Lizzie

Elizabeth Richmond is suffering from recurring headaches and difficulty in sleeping. She receives threatening letters signed by the one she was in, but she has no-one with that name. Because of her mental situation has worsened; she and dr. Neil Wright, and her attempts. Deep in her subconscious finds that dr. Wright's three personalities: the shy Elizabeth, as we all know her; she was wild, as her mother, the gentle Day, as she was supposed to be. Wright should try out the personality of Day as any to leave. Hugo Haas, this one is a bit different movie , and I was pleasantly surprised by the theme of multiple personalities in an old movie . Eleanor parker is doing a great job as Elizabeth, and her alter-ego, she is strong there . Hogo Hare, which is also in a supporting role in the film , and, as is always the case that the role of a caring good man , and that he will always be full of confidence . In the film, it is solid and no cake topper, but certainly more than adequate .

I've seen this movie twice and it helped to make an Eleanor Parker fan out of me. The acting is a little over the top but in my opinion Parker was one of the best and most underated actresses of her time.

I never knew about Lizzie until a few years ago, but had seen The Three Faces of Eve several times. I want to respectfully correct my favorite reviewer here (we seem to have the same taste in movies and TV shows) on comments in his Sept 2021 review. In addition to seeing The Three Faces of Eve I've read "Eve's" (Chris Costner Sizemore) book several times and just finished it again. I'm from the DC area and actually worked at a hospital where Sizemore's doctor practiced. Her story was most DEFINITELY never refuted. Her books I'm Eve and A Mind of My Own are excellent and she did indeed have MPD, cured by Dr Tsitos. I think the reviewer is thinking of the patient behind Sybil, who HAS admitted that she faked MPD to please her therapist.

I do recommend both Lizzie and The Three Faces of Eve as well acted and fascinating moviews.

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.

It's interesting that The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and Lizzie (1957) were made the same year. Both of them introduce the subject of a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder. Although the story of Eve White--for which Joanne Woodward won a Best Actress Oscar--was based on a real-life woman, it would be hard to say that that movie was really any better than this one reviewed here, based on Shirley Jackson's novel, "The Bird's Nest."

Lizzie (1957) is the story of the mousy Elizabeth Richmond (Eleanor Parker) who lives with her constantly drunk aunt, Morgan James (Joan Blondell) and works as a secretary in a museum. Elizabeth seems to have no real social life and only one real true friend at work, Ruth Seaton (Marion Ross, who later played Ron Howard's mother on TV's Happy Days). Elizabeth is serious and scholarly but has no real self confidence during her daytime job, in spite of encouragement from her friend and co-worker, Ruth. She finds anonymous scribbled out death threats, in her purse or on her desk. These slips of paper, are always signed-- Lizzie. When she shows them to Ruth, Ruth just tells her they are not serious and should be forgotten.

When Elizabeth comes home each night, she is greeted by her lovable, but always soused, Aunt Morgan. Elizabeth goes to her room and transforms herself into a cheap-looking, but beautiful and seductive, alter ego. She becomes "Lizzie" and goes to a bar to beguile men into buying her drinks. (Johnny Mathis makes his first movie appearance, here, as the singer at the piano bar.) When Elizabeth awakes the next morning, she has strange unexplained headaches. At times her aunt notices that her gin bottles have been finished off by someone other than herself, but who can it be but Elizabeth? When Morgan confronts Elizabeth about this, she honestly has no memory or knowledge of drinking any alcohol.

Morgan and Elizabeth have an understanding neighbor, Walter (Hugo Hass--the movie's director), who works at home as a writer. When Morgan confronts Walter about Elizabeth, he suggests that she see a doctor. He knows a good doctor, Dr. Wright (Richard Boone), who he uses from time to time when he has writer's block.

Elizabeth finally goes to see Dr. Wright, complaining of headaches and troubled sleeping. He tells her that he would like to put her into deep hypnosis to explore her childhood background. During a series of sessions, Dr. Wright discovers that Elizabeth has two more personalities--Beth and Lizzie. However, to fully understand the "whys" of Elizabeth three personalities, he goes to her house on her birthday. Something had happened to her on her 13th birthday. But, what was it and how could it have caused her Multiple Personality Disorder?

As with The Three Faces of Eve (1957), the strong central personality, Beth, must understand the other two personalities in order to let go of them and become the one integrated person.

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.