Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Robert J. Maxwell It's an interest, more-or-less straightforward story of a woman with multiple personality disorder, named Sybil here, and played by Sally Field. Sybil was a real woman who lived in Kentucky. She was treated by a psychiatrist for many years, charged on a sliding scale that evidently had a zero point, because nobody in Sybil's position is going to afford twelve years of private psychiatric treatment. The complimentary treatment is provided by Joanne Woodward as Dr. Wilbur.Most of the popular stories about people with MPD have a convenient three personalities, one of which -- the most fully integrated one -- "wins" in the end, leading to a happy ending. Sybil, like so many real patients, had so many alter egos that it was hard to keep track of them. The film only introduces about half a dozen, all with different names and ages, and skips the remaining fifteen or so. Thank God for small favors. I have enough trouble keeping up with my own roles.This story has a happy ending too, a kind of dream sequence in which the original Sybil gets to meet and embrace her other personalities and they are absorbed into her. She evidently did manage to pull herself together because she went on to a successful career as a professor of art, a position she wouldn't have held long if she'd showed up on campus one day as an eight year old child.The story has been modified, necessarily, in other ways too. As a representative of Sybil's spare contacts with others, we have Brad Davis in the role of a street musician and concocted clown. It's a sympathetic role and he does well by it, but he disappears from the narrative rather abruptly.The splashiest role by far is Sally Fields'. She gets to mope, to mumble, to shriek, to put her fist through windows, to pull her face into gargoyle masks, to be sophisticated, to be petulant, to be mean, and to scuttle along the floor and hide under the piano. She's given it her all, because she's completely put aside that usual fey quality she carries with her -- girlish, provocative, and abundantly sexual. She has pretty toes too. If you go for that sort of thing.But I admired most the performance of Joanne Woodward as the psychiatrist. She's delightfully mature after we've spent some time with Sybil. She can be nurturing, tolerant, firm, and directive. She's attractive and wears a becoming hair do or hair style or whatever it's called. A good shrink, in other words. My shrinks were never like that. After calling me names like "paranoid" right to my face, they all sneaked around telling dirty stories about me behind my back and writing letters of recommendation so condemnatory that I wouldn't have sent them to someone who wanted to hire a dog. Years after this treachery and they're still dunning me for unpaid bills.Clearly, a lot of effort on everyone's part went into this production. The only real problem I had with it is what one might call the psychoanalytic ploy. In these tales, the patient must always have symptoms caused by some repressed memory of childhood trauma. All you have to do is bring the trauma to conscious awareness (and the emotions associated with it) and BINGO -- no more disorder! B. F. Skinner would have a lot to say about that, but it DOES make for a smoother ending, emotionally more satisfying if not very realistic.

Putzberger That was the closing line of the first installment of "Sybil" when it originally aired on NBC as a two-part "Big Event" special in 1976. By the time Joanne Woodward asks that question of a fetal, thumb-sucking Sally Field, you're desperate to know. Since 1976, child abuse has become a dramatic cliché, multiple personality disorder has become a discredited diagnosis, and Sally Field has become a laughingstock. All of which demonstrates the enormous impact of "Sybil," one of the best-written, best-acted movies ever made for television. Is the portrait of schizophrenia completely honest? Probably not. Does Sybil recover too quickly? Most likely. Does Dr. Wilbur, Sybil's therapist, violate scads of professional ethics in the name of curing her patient? Oh, yeah. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not supposed to tell a patient that you love them, and you're definitely not supposed to break into their abandoned childhood home to look for signs of abuse.) But if "Sybil" raises more questions than it answers, that's fine, they're brutally important questions. Our collective view of mental illness has become much more sensitive and compassionate in the last few years and I don't doubt much of that is due to the influence of "Sybil." Plus, Tears for Fears named their 1985 album "Songs from the Big Chair" as an homage to "Sybil," so you can see the kind of impact it had."Sybil" is a lightly fictionalized version of a 1973 book (itself heavily fictionalized, according to some experts) about a young woman who copes with her horrifically abusive mother by dissociating into 16 personalities. For reasons that no one understood at the time, the filmmakers cast Sally Field, the Flying Nun, as this disturbed young woman. She's brilliant. For dramatic effect, the script distills multiple breakdowns into single scenes, so Sally has to careen from mousy to charming to shrewish to infantile within the course of a few minutes. She pulls it off by playing them all as wildly exaggerated aspects of a single character, not as different characters, proving that she understood this role perfectly. Make all the jokes you want about her Oscar speeches, but Sally earned this Emmy. Joanne Woodward acquits herself well as Dr. Wilbur, A Strong, Nurturing Woman. For about a decade after "Sybil," Joanne appeared in roughly one classy made-for per year as A Strong, Nurturing Woman, and here's where she did the research. As fine as Field and Woodward are, though, the most vivid and disturbing performance is that of Martine Bartlett as Hattie, Sybil's wacko mother, whom we see in flashbacks. There's no way the movie could depict all of Hattie's bizarre behavior as described in the books -- she was physically, sexually, and verbally abusive, prone to fits of catatonia and enjoyed defecating on her neighbors' lawns. But Ms. Bartlett, with her unblinking eyes and demented half-smile, conveys all of Hattie's utter lunacy in one short Christmas scene that Sybil relives while under hypnosis. ("Lettuce head! Go to bed! Your nose is red, your name is Fred, I'll kill you dead!" Not for the squeamish -- even though we don't see Hattie kicking and hitting Sybil, we can feel it. This scene could give you nightmares.) There are other significant differences from the book -- the movie Sybil is a bit more outgoing than the woman described on paper, plus, there's a budding romance with a widowed father that the book never mentions -- but these are minor quibbles, the movie can be appreciated on its own merits.Lots of very reputable clinicians have tried to discredit Cornelia Wilbur, and I can't imagine any modern student of psychology or psychiatry watching this movie without pointing out its flaws. But "Sybil" will stand the test of time thanks to its excellent acting and its devastating depiction of child abuse. Please note: people have claimed that Wilbur was a fraud or that her methodology was flawed, but no one has ever disputed that the real-life Hattie Dorsett was abusive towards her daughter.

korbond_darners My psychology class watched this earlier in the year (in my last year of high school) and I have to say it disturbed the sh*t out of me. I can't believe a little girl actually went through all of that, no wonder she developed DID(Dissociative Identity Disorder), I could barely cope with watching the movie let alone go through it in real life! Makes me want to cry just thinking about it..I think child abuse is the saddest thing in the world, people putting their kids in tumble driers or whatever, I hate knowing that sh*it like that goes down all the time.. I mean there has got to be something seriously wrong with you when you treat a child that way. Hats off to the actress that played the mother, I don't think many people have the balls to play a part like that.

mercuryix2003 This was a deeply harrowing movie to watch, and unbelievably so when it came out in 1976. A small child in the grip of her homicidally insane mother, who inflicted sadistic torture on her, while her ineffective husband looked the other way when the signs of abuse were obvious. There's a small performance in this movie that haunted me more than almost anything else in the film; the part of the grandmother, played by Jessamine Milner, who was as much a victim and prisoner in the home of her psychotic daughter as Sybil was. The difference was she was aware of the extent of her daughter's insanity. What must it be like to be a prisoner in your own adult child's home, knowing she is inflicting abuse on your grandchild and will do the same to you if you speak? That kind of helplessness must be sheer hell to live with. She could have told her son-in-law or the police at any time (if she was able to get out of the house), but would they have done anything? Or turned a blind eye, considering the time? Jessamine Milner's performance was so honest and affecting, it stands out as one of the most painful parts of the film, and she is in only two minutes of it! She was born in 1894, and was almost 80 when she made the film. She apparently was in her mid-seventies when she went into film! She's a mystery, and other than her few TV appearances in the late 70s, nothing apparently is known about her. However, she deserves a mention somewhere because of her performance in this difficult to watch film.