So the BQ now wishes a Happy Belated Birthday to one of our all time favorite actresses.....a woman whose presence and very name symbolized cinematic dreams of eternal happiness with the girl next door. Even more remarkable,,,,,,,,the charmed lives led by Doris Day in her films were a universe away from the woes of the real individual, who suffered untold abuse and betrayal from her succession of worthless husbands.
And speaking of crummy husbands....that's why we focused on this modest, odd little thriller in Doris's filmography. Shot fast and cheap in black and white, the film was produced, as were most of Day's subsequent films, by her third husband Martin Melcher. After Melcher's death decades later, Day discovered he'd systematically looted her finances, leaving her penniless. (What's worse, according to legend, he veto'd the chance for Day to play Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate")
The husband that Day contends with in "Julie", however, is closer in character to her previous two husbands, both abusers. (Which is why she expressed qualms about taking this role...)The film wastes no time at all establishing Day's obsessively jealous, concert pianist spouse, (Louis Jourdan) as a murderous psychotic. Day flees their spectacular Monteray seaside home after Jourdan freely admits that he engineered the supposed 'suicide' death of her late first husband.
Jourdan stalks her to San Francisco, where Day resumes her old job as an airline stewardess. Not content with tormenting her with phone calls blaring his frenzied piano playing, Jourdan boards a flight she's working on. And since this all takes place in the pre-terrorist l950's, Jourdan has no trouble getting on the plane with a gun in his coat pocket........truth is, he might have little or no trouble today either, since the TSA officers wouldn't notice him as they thoroughly patted down 8 years olds and invalid grandmothers.....
Normally you'd expect a story like this to become a typical grandly feverish Hollywood melodrama, a possible pre-cursor to "Sleeping With The Enemy" or even "Fatal Attraction". But "Julie"s writer-director Andrew L.Stone was not the guy for that movie. Stone despised Hollywood artifice and rapidly made his reputation with thrillers shot documentary-style on real locations. (The standard joke about Stone....if he had directed "On The Beach", none of us would be alive to watch it)
You can tell Stone had little or no interest in the whole crazy husband part of the movie. He races through it to get the movie's last half hour and its primary set-piece......in which Jourdan engages the plane's pilots in a cockpit shootout. In his last gasping vengeful act, Jourdan leaves Day alive as the only able-bodied person to land the plane. And this leaves director Stone to stage a meticulous re-enactment of what air traffic controllers would have to do to help land a plane under the control of an amateur pilot......clearly his entire reason for writing this film in the first place.
Okay, it's profoundly silly hokum, long roundly ridiculed along with the other, more infamous 'stewardess-flying-the-plane' movie, "Airport '75. (That one required Karen Black at the controls, since she appeared in virtually every movie in l975.) But Doris Day, an instinctive actress rather than a technically trained thespian, could put across anxious dread that looked and sounded like the real thing. Corny and ludicrous as this sequence may sound......we defy you to mock this scene while you sit there watching it.
Let's just say that, as a pilot, Doris acquits herself at least as well as Harrison Ford in that she avoids skimming over any parked planes at the airport. Therefore, the BQ will proudly serve a full 3 bags of airline peanuts to "Julie" (***).....Doris may have shifted in flight, but she guarantees a happy landing......
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