Who payed the critics

Waste of time

An absolute waste of money

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Nina Foch (Julia) is down on her luck. She owes 3 weeks rent and hasn't got a job. Her love life is also empty although she is friendly with ex-boyfriend Roland Varno (Dennis). We are thrust straight into her ordeal once she applies to be secretary for wealthy Dame May Witty (Mrs Hughes).The film goes from mystery to thriller whilst all the while keeping the suspense and evoking a noirish feel. Don't look for holes in the story, just go with it. The cast are excellent and we have a lead character who thankfully, is not a wimp. Nina Foch is continually fighting back which puts the audience on her side. It's quite disturbing how easily her life is turned upside down and threatened.Years ago, I worked at a market research company and one day, Billy didn't turn up to his shift. No-one knew where he was. This was unusual especially as the survey we were conducting was about sexual habits and he loved that kind of thing. When he finally appeared the next day, it turned out that he had been tied up in a dungeon. Not as a kidnap victim but for his own pleasure. Still, it highlights how easily one can be thrown off kilter from one's normal routine. Nina Foch fights back from her dungeon in this one.

A real production line movie that has its moments, but ultimately not really worth it. Best parts are when Dame May tells the as always super creepy McCready to "Put that knife away" . Those scenes are a hoot! However, those are countered by some of the worst acting on film by Joy Harington as Bertha the housekeeper. Other than hiring an actor who had never heard the English language could those lines be delivered any worse. It has decent atmosphere and cinematography, but in this case director John H Lewis, who in his IMDb bio is said to be famous for elevating mediocre content with great style, does not pull off a cinematic miracle. However, if you watch another of his films THE BIG COMBO (1955) there are some amazing examples of just that.

Nina Foch insists that "My Name is Julia Ross" in this 1945 film noir also starring Dame May Witty and George Macready. It's short, and because it is, the film suffers. It could have stood to have been a good fifteen minutes to a half hour longer.When I was growing up, Foch was a fixture on television, playing a neurotic woman, the wife with the cheating husband, the nervous wreck. She became one of the great acting teachers in Los Angeles. Here, she's a pretty young ingenue playing the title role. Julia answers an ad for a secretary and is hired immediately by Mrs. Hughes and her son Ralph. Little does she know - though we learn immediately - that the employment agent is a front, set up to get just the right woman for this assignment, a woman with no family and no boyfriend.It's a live-in situation; once Julia gets to the house, she's drugged, and when she wakes up, she's told she's Mrs. Hughes and not allowed to leave.The acting is very good. Low budget but still entertaining - some things, particularly at the end, happen way too quickly, which is why I said the movie is too short. Nevertheless, I recommend it.

MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS is a mesmerizing 1945 B thriller from Joseph H. Lewis, arguably one of the very finest directors of Hollywood noir films. This 65 minute Gothic oddity from Columbia Pictures came after Lewis' lengthy apprenticeship as the helmer of a string of poverty row westerns, East Side Kids comedies, horror melodramas (including the incredibly bizarre Bela Lugosi shocker THE INVISIBLE GHOST) and standard studio B product (SECRETS OF A CO-ED, BOMBS OVER BURMA, THE FALCON IN SAN FRANCISCO, etc)---all of which set the stage rather nicely for what was to come from the enormously talented and inventive Mr. Lewis. MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (as well as SO DARK THE NIGHT from the following year) introduced a director who had mastered the rare and delicate art telling a dark and probing tale swiftly and efficiently on the most modest of budgets. Later Lewis productions like GUN CRAZY (1949) and THE BIG COMBO (1955), despite the expanded scope of their narrative structure, continued to rely upon deft, lucid camera work and effective low-key lighting. And very modest resources.MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS probably owes more to the tradition of British mysteries (it's set in a studio-bound England) than it does to conventional film noir attitudes and trappings. A young woman (Nina Foch) agrees to take a position in the home of an elderly woman (Dame Mae Witty). Two days after her arrival she awakens from a deep sleep in a completely strange house and, mysteriously enough, with a brand new identity---that of the old woman's daughter-in-law. Told that she's been the victim of a nervous breakdown, she struggles to grasp the utter and seemingly hopeless nature of her predicament. But before long she begins to piece together the strange and troubling truth behind this dark mystery, that her "husband" (the always menacing George Macready) most probably murdered his real wife and that she's been duped into participating in a harrowing and sinister scheme. Much of what distinguishes this otherwise modest tale are the indelible touches that Lewis brings to the production, marking it as the first of his truly serious endeavors as a film director.