The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
I don’t really know why The Three Faces of Eve is such a famous movie. It’s a story of a Southern housewife (Joanne Woodward) who has multiple personalities. When she first starts seeing a psychiatrist (Lee J. Cobb), it’s only because of her headaches and memory loss, but together, they discover that a slutty, wild version of herself takes over during those periods of lost time. Eve White is the shy housewife, and Eve Black is the party girl; wow, what a shocker. It’s a psychological phenomenon, for her doctor has never encountered someone with two personalities (although as the title suggests, a third emerges later in the movie) and he doesn’t quite know how to handle it. Her husband (David Wayne) doesn’t even believe it until he sees the transformation for himself. But to me, Joanne’s character (although based on a real woman) was obviously so frustrated by her life she needed to let loose every once in a while, and say what she really felt. She didn’t have multiple personality disorder; she just needed an excuse to yell at her husband. In the iconic scene with David Wayne, she lets off steam as Eve Black by calling her husband names and saying, in essence, she’d rather die than be married to someone like him. Are we really supposed to think she’s crazy, rather than needing a shield to hide behind?
I’m not a Joanne Woodward fan, and this movie is one of the reasons why I never liked her. Hardly a demanding role anyway, she didn’t put much more into it than the script required. Be crazy, be shy, be slutty, be mad, be hypnotized. It felt pretty one-dimensional to me. And I didn’t find Lee J. Cobb believable as an intelligent therapist, but I suppose that was only because he’d already established himself in my memory in his earlier roles like Golden Boy and On the Waterfront. There was another movie with the exact same story and based off the same real case: Lizzie. Unfortunately for Eleanor Parker and Richard Boone (patient and therapist, respectively), it was released during the same year as The Three Faces of Eve and received no accolades. I preferred that version, even though I recognized the production values weren’t as high. Ironically, it was the first time I’d seen Richard Boone in a movie, so I did find him believable as a caring psychiatrist. I didn’t know he’d made a career out of playing bad guys, so I apologize to Lee J. Cobb for my earlier prejudice.
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More Lee J. Cobb movies here!
I’m not a Joanne Woodward fan, and this movie is one of the reasons why I never liked her. Hardly a demanding role anyway, she didn’t put much more into it than the script required. Be crazy, be shy, be slutty, be mad, be hypnotized. It felt pretty one-dimensional to me. And I didn’t find Lee J. Cobb believable as an intelligent therapist, but I suppose that was only because he’d already established himself in my memory in his earlier roles like Golden Boy and On the Waterfront. There was another movie with the exact same story and based off the same real case: Lizzie. Unfortunately for Eleanor Parker and Richard Boone (patient and therapist, respectively), it was released during the same year as The Three Faces of Eve and received no accolades. I preferred that version, even though I recognized the production values weren’t as high. Ironically, it was the first time I’d seen Richard Boone in a movie, so I did find him believable as a caring psychiatrist. I didn’t know he’d made a career out of playing bad guys, so I apologize to Lee J. Cobb for my earlier prejudice.
Want to watch it? Click here to see it on ok.ru and thanks "ASA Movie Craze" for posting!
More Lee J. Cobb movies here!