Mi chiamo Giulia Ross

An excellent little thriller ,infuenced by Hitchcock,which was remade by Arthur Penn as "dead of winter" ;an anomaly in his filmography ,his version was closer to the horror movies of the eighties, with even gore thrown in for good measure. Joseph E.Lewis 's work is in the Gothic tradition ,with its castle by the sea and its park with high gates a la "Rebecca" ;Nina Foch is efficient as the damsel in distress, who fortunately proves herself often smarter than her persecutors ;George McRead and the marvelous Dame May Whitty,terrifying under her genial comforting attitude ,give good support ;although the film is rather short (65 min) we feel that this son has remained a little boy under his mom's thumb. (as it often happens in sir Hitchcock's works) Sit back ,turn off the lights and get some scares .

My Name Is Julia Ross is one of those gems that every now and then come from the B end of a major studio. Columbia Pictures did this one and got a good cast of some as yet unknown players.

The title role is played by Nina Foch in her salad days and she applies for a position as a secretary to Dame May Whitty. It's all a ruse as she's whisked off to the Cornwall coast from London.

Foch is kept in a genteel prison and she's constantly referred to as Whitty's balmy daughter-in-law, wife of George MacReady. Foch is having trouble keeping her own sanity as she searches for the reason that Whitty, MacReady, and the rest of the staff are treating her as they are.

This film is a solidly cast one with Foch, Peters, and Whitty just perfect in their parts. If broadcast don't miss this one.

For those who think of Dame May Witty as the kindly, slightly batty, old lady from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, this movie requires an adjustment. Here, she's anything but kindly or batty. Instead, her son, George Macready is the loony one. Just don't give him a knife, otherwise his eyes light up and no furniture cushion in the house is safe. Now we know what he has in mind for the trapped Nina Foch if he can just get out from under Mother's domineering hand.

Really tight little woman-in-danger film that keeps the suspense on high throughout. The script never strays from Foch's dilemma. She's held prisoner in a big old Gothic house on the edge of an angry sea. They're going to kill her, but why. Her predicament makes no sense. The tension mounts as she tries one escape ploy after another, but even strangers seem against her. We begin to feel her helplessness and mounting paranoia as the world turns away from her.

Director Joseph H. Lewis took a big step toward cult status with this film and understandably so. Then too, watch Foch run subtly through a gamut of emotions without once going over the top. Witty too shines as a really intimidating matriarch who knows what she wants and how to get it if she can just keep her wacko son in line. My one reservation is the climax which seems too contrived considering the timing of the events. Nonetheless, it's a good, nerve-wracking way to spend a little over an hour, courtesy Columbia studios.

A toothsome little potboiler whose 65-minute length doesn't seem a second too short, My Name is Julia Ross harks back to an English tradition of things not being what they seem -- Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is one example. Out-of-work Julia Ross (Nina Foch) finds a dream job at a new employment agency in London, whose sinister representative seems very anxious to ascertain if she has living relatives or a boyfriend. After reporting to duty, she wakes up (Having Been Drugged) in a vast Manderley-like pile on the Cornish coast, supposedly as the barmy-in-the-crumpet wife of George Macready, who displays an alarming interest in knives and ice picks. His doting, enabling mum is the irresistible Dame May Whitty (this time a model of bustling efficiency on the other side of good-vs-evil than she occupied in The Lady Vanishes). The nightmare vision of this tale unfolds claustrophobically; we know what's going on but are powerless to tell poor Julia. This movie, curiously, is regularly accorded a place of honor as one of the earliest (and very few British) films noirs. I think it's closer to the Gothic old-dark-house tradition than the American one of wet cobblestones and urban corruption; it does, however, evince a more modern, psychoanalytic cast of mind. Whatever you call it, it remains a sharply satisfying thriller.

Second-feature concerns a young woman in London desperate for a job, happy to accept live-in secretarial position with an elderly woman and her son. Thrillers about people being held in a house against their will always make me a little uneasy--I end up feeling like a prisoner too--but this rather classy B-film is neither lurid nor claustrophobic. It's far-fetched and unlikely, but not uninteresting, and our heroine (Nina Foch) is quick on her feet. Rehashing this in 1986 (as "Dead Of Winter") proved not to be wise, as the plot-elements are not of the modern-day. "Julia Ross" is extremely compact (too short at 65 minutes!) but it stays the course nicely until a too-rushed climax, which feels a little sloppy. *** from ****