The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957)
Cast: Joanne Woodward, David Wayne, Lee J. Cobb, Edwin Jerome, Alena Murray, Nancy Kulp, Douglas Spencer, Terry Ann Ross, Ken Scott, Mimi Gibson, Alistair Cooke. Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson, based on a book by Corbett Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley. Cinematography: Stanley Cortez. Art direction: Herman A. Blumenthal, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Marjorie Fowler. Music: Robert Emmett Dolan.
When cases of what was then called "multiple personality disorder" were first diagnosed and made known to the public, it was a godsend to actors, who could then show off their skills in three-or-more-in-one roles. Playing "Eve White," "Eve Black," and "Jane" in The Three Faces of Eve launched Joanne Woodward's film career and won her a best actress Oscar. Later, it would give Sally Field a chance to play more than a dozen characters in the TV movie Sibyl (Daniel Petrie, 1976), earning her an Emmy and helping her break out of the "manic pixie dream girl" type that she had been stuck in after the TV series Gidget and The Flying Nun. (Sibyl's producers also indulged in the stunt-casting of Woodward as Sibyl's psychiatrist.) Today the disorder is more usually known as "dissociative identity," and it still stirs controversy in psychoanalytic circles, with some questioning whether it really arises from childhood trauma like the ones portrayed in The Three Faces of Eve and Sibyl, and even if it might be induced by the psychiatrist's own techniques in treating patients. That is to say, despite the attempts -- which include a sober-faced introduction in which Alistair Cooke solemnly asserts that the film is a "true story" -- by The Three Faces of Eve to present its narrative as a sort of docudrama, the movie needs to be met with a lot of skepticism. That doesn't deny, of course, that Woodward gives a terrific performance, carefully segueing from one Eve to another and eventually to Jane. And I liked Stanley Cortez's manipulation of shadows in filming the story -- though it's not a movie that needed to be in CinemaScope, always something of a distraction in black-and-white. But what may make Woodward's performance stand out even more is its contrast with the hamming of David Wayne as Eve's violent hick husband, a man almost as much in need of a shrink as she is. And Lee J. Cobb is uncommonly bullying as Eve's doctor, constantly sucking on a cigar as if invoking Sigmund Freud. We have a happy ending, of course, despite the fact that the real "Eve," Christine Costner Sizemore, led an anxious and troubled later life, at one point suing 20th Century Fox over a contract that deprived her of the rights to her own story.