Nunnally Johnson (1957)
Is it a character study or a case study? That’s a question sometimes asked of a based-on-a-true-story film or play whose protagonist is psychologically unusual or disturbed – often with the implication that a case study is dramatically inferior because, rather than imaginatively exploring personality, it merely records behaviour. Nunnally Johnson’s film makes no bones about about what it is. It’s introduced by Alistair Cooke, who appears on camera as himself (he’s announced in on-screen text as the ‘distinguished journalist and commentator’). In his familiar, rather pompous tones, Cooke informs the audience that what we’re about to see is the true story of a young housewife who, in 1951, began to show signs of multiple personality disorder. He doesn’t name the real woman in question – Chris Costner Sizemore – but he does mention the actual doctors involved, Corbett H Thigpen and Hervey M Cleckley, whose account of the case was presented to the American Psychiatric Association in 1953 and whose subsequent book about Sizemore is the source of Johnson’s screenplay (on which Thigpen and Cleckley advised). Cooke also notes that much of the film’s dialogue is taken from the clinical record. The Three Faces of Eve is unashamedly a dramatised case study.
Chris Costner Sizemore has become Eve White, an unassuming wife and mother in Georgia, whose husband Ralph (David Wayne) brings her to see psychiatrist Dr Luther (Lee J Cobb). The Whites have a little daughter, Bonnie (Terry Ann Ross); Eve’s uncharacteristic behaviour, which began shortly after the recent loss of another child in pregnancy, gets odder and more worrying in the months following her first meeting with Luther. She spends far more money than the household can afford on glitzy dresses and shoes. She tries to strangle Bonnie and is thwarted only by Ralph’s hearing his daughter’s terrified screams. Eve doesn’t remember either of these aberrations. She is aware of suffering severe headaches and she occasionally blacks out, which is very much the operative phrase. During one of her conversations with Luther, Eve suddenly becomes a different woman – a pleasure-seeker and shameless flirt who calls herself Eve Black. This alter ego knows all about mousy Eve White and has nothing but contempt for her. Eve White knows nothing about Eve Black.
The violent attack on Bonnie lands Eve White in a psychiatric hospital. After her release, Ralph gets a job in Florida and leaves his wife in a boarding house while Bonnie is cared for by Eve’s parents. Ralph doesn’t believe the multiple personality mumbo-jumbo the doctors allege and the marriage breaks up. Luther meanwhile continues to negotiate between the two Eves until, during hypnosis, a third woman emerges; at first this personality is nameless and has little memory but she’s stable and reasonable compared with the diametrically opposed Eve White and Eve Black. She subsequently takes the name Jane and Luther prompts her to access a trauma in Eve White’s childhood, when she was forced by her mother to kiss her dead grandmother, in her coffin. This unlocks other memories and, when Luther now asks to speak with Eve White or Eve Black (his usual practice in exchanges with the patient), Jane tells him they’ve gone. In the closing scene, we see Jane happily married to Earl (Ken Scott) and reunited with Bonnie.
There were probably honourable reasons for involving Alistair Cooke (he also supplies bits of signposting voiceover narration throughout) – as a trustworthy figure, stressing to mid-1950s mainstream-movie audiences that the story of Eve is no invention and (therefore!) demands to be taken seriously. But that prologue seems a bit of a cheat too – or, at least, to vindicate prejudices against case-study drama. Don’t argue because all is ‘true’ – regardless of whether it’s dramatically convincing within the screen story being told. And while The Three Faces of Eve seems superficially different from contemporary Hollywood psychodramas, it is in important respects conventional. Once a single, key traumatic event is brought to light, the heroine’s problems are solved – even though it remains unclear how Eve White functioned throughout the years when her behaviour wasn’t causing alarm. Jane’s emergence and eventual triumph neatly reflect a Goldilocks approach: Eve White is too drably repressed; Eve Black is too exuberantly id; Jane is just right.
As the psychiatrist, Lee J Cobb may be in the film for reasons not dissimilar to Alistair Cooke – someone whose strong, dependable presence lends authenticity to proceedings without intruding too much on them. Dr Luther smokes cigars: that’s about as much detail as Cobb is given to create an individual, as distinct from a compassionate interviewer. This works well enough; the underwriting of Eve’s husband Ralph is more of a problem. With the events described so recent, this may have had to do with not upsetting people like Chris Costner Sizemore’s first husband, who were still very much around. Whatever, we never know enough about Ralph or about Eve’s marriage to him: at one point, she tells Luther it hasn’t been a happy one although OK in parts, and that she doesn’t know why she hasn’t been able to make him happy. The relationship remains a largely unopened book and David Wayne, not surprisingly, flounders in the role of Ralph. A scene between him and Luther, in which the latter tries to explain Eve’s condition and Ralph is suddenly a dimwit, is especially awkward. I wished Ralph had been bright enough to ask Luther why his wife suddenly started acting funny. Nunnally Johnson doesn’t, of course, want that question raised.
Joanne Woodward’s Oscar-winning portrait of the title characters, and movement between them, is something else – and a great advertisement for the Actors Studio of the early post-war years. The script may be evasive and lack penetration but Woodward goes deeper and Johnson directs her well. Each of the three personalities is convincingly realised: it’s a particular achievement that Woodward makes Eve White, as well as painfully dreary, affecting, though you’re always glad – for the actress as well as yourself – when an Eve Black routine comes along to liven things up. Woodward doesn’t instantaneously flip between personalities. Instead, she seems to enter a fugue state lasting just a few seconds, during which she lowers her head: when she raises it again, she’s someone different. This arrangement makes you all the more aware you’re watching and admiring a performance. But it’s a terrific performance.
18 January 2025
