Lizzie

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.