Pushing 40 at the time, Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave (as Julia) play the central couple across several decades, allowing their younger stand-ins precious few scenes. That makes navigating Lillian’s out-of-order memories hard enough, complicated further by screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s kid-gloves approach to their connection, with little more than professions of sisterly “love” to suggest anything out of the ordinary. Jason Robards, exceptional as the surly Dashiell Hammett, makes things all the more confusing with his presence, serving as a male love interest to our presumably lesbian main character.

Seldom have I felt so exasperated and unengaged during the opening half hour of a film, only to find myself on the brink of tears when everything comes together in the end. Julia is a formidable character, a Schindler-sized humanitarian who uses her considerable fortune to buy the freedom of Jews in Nazi-controlled Berlin, and yet she seems more symbol than real woman (perhaps embellished through Lillian's reminiscences). Where specifics flag, Zinnemann injects his own experience into the picture, most evident in an uprising where Nazis storm the university, attacking the Jews they find there and throwing a defenseless student from a balcony in the process.

The turning point for me — the moment when I literally leaned forward in my seat for the remainder of the film — occurs during a long train sequence in which Lillian becomes an amateur spy. Driven by her admiration and unarticulated love for Julia, she agrees to travel straight into the lions’ den (she is, after all, a Jew entering WWII-era Berlin). We see the voyage from her point of view, nervous to the point of giving herself away, every stranger a potential enemy. It’s an astonishing feat of audience identification and the first stretch of the film in which the film commits to a specific time period, winning us over in the process. We may never truly know Julia (or Lillian for that matter), but this set piece conveys just how important she must be to inspire such devotion.

Screened: April 24 @ the AMPAS Theater, part of the Academy's "Great to be Nominated" series. The event (timed to Zinnemann's 100th birthday) included a Q&A with writer Alvin Sargent, editor Walter Murch, producer Richard Roth, Fox honcho Alan Ladd Jr and "young Julia" Lisa Pelikan.