Lizzie is a film I consider to be far ahead
of its time, Eleanor Parker plays a twenty-five
year old woman with multiple personality disorder. She has two clearly distinct
personas, and a third which only begins to emerge under hypnosis. Her daytime
persona is Elizabeth, a neurotic young woman who works in administration at a
museum. She is continually exhausted, with sleepless nights, headaches and
other aches and pains which she cannot explain. Her nighttime persona is
Lizzie, a reckless, wanton slut who emerges after dark, applies makeup, pulls
her hair up and goes out to the local bar to drink and pick up men. While
Elizabeth doesn’t know Lizzie exists, Lizzie knows all about Elizabeth, and her
goal is to destroy Elizabeth and take over her body. She even writes Elizabeth
crude notes, taunting her and threatening to kill her.
Elizabeth
lives with her alcoholic Aunt Morgan, played by Joan Blondell. Director Hugo
Haas is charming as Walter, the concerned next door neighbor who enjoys
flirting with Aunt Morgan, recognizes that Elizabeth needs help and recommends
his psychiatrist friend, Dr. Wright (Richard
Boone). Eventually, Elizabeth agrees to see Dr. Wright, and under hypnosis
he discovers Lizzie and a third persona, Beth, a calm, serene, positive,
well-adjusted persona who had remained hidden up to that point and whom Dr.
Wright believes is Elizabeth’s true self. Once Dr. Wright has discovered all
three personas he decides to try to uncover the event or events in Elizabeth’s
past that lie at the core of her multiple personality disorder so that the
anxious and reckless personas may be discarded. He is an appealing and
sympathetic character, and has a warm, professional relationship with
Elizabeth.
In one
hypnotherapy session, Elizabeth remembers a day at the beach involving her
pre-teen self, her sluttish mother and her mother’s crude boyfriend Robin. This
session begins to reveal the source of Elizabeth’s disorder; her mother’s
boyfriend resents her and talks about getting rid of her so he and her mother can
travel to Mexico.
The film’s
pivotal scene occurs at the end of the film when Aunt Morgan, Walter and Dr.
Wright stage a 26th birthday party for Elizabeth, which is intended as a
reenactment of her 13th birthday party. At that earlier party Elizabeth and her
mother had had an argument and Elizabeth had pushed her mother into a chair
causing her weakened heart to fail. Then, later that same afternoon, her
mother’s boyfriend Robin had followed Elizabeth into her bedroom and had
(off-screen) sexually abused her. When Elizabeth finally brought these
repressed memories to her conscious mind, it allowed her to understand that she
was not responsible for her mother’s death or her abuse at the hands of her
mother’s boyfriend. As a result, the depressed Elizabeth and the sluttish
Lizzie personas were weakened, and the serene, well-adjusted Beth emerged and
became the dominant persona. In resolving Elizabeth’s multiple personality
disorder in this way, the script is consistent with psychotherapy modalities
that claim that bringing repressed memories to the conscious thinking level
will allow them to be understood and then discarded, so they no longer control
us.
Parker's persona
transformations are subtle and distinct, and she gives Lizzie and Elizabeth much
more depth and poignancy than you'd expect given the rather banal script and
mediocre direction. As an actress she was always able to channel the
vulnerability of the women she played, which makes her particularly suited to
this role.
While Eleanor
Parker had the talent and appeal of a movie star, she never developed a
recognizable star persona like, for example, Julie Andrews. Whether playing
Maria in The Sound of Music, or Mary
Poppins, you always knew you were watching Julie Andrews. The same was true of
Barbara Streisand and Jennifer Aniston. But Parker was not interested in
developing a star persona. She preferred to disappear into her character,
seemingly becoming a new woman with each film. She could not be typecast, because
no one knew what her type was. The
fact that her best-remembered role was the Baroness in The Sound of Music is a testament to her success. Acknowledging
this, Doug McClelland’s 1989 biography is titled: Eleanor Parker: Woman of a Thousand Faces.
Parker was
also intensely guarded about her personal life and felt that if she kept her
anonymity, then she had done her job well. Her filmography includes 79 films
and three Oscar nominations, and it’s ironic that, had she bothered to develop
a recognizable star persona, she might have been nominated more often, and
possibly even won an Oscar.
1957 was a
year for multiple personalities and while Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her
performance in The Three Faces of Eve,
Eleanor Parker was not even nominated for her role in Lizzie. That's a pity because Parker's performance is noteworthy
and possibly Oscar worthy.
Labels:
drama, Eleanor Parker
