The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957)

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.

The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)

Did Tom Joad's descendants vote for Donald Trump? Do Marfa Lapkina's support Vladmir Putin? John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath begins with a tractor pushing people from the land they've worked, while The Old and the New (Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929) ends with a tractor helping people harvest their crops. It's just coincidence that I watched two movies about oppressed farm laborers on consecutive nights, but the juxtaposition set me thinking about the ways in which movies lie to us about matters of politics, history, and social justice (among other things). In both cases, a core of truth was pushed through filters: in Eisenstein's, that of the Soviet state, in Ford's that of a Hollywood studio. So in the case of The Old and the New we get a fable about the wonders of collectivism and technology, whereas in The Grapes of Wrath we get a feel-good affirmation of the myth that "we're the people" and that we'll be there "wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat." Both films are good, but neither, despite many claims especially for The Grapes of Wrath, is great, largely because their messages overwhelm their medium. Movies are greatest when they immerse us in people's lives, thoughts, and emotions, not when they preach at us about them. It's what makes William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying a greater novel than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Both are superficially about the odysseys of two poor white families, but Faulkner lets us live in and with the Bundrens while Steinbeck turns the Joads into illustrated sociology. Ford won the second of his record-setting four Oscars for best director for this film, and it displays some of his strengths: direct, unaffected storytelling and a feeling for people and the way they can be tied to the land. It has some masterly cinematography by Gregg Toland and a documentary-like realism in the use of settings along Route 66. The actors, including such Ford stock-company players as John Carradine, John Qualen, and Ward Bond, never let Hollywood gloss show through their rags and stubble -- although I think the kids are a little too clean. Nunnally Johnson's screenplay mutes Steinbeck's determination to go for the symbolic at every opportunity -- we are spared, probably thanks for once to the censors, the novel's ending, in which Rosasharn breastfeeds an old man. But there's a sort of slackness to the film, a feeling that the kind of exuberance of which Ford was capable in movies like Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) has been smothered under producer Darryl F. Zanuck's need to make a Big Important Film. I like Henry Fonda in the movie, but I don't think he's ever allowed to turn Tom Joad into a real character; it's as if he spends the whole movie just hanging around waiting to give his big farewell speech to Ma (Jane Darwell, whose own film-concluding speech won her an Oscar).

The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

The Southerner is perhaps the best of the films Renoir made during his wartime exile in the United States, which is not to say that it ranks with his French masterpieces that include Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), or Rules of the Game (1939). It does, however, stand up well against the better American films of 1945, such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock), or Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl). It also earned him his only Oscar nomination as director: He lost to Billy Wilder for The Lost Weekend, but he was presented an honorary Oscar in 1975. The film was also nominated for sound (Jack Whitney) and music score (Werner Janssen). The Southerner feels less authentic than it might: Renoir was unable to overcome the Hollywood desire for gloss, so Betty Field looks awfully healthy and well-coiffed for the wife of a hard-scrabble cotton farmer whose family lives in a shack with no running water and whose youngest child almost dies of "spring sickness" -- a form of pellagra caused by malnutrition. Zachary Scott is a little more credible as her determined husband, Sam Tucker, a cotton picker who decides to start farming on his own. The role is a sharp contrast to his performance the same year in Mildred Pierce, in which he's a slick con man -- the kind of role he found himself playing more often. The cast also includes Beulah Bondi as Sam Tucker's grandmother, J. Carrol Naish as the Tuckers' stingy neighbor, and Norman Lloyd as the neighbor's nephew and man-of-all-work, who tries to drive the Tuckers off their land. Renoir is credited with the screenplay along with Hugo Butler, who did the adaptation of a novel by George Sessions Perry, but it was also worked on by an uncredited William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson.