Lizzie

''Lizzie" is an intriguing film with the potential to be better than it is. It starts off well with the ever reliable Eleanor Parker setting the mood and immediately winning audience sympathy. Alarmingly, on Elizabeth's return home from work, the film suddenly feels trashy with Joan Blondell, as her frumpy aunt, giving a wild, over the top performance that I find quite repulsive. What a role for Myrna Loy who would have nailed it. Richard Boone matches Parker in class, giving a sound and convincing performance as the pragmatic psychiatrist.

Parker goes somewhat adrift in transforming from the timid Elizabeth to the vulgar Lizzie and the night club scene comes across as ludicrous ; a sort of Jekyll and Hyde parody. I have always admired Eleanor Parker but it's sad to see her talents compromised by unsure direction and the painful scene-stealing attempts by the shrill Blondell.

I intend keeping my DVD copy but will be re-watching the film for the best scenes ; those featuring Parker and Boone.

The very same year Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve, Eleanor Parker played in a nearly identical film released a few months earlier. She, too, played an unstable woman with three personalities who seeks help from a therapist. Some of the scenes were so similar, it's as if one of the screenplays was a rough draft of the other! When Richard Boone hypnotized Eleanor and asked, "May I speak to Lizzie?" you can't help but recall when Lee J. Cobb hypnotized Joanne and asked, "May I speak to Eve Black?"

When you research the similarities between the film, you'll find a sickening backstory: 20th Century Fox tried to "hurry up" the publication of the book behind The Three Faces of Eve because the book behind Lizzie (produced by MGM) had been a hit and sparked public interest in multiple personality disorders. One movie is very famous, and one is obscure and has never been heard of. It's not fair, but that's Hollywood for you.

Lizzie is an inferior movie, but once again, it's not really fair. Eleanor Parker is a far superior actress, and she doesn't falter in anything she's asked to do. However, the screenplay is weak and the production obviously wasn't given as much money. Script versus script, Joanne is given a lot more to do to shock the audiences; but had the cast been reversed, Eleanor would have been more than capable of handling it-and much better.

Basically, if you like the story of The Three Faces of Eve and want to see the "original" with Eleanor Parker, Richard Boone, and Joan Blondell instead, or if you want to give justice its due by watching the movie that came first with an open mind, rent it. If you do, you'll get to see a twenty-year-old Johnny Mathis performing "It's Not for Me to Say" and "Warm and Tender" at the piano bar! You'll also see Richard Boone in a totally against-type performance as an intelligent and sympathetic therapist (far more convincing than Lee was), and Eleanor Parker showing off her wonderful acting chops as much as she's allowed to with a B-picture screenplay.

1957 was apparently a year for muliptle personalities. Joanne Woodward got her Oscar for The Three Faces Of Eve and Eleanor Parker came out with this film Lizzie.

With the acclaim that Woodward's film got which made her a star, Lizzie seems to be lost in the shuffle. That's a pity because Parker's performance is noteworthy and may have been Oscar worthy.

The similarities between the films are really astonishing. Parker is a woman with three recognizable personalities, a mousy good girl, a tramp who writes nasty letters to her other selves and a relatively normal type. Both go through some therapy with a psychiatrist in this film Richard Boone to find a cure. As is usual with films on mental illness the cure is way too simplistic. But the moviegoing public wants easy answers to life's problems. It's why they go to the cinema.

Also note a good performance by Joan Blondell as Lizzie's frowsy drunk of an aunt whom she lives with

Lizzie is wortthwhile viewing.

Lizzie is a magnificent study of multiple personality disorder, a far superior film to The Three Faces of Eve, which won the Acadamy Award that year. Eleanor Parker makes all her transformations between Lizzie's characters on screen, a far more challenging task that disappearing off camera as Joanne Woodward did! Her portrayal is subtle and wonderful. I highly recommend this movie.

My unpublished review was written in 1973 while I was studying the films of Hugo Haas, presented here in shortened form.

Of all the films he has directed, "Lizzie" is Hugo Haas's most Hollywood establishment-oriented, in that he was not writing and producing (thus reducing his usually clearly defined auteur status) and he was working with a star cast. Thus, "Lizzie" serves as a convenient "control" against which his more personal films can be judged.

Camera set-ups, compositions, camera movements, use of sets and decor, and direction of actors all reveal Hugo Haas's style, although the film's "3 Faces of Eve" , Shirley Jackson-novelized material is really only tangential to the mainstream of Haas's melodramatic conception. His natural talent for pouring on the sleaziness is kept within bounds here, for he is making a B- rather than a Z-budgeted film. Itis interesting to compare the film with Paul Newman's "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" (far inferior to Haas' modest effort), which stars an overacting Joanne Woodward a la her "3 Faces of Eve", but relies on simplicity of style and kitchen-sink sleaziness of which Haas is the master.

The first elaborate dolly shots and swivels in the Natural History Museum which open the film are clear indications of Haas' inspiration. They economically for some set-up a cold, dead milieu sans overstatement in addition to establishing the groundwork for some memorable nightmare fantasy shots later in the film. The lack of showy variety in the stagings reflects a limited budget. All the action takes place in: museum exhibit area, Eleanor Parker's office there, Joan Blondell's house, outside in the yard with neighbor Haas, a low-life bar, the roof of the museum, and flashbacks at the beach. Haas's exploitation of these stagings is magnificent, with the additional staging of Richard Boone's office taking a lion's share of screen time.

Eleanor Parker's tour-de-force as Elizabeth/Lizzie/Beth is of special note because it combines her own well-demonstrated acting range a la "Caged", while indicating the overlay of Haas's heightened intensity style. It proves the sad fact that Haas's own films as quadruple-threat man would have been more successful if he could have afforded top actresses instead of borderline amateurs like Cleo Moore and Beverly Michaels. Haas's understanding of cinematic problems is well demonstrated as he definitively contrasts Eleanor's personality with her makeup. Thus, after the requisite establishing scenes, Haas has a scene of Lizzie in Elizabeth's makeup "coming out", and a climactically powerful scene of Elzabeth seeing herself in the mirror as the gaish, uninhibited-looking Lizzie. His use of the 3-sided mirror is made memorable by Haas's complete elimination of distraction -there are no other objects or interesting bits of detailing save the four images of Eleanor in this medium shot in her bedroom.