Lizzie

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.