Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in June/July, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 3, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
The Borden murders are America’s most enduring and fascinating murder mystery, so it is not surprising that they have frequently affected that most quintessentially American art form, the motion picture, as well as its perky younger sibling, the television program. Many interesting echoes of the Borden case are found in this chronology.
A 1949 comedy called The Man Who Came To Dinner features a Lizzie-inspired character in a small but pivotal role. Based on a hit play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the movie was directed by William Keighley. Well-known critic Leonard Maltin praised the movie as a “delightful adaptation” of the play. The film’s comedy veers from the light-hearted to the macabre but is always wittily successful. The plot revolves around cranky radio personality Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) who pays a visit to the Stanleys, an affluent Midwest family. His stay is unexpectedly extended when a bad fall requires him to recuperate at their residence. While he is recovering, his secretary (Bette Davis) kindles a romance with a young man she meets on this visit. Whiteside’s leg heals but he pretends to still be incapacitated so he may keep an eye on her. Caught at the deception, he regains the upper hand by discovering that the Stanley family has a secret. It is not the “Stanley” family at all but the Sedley family and its shy but friendly old aunt is the notorious axe murderess Harriet Sedley. Whiteside zestfully refers to what he calls “the old jingle.” He then repeats it, saying, “Harriet Sedley took an axe/gave her mother forty whacks/and when the job was nicely done/she gave her father forty-one.”
The television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents did a 1956 segment on post-trial Lizzie that was based on the play Goodbye, Miss Lizzie Borden by Lillian De La Torre. In the program, a female reporter is nosing around, attempting to pry information from a recalcitrant and restrained Lizzie. Our enterprising journalist hears the neighborhood children chanting the famous rhyme and eagerly notes it down as Lizzie brushes her off.
During the segment we meet Emma. The scriptwriters took several liberties with the facts, the first of which was to depict Emma as younger than Lizzie. The clearly disturbed Emma confides in her protective older sister that it was she who killed their stepmother and father. The show ends on a poignant note as Lizzie, who would never tell the truth about her beloved sibling to clear her own name, stares sadly ahead as she hears youngsters again chanting, “Lizzie Borden took an axe . . .”
Something appears to have happened to this episode as Alfred Hitchcock Presents passed into syndication. Correspondents with Ken Moggs, author of The Alfred Hitchcock Story and webmaster of “The MacGuffin,” a website devoted to all things Hitchcock, has indicated that the ending in which Lizzie looks at the camera as she hears the hated singsong rhyme has been deleted. This writer has found no one able to explain why it was cut. Oddly, mystery surrounds this TV episode about America’s most famous whodunit.
1964 saw the release of William Castle’s Strait-Jacket. Often called “the poor man’s Hitchcock,” Castle was known for his outrageous gimmicks like having devices attached to theater seats to give members of the audience a small electrical shock during the movie The Tingler. Castle’s film Strait-Jacket stars Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin, a woman who is confined to a mental hospital for twenty years after decapitating her husband and his girlfriend with a hatchet during a fit of jealousy. Apparently recovered, she tries to build a normal life with her daughter. Lucy starts to seem increasingly unhinged, especially after she begins to repeatedly hear a children’s singsong rhyme: “Lucy Harbin took an axe/gave her husband forty whacks/when she saw what she had done/she gave his girlfriend forty-one.” Then hatchet killings start again.
While the children’s song is the only obvious homage to the Lizzie Borden story in the movie, it has a Borden connection that was made many years later. On the centennial of the Borden homicides, National Review ran a cover story on the classic case written by Florence King. The cover showed a shadowy woman wielding a hatchet and was taken from a still in Strait-Jacket.
Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte is a kind of cinematic Grand Guignol. Directed by Robert Aldrich and released in 1964, the film makes no direct reference to the Borden murders but the parallels are plentiful. Charlotte (Bette Davis) is an aging spinster suspected of murdering her married lover with an axe during her youth. The lover was beheaded and had his hand struck off, echoing the Borden cases in which the medical examiner decapitated the corpses. Like Lizzie, Charlotte is the daughter of a wealthy man. Unlike Lizzie, she is not charged with the killing but there is a continuing mystery because of the crime’s lack of legal termination coupled with a prevalent belief in her guilt. Like Lizzie after her acquittal, Charlotte has been the socially ostracized and has become reclusive. Children sing a macabre rhyme: “Chop, chop sweet Charlotte/Chop up your married man/Chop off his head and hand.” The movie shows small children daring each other to sneak into the home of the notorious, suspected axe murderess. Frank Spiering wrote in Lizzie that a man named Russell Lake recalled that during his childhood he was “one of the privileged children who could run through her [Lizzie’s] yard and climb over the stone wall to get away from the neighborhood bully . . .” According to Spiering, Lizzie would sometimes invite children in on a cold day and “to the few who were brave she would offer cups of hot chocolate.”
Terror in the Wax Museum came out in 1973. It was inspired by the 1933 horror classic, Mystery of the Wax Museum. The latter movie was remade in 1953 as House of Wax starring Vincent Price. Directed by Georg Fenady, Terror is set in the era when the 19th Century was turning into the 20th A sculpted Lizzie stands along with such other historical figures of horror as Jack the Ripper, Bluebeard, and Ivan the Terrible in a wax museum. Grisly murders break out and the audience is meant to wonder if the wax figures are coming to life to kill. The movie did not do well and got dismal reviews.
The Borden story received a fascinating treatment in the 1975 made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden. Directed by Paul Wendkos, the movie starred Elizabeth Montgomery, known primarily for her talents as a comic actress in the popular TV sitcom Bewitched. She turned in a top-notch dramatic performance and was an especially good choice for the role. While Montgomery was both slimmer and prettier than the real Lizzie, she did bear a credible physical resemblance to her.
Dr. Gabriela Schalow Adler published an essay in the January 1999 issue of the now defunct but deeply mourned Lizzie Borden Quarterly that dealt at length with this intriguing and well-made movie. Adler points out that, “The film begins with the day of the murders and ends with Lizzie returning home after the trial. It opens with the statement that it is ‘based largely on fact,’ rather a curious claim for a film with ‘legend’ in its title.” Adler speculates that it could be interpreted to mean “that the legend is being factually rendered . . .”
The movie depicts Miss Lizzie as a bored, despondent spinster who habitually shoplifts while her obliging father pays the bills for items lifted. This is a questionable portrayal. This writer has published essays strongly disputing the assertion that Lizzie was a kleptomaniac on the grounds that if Andrew Borden were the puritanical skinflint he is assumed to be, it is highly unlikely that he would willingly pick up the tab for a daughter who stole for kicks. It is equally likely that the prosecution would have introduced evidence of her thievery at her murder trial to counter the defense’s many witnesses to her good character. The prosecutors produced no such witnesses probably for the very good reason that there simply were not any.
However, the filmmakers had no compunction about exercising poetic license, for the item she steals early in the movie is an axe! The shopkeeper sees her take something but is uncertain as to what the item is, but, as Adler writes, he “tells an indignant witness that everyone knows about Lizzie, and they just send Andrew the bill.” Adler makes a good point when she continues that this shoplifting of the weapon “creates a flaw in the plot. How will the merchant bill Andrew, and if he discovers precisely what was stolen, won’t that solve the mystery of the murders?” Discerning viewers would be well advised to take this as something other than the “fact” promised in the movie’s opening statement.
In the oppressive August heat, Lizzie’s frustrations boil over when she commits the double homicide. The movie explains the absence of a bloodstained dress by having her strip naked to butcher both stepmother and father. As Adler speculates, it makes for powerful scenes but does not have the ring of truth to it: “A Victorian lady getting naked to kill her parents, even on a hot day . . . does not seem ‘real,’ but it is terrifying and provocative.” The movie ends on a curious note. A statement appears on the screen to say that the murders remain unsolved to this day. Adler comments that the possible meaning is “Maybe she did not kill them at all, and only imagined those horrible death scenes.”
Regardless of how accurate or fictional it is in its depiction of Lizzie’s character and its theory of the crimes, the movie may well be one of the best films ever made for television. Wendkos paid close attention to period detail, one example being a “No Irish need apply” sign prominent in a store window. Tightly directed and beautifully photographed, the movie boasts excellent supporting performances by Katherine Helmond as Lizzie’s baffled sister Emma and Fritz Weaver as an unpleasant, tight-fisted Andrew.
The Legend of Lizzie Borden is not at all suitable for children. In addition to Montgomery’s nudity and hatchet wielding, there are other disturbing scenes—one in which the child Lizzie walks in on her father when he is embalming a corpse as an undertaker, and another in which he brutally decapitates her pet pigeons.
The Internet Movie Database has many comments from people who have seen the film and all are gushing with praise. Several bemoan the fact that the video is out of print and the film has not been released on DVD. This writer would like to add her voice to those suggesting this excellent and richly imagined telling of the Borden “legend” be made widely and easily available to the public.
Miss Lizzie makes an appearance in Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, a deservedly forgotten 1988 horror spoof. She is one of the “monsters” haunting a house into which an unlucky family has recently moved.
The opera Lizzie Borden, staged by the New York City Opera, was televised in 1999. This production was directed by Rhoda Levine and conducted by George Manahan. It starred Phyllis Pancella as Lizzie. Writing about the opera for the New York Theatre Reviews, Bruce-Michael Gelbert said, “the company’s forces fully succeeded in realizing the now spiky, now lyrical music drama and making palpable the tension and acrimony abounding within the dysfunctional Borden family in its grim, gray surroundings. Vibrant mezzo-soprano Pancella contributed a vivid, knowing portrayal of the tightly wound, loveless Lizzie, frustrated and increasingly unhinged.” Playing extremely loose with the facts, the opera re-named Lizzie’s sister “Margaret” and gave her a sea captain as a fiancé. According to Gelbert, it also has a “suggestion of incest in a chilling scene with her father in which, already stained with Abigail’s blood, she saw herself taking her mother’s place.”
Monkeybone, released in 2001, is an odd movie. The plot centers around a cartoonist who falls into a coma and finds himself trapped among his own characters, one of which is apparently Lizzie Borden. As in Terror in the Wax Museum, Lizzie is one of an assortment of historical or legendary baddies.
A film now in the making, Bob’s Night Out, is supposedly going to have a character called Lizzie Borden. The Internet Movie Database describes the plot as follows: “The son of America’s most eccentric millionaire is committed to a mental institution by his stepmother so she can obtain his inheritance. But Bob escapes wrecking vengeance and havoc on L.A.” Will this be a genuinely, dramatically creative movie showing us a Lizzie Borden in a stunning new light or a Z-grade piece of junk exploiting her as a “monster”? The plot synopsis suggests it will be one or the other, although which remains to be seen.
In a June 4, 1984, Newsweek article called “A New Whack at the Borden Case,” David Gates wrote that the Borden case “was one of America’s first media murders, covered by papers as far away as California.” Perhaps that makes it peculiarly fitting that the media fascination with this case has lasted for such an awesomely long time, inspiring a plenitude of extraordinary works in every medium, but nowhere more dramatically than in those of motion pictures and television.
WORKS CITED
Adler, Gabriela Schalow. “The Legend of Lizzie Borden: But She Doesn’t Look Like a Fiend.” Lizzie Borden Quarterly VI. 1 (Jan. 1999): 1, 10-16.
Gelbert, Bruce-Michael. “Gory Story”, review of Lizzie Borden, by Jack Beeson, New York Theatre Reviews 12 May 2004 <http://www.nytheatre-wire.com/rev98-99.htm>.
The Internet Movie Database. 2004. The Legend of Lizzie Borden 12 May 2004 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073273>.
Spiering, Frank, Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden. NY: Random House, 1984.
The author thanks Ken Moggs for sharing his correspondence on the subject of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents segment on the Borden case.
