Lizzie

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.

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.

For whatever it's worth, Lizzie is the best movie Hugo Haas ever directed. And that's not a left-handed compliment. Based on a Shirley Jackson novel, Lizzie remains an effective, if tawdry, glimpse into Multiple Personality Disorder, a controversial syndrome that understandably lends itself to exploitation (hence the suspense mechanisms of the plot). But Lizzie ends up rendering better justice to its subject than the more prestigious The Three Faces of Eve of the same year.

Eleanor Parker plays Lizzie. She also plays Elizabeth and Beth, two other facets of her character's (characters'?) fractured psyche. By day, she's mousy Elizabeth, boring her fellow-workers at a museum with complaints about constant headaches; she also keeps finding poison-pen letters from somebody named Lizzie. At closing time, she goes home to the house (a stark horror) she shares with her aunt (Joan Blondell), who slouches around in a horse-blanket bathrobe while killing still another bottle of bourbon. They cohabit in an uneasy truce, broken by unseemly episodes such as Blondell's being called, from the top of a steep, shadowy staircase, a `drunken old slut.'

Another of Elizabeth's litany of complaints is that she can't sleep. Little does she know that live-wire Lizzie emerges at night, slapping on the makeup with a trowel and then heading out to a piano bar where Johnny Mathis sings. There she guzzles the bourbon she claims to hate (hence those headaches) and picks up men, including a handyman from the museum whom she doesn't recognize next morning.

When Blondell catches her red-handed (ungrateful Lizzie polished off the bottle), kindly neighbor Haas suggests that maybe it's time, as Ann Landers would have phrased it, to `seek professional help.' Richard Boone seems an unlikely candidate for a psychiatrist, but he proves a surprisingly reassuring and compassionate one. Using hypnosis, he uncovers the three layers of his patient's personality. The problem lies in coaxing the well-adjusted Beth (whom nobody has ever seen or heard) out of her psychological shell....

Near the end, Haas overreaches briefly with a dream sequence that recalls the loony phantasmagoria of Glen or Glenda, Ed Wood's autobiographical essay on the torment of the cross-dresser. And of course Lizzie's tidy wrap-up, in uplifting Hollywood fashion, is so much dollar-book Freud. That aside, the movie draws upon on a more valid explanation of MPD than does the de-fanged and disingenuous The Three Faces of Eve. Not until Sybil, a hair-raising 1976 TV movie, would a more candid exploration of the traumatic roots of the syndrome appear, for which Sally Field copped an Emmy. Small wonder: Parts like this are like catnip for scenery-chewers and rarely fail to wow critics (Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her Eve). It all but defies the order of nature that Susan Hayward didn't, somehow, manage to grab the role of Lizzie. But then again, she always played Lizzie.

Shirley Jackson's "The Bird's Nest" has always been one of my favorite novels, so I was excited to find that it had been made into a movie (albeit one that's nearly impossible to find) 'way back when. The film's black-and-white 1950s graininess perfectly evokes its era, as do the starchy clothes and rigid hair of the characters, and the dreadful, over-the-top "score" of shrieking, dissonant violins. The beginning of the movie promised an experience so terrible that I was tempted to hold off watching it till I could gather some of my snarkier friends, but it was already too late -- I'd been sucked in and was having too much fun to quit. As the movie goes on, it gets much better, yet it remains enjoyable, every now and again flinging itself headlong into vertiginous swoops of insane bathos. All in all, I found it perfectly delightful, and can only summarize it by plagiarizing Mae West: When it's good, it's very good, and when it's bad, it's better.

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.