Julie (Arwin Productions, MGM, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that I switched to TCM for a highly unusual presentation of the 1956 film Julie, written and directed by Andrew Stone for Arwin Productions, the company founded by Doris Day and her husband Martin Melcher, released through MGM. Melcher was determined to extend his wife’s range as an actress and get her stronger, more challenging roles than she’d got as a Warner Bros. contractee. This was the second Arwin production – the first had been Young at Heart, a 1954 musical remake of Four Daughters which featured Day in the part originally played by Rosemary Lane and Frank Sinatra (in their only film together) in John Garfield’s old role, which Arwin and Warner Bros. co-produced – and in between Melcher had landed Day plum roles as 1920’s torch singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me (probably Day’s finest acting role) and as the female lead opposite James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his 1934 British hit The Man Who Knew Too Much. (Contrary to Hitchcock’s remark to François Truffaut that “the first version was made by a highly talented amateur and the second was made by a professional,” I’ve always like the first The Man Who Knew Too Much far better than the second – and after I saw Day’s 1953 film Calamity Jane, which cast her as an expert markswoman, I wished Hitchcock and his writers had kept the original ending in which the woman uses her shooting skills to pick off the villain who’s holding her child hostage without hurting the child.)

Julie was a particularly difficult film to make because she literally had to relive her past. It cast her as Julie Benton, recently married to Lyle Benton (Louis Jourdan) following the mysterious death of her first husband Bob (whom we never see), and in the early 1940’s when Day was just starting her career as Les Brown’s band singer she’d been in abusive marriages herself to band musicians Al Jordan and George Weidler. In fact, Jordan had been so angry when she got pregnant that he beat her up in hopes of triggering her to miscarry. It didn’t work – she gave birth to her first and only child, a boy named Terry – though it’s not surprising given what his biological dad did to his mom that he used his stepfather’s last name, Terry Melcher. (Terry Melcher grew up to be a rock record producer for his mom’s label, Columbia, where he signed Paul Revere and the Raiders and The Byrds. He also encountered a young, terrible singer-songwriter named Charles Manson, who expected Melcher to sign him to a Columbia recording contract. When Melcher declined, Manson formed a psychopathic hatred of him and decided to get back at him by sending the women in his “Family” commune to kill him. But since Melcher no longer lived in the house on Cielo Drive where Manson had visited him, Manson and his girl goon squad ended up killing the people who did: Sharon Tate and her entourage.) Julie the movie has similarities to Gaslight – a woman married to a psychologically (and, in this film, physically as well) abusive husband whom she realizes wants to kill her – but in Gaslight it took a while for both the heroine and the audience to realize the husband was evil, whereas in Julie we know that from the get-go.

The opening scene features Julie and Lyle (the name “Lyle Benton” seems oddly Anglo for a character played by an actor as ineradicably French as Louis Jourdan) driving home from a party at which Lyle had a jealous hissy-fit over Julie talking to another man. Lyle reaches his leg over to Julie’s and pushes her foot full-bore on the accelerator, causing the car to speed uncontrollably. She pleads with him to get his foot off hers so she can drive normally, but he refuses. Ultimately the car veers off the road, though at least it doesn’t crash into anyone or anything. Lyle is predictably apologetic, asking Julie to forgive him his spate of uncontrolled jealousy, and she does. In fact the first third of Julie is a quite good presentation of the dilemma faced by a woman in the grip of an abusive husband; she makes the predictable excuses for him and refuses the advice of her late husband’s best friend, Cliff Henderson (Barry Sullivan – and seeing him as a good guy is as surprising as seeing Louis Jourdan as a bad one). Julie tells Cliff that she can’t leave Lyle because he’ll just track her down and either beat her into submission or kill her. Cliff has re-investigated the death of Julie’s first husband Bob and has concluded that Lyle actually killed him and then faked it to look like suicide (which is what the police ruled it) just so he could get Julie on the rebound. They take their suspicions to the San Francisco police (Julie is set in San Francisco and just south of it in Carmel, where ironically Doris Day settled and lived for decades after she retired), but are told by Detective Lieutenant Pringle (Frank Lovejoy) that there isn’t anything the law can do to protect her until Lyle actually attacks her. Nonetheless, she tries to break free from him, leaving town and taking a job as a flight attendant for Amalgamated, a so-called “nonscheduled” airline (essentially the Val-U-Jet or Spirit of the 1950’s), since that’s how she’d made her living before she married Bob. Alas, Lyle tracks her down and terrorizes her again.

She’s able to escape him – for now – and moves into a San Francisco apartment building under a different name, rooming with fellow Amalgamated flight attendant Denise Martin (Aline Towne). Because Lyle has lost track of Julie, he goes after Cliff instead, waylaying him and forcing him to drive to a deserted spot in the countryside, where Lyle shoots him. Fortunately, Cliff is only wounded, not killed, and a local farmer, Ellis (Hank Patterson), takes him in and calls the local operator to get Cliff medical help. When Cliff comes to, he frantically calls the San Francisco police to warn them that Lyle is on his way to San Francisco to kill Julie, but he can’t remember the name of her apartment building (only the first four letters) or the name she’s using there. Meanwhile, the dispatcher at Amalgamated calls Julie to cover a flight that needs someone in an emergency, and Julie at first refuses but then reluctantly takes the gig for fear of losing her job if she doesn’t. Alas, Lyle – using Cliff’s car – is following her and ultimately ends up at the airport, where he somehow sneaks on to the plane where she’s working. His intent is to torture her by shooting both pilots so the plane will crash uncontrollably and kill not only Julie and Lyle himself but all the passengers on board. He kills the flight captain and wounds the co-pilot sufficiently that he’s too weak to fly the plane himself, and from there Julie turns into an Airport movie as Julie takes the controls herself and brings the plane in for a bumpy but safe landing at San Francisco International Airport with the help of the ground crew giving her step-by-step instructions.

If nothing else, Julie is a good example of the Doris Day that became an icon among second-wave feminists: not only is the first half of the movie almost an object lesson in the helplessness of women in the face of abusive husbands (the laws on the books today to protect women in situations like this didn’t exist in 1956, and even now they often don’t work), the second half is a tribute to the courage of an ordinary woman put into a situation where other people’s lives are dependent on her mastering a skill set she’s totally unfamiliar with, and she comes through beautifully. (Julie mentions during the climactic scene that she’s not a total novice at flying – she once took a flying lesson with a trained pilot who put her behind the controls – but it was a small private plane instead of an airliner and she didn’t have to land it.) After the film, Eddie Muller mentioned the movies made since that have used the situation of a flight attendant pressed into service to land a plane in an emergency – Airport 1975 and the spoof Airplane! five years later – though I have vague memories of one that did it even before Julie: a late-1930’s film from (I believe) RKO with Robert Armstrong as the trained pilot on the ground who gives the flight attendant the necessary step-by-step instructions on how to land in an emergency. I also found myself mentally remixing the ending of Julie to have Julie decide to make flying her career and train to become an airline pilot for real. Talk about flying through the glass ceiling, both figuratively and literally!