spirits of the Forties woman-trapped-in-an-old-house cycle into a brisk thriller animated by comically irreverent touches. True to its boldly assertive title, MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS flaunts the rich potential of the B-film to act as a revealingly distorting mirror of the more predictable and prestigious big-budgeted A-films. Indeed, scenes of Foch pulling apart the wall panels and stair cases to discover secret passages seem to subversively celebrate the thread-bare sets of Lewis’ low-budget production. An unexpected break out hit, MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS was so popular it was elevated by Columbia to an A-feature and moved to the prestigious top half of double bills. (Haden Guest)

With SO DARK THE NIGHT