source: Lizzie

Trailer—Lizzie

Lizzie

The story is so trite and Parker overacts to the hilt. She shows only two emotions - sad and maniacal. Gloria Blondell appears in the same robe in almost every scene! All we know about her is that she's Elizabeth's aunt and that she drinks a lot of bourbon. There's a neighbor man who seems interested in Blondell, but we don't know who he is or why he's interested. We never know if Blondell is interested in him. The dialogue is poorly written. To show the passage of time, Blondell brings into different conversations how long it's been since Elizabeth has been seeing a psychiatrist.

I LOVE this movie! Eleanor Parker does an amazing job conveying three personalities. Joan Blondell plays the perfect caring, but booze-obssessed aunt who really can't understand or help Elizabeth. Richard Boone is always good as the serious professional, in this case Elizabeth's psychiatrist. Hugo Haas - great director and perfect interfering-but-with-good-intentions neighbor. The addition of Johnny Mathis singing "It's Not For Me To say" in the cocktail lounge is icing on the cake! I've watched this movie many times and it remains a favorite!

I thought "Mommie Dearest" was on of the campiest films I had ever seen, but this one topped it! Maybe it was just the mood I was in, but I couldn't stop laughing. The acting was way over the top, the lighting was terrible...it was like watching one of those old Carrol Burnett parodies. I loved it!

Released four months after "the three faces of Eve " (feat AA winner Joanne Woodward ), "Lizzie" does not compare favorably with it. It was the first time Hugo Haas had worked with big names such as Eleanor Parker and Richard Boone ,but he did not use them really efficiently. The shrink's method is simplistic, he finds what is buried in Elizabeth's /Beth's /Lizzie's dark past in the fourth words association of the test ."Mother -mud " voila! The subject actually recalls what would be fully realized in Hitchcock's underrated " Marnie" (1964),particularly the last scenes. Hugo Haas was better at dealing with his usual deadly love triangle although there is at least one good scene : a piece of birthday cake as a phallic symbol !

What a waste of Eleanor Parker. Who thought stone faced Richard Boone would be suitable playing a psychiatrist? I can tolerate badly done movies if they are camp. This didn't have any camp value other than the overuse of the word *. The only good thing about this film is seeing a young, handsome Johnny Mathis.

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.

Like "The Three Faces of Eve", "Lizzie" deals with a title character suffering from multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder). However, I think this movie is a better treatment of the topic than its more famous counterpart, for two primary reasons. One is the performance of Eleanor Parker, who does not disappear off camera and then come into the room as one of her alter-egos, but lets us see the shifts and changes as they occur. The other is its greater psychological realism - rather than giving us a cop-out about the trauma of seeing a dead body, "Lizzie" doesn't shy away from dealing with the topic of sexual abuse.