A Woman of Parts

Adorable Julia is a smooth and zesty little romantic comedy built on what seem like blueprints for a flop. To make a film of Somerset Maugham's 1937 novel Theatre was to risk anachronism, and to make it in French ought to have guaranteed disaster. What could be done to enhance the hackneyed backstage tale of a London actress who gambles her good name and marriage in an affair with a Casanova not much older than her teen-age son?

What could be done is what the producers did: they hired Lilli Palmer to play the actress, Jean Sorel to play her callow paramour, and Charles Boyer --that great screen lover of yore--to play the cuckolded husband. In a secondary role, Boyer deftly blends temperament and tolerance to contrast against the beautiful worthlessness of Sorel. But Julia becomes most adorable when Actress Palmer wriggles into character to show all the charm, vanity, insight, ego, witchery and wit of a woman who would rather have top billing than top cooing. Enjoying a last fling at youth, Julia tucks away her qualms, reaches for her checkbook and asks her swain: "How can I thank you?" He knows. So does she. "I haven't cried since The Stricken Heart,'" she soliloquizes unhappily. When she realizes she has been made a fool of, however, Julia refuses to play the castoff older woman. She plots a worldly vengeance that firmly establishes the triumph of age over youth, then goes off to indulge in a high-caloric orgy of forbidden foods. It is a precisely shaded performance. Aspiring starlets would do well to note how the Palmer method turns a somewhat faded lesson in love into a vivid lesson in acting.

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