The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975)

The late Elizabeth Montgomery stars in this courtroom drama based on the famous killings of Andrew Borden, and his wife Abby Durfee Borden. The case was one of the most sensational of its day, a veritable media circus before such things even existed: no televisions, no radios, no internet. But, a lot of obsession over a Sunday School spinster and her alleged murder of her father and stepmother.

Andrew Borden (Fritz Weaver), is a dour, unlikeable, and mean "skin flint" as Irish maid Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan (Fionulla Flanagan) calls him. (The family calls her Maggie for reasons never made quite clear, but perhaps it is a dig at her heritage at a time when the Irish were ill-treated by WASP society). He's a mortician and a skin-flint because, in his daughter Lizzie's mind, he refuses to move from their gloomy old house to a more fashionable section of town, more befitting their station. He's also a mortician, and there is a curious flashback wherein young Lizzie spies him working on the cadaver of a young girl. And what he is doing seems a little oddly inappropriate (think: Count von Cosel).

He also forces the family to gag down a "mutton stew" that has been festering in unrefrigerated heat for five days. This makes them sick. (Or, at the very least, sicker than they already all are.)

The film, however, begins with Lizzie coming to the door of the house after Bridget summons a neighbor. In a dreamy, detached voice she says, "Could you please come in? Someone has killed father." The opening theme is a piece of old taproom piano playing; sets the tone. Sister Emma (the late Katherine Helmond), is conveniently away visiting friends.

Lizzie is the prime suspect of course, and the inquest turns into a trial. The recreation of the victims' bodies seems relatively accurate, and there is a decent amount of gruesomeness in this picture. Much of it is told in testimonial flashbacks, and of course, the weird, cold, detached Lizzie has the most nightmarish flashbacks of them all. Was there some incestuous abuse between Lizzie and her father? There seems to be an undercurrent of THAT particular paraphilia suggested as well.

Lizzie's personality comes across as harsh, often scolding, as when she upbraids her sister Emma for not bringing her the particular gloves she wants to wear to trial. At other times, she can evince quite a hysterical reaction, as when her lawyer tells her that the worst they can do to her if convicted, is "death by hanging." (Which, all things considered, is pretty bad.)

Lizzie turns from the somewhat vacant emotional iceberg to someone crawling across the jailhouse walls, screaming in terror. They say sociopaths only feel their own pain.

It might have been the changing of her father's will (at the suggestion of Lizzie's hated stepmother, played here by Helen Craig), or her father's refusal to give her a greater allowance. It might have been incest, or memories of watching her father molest corpses, or hatred of her stepmother--or maybe it was just that damn rotten stew that broke the came's back; but, whatever it was, this film comes only to one conclusion (a bloody, nude one, but a conclusion nonetheless). It goes:

"Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she'd seen what she had done, she gave her father forty-one."

Starts slow, but definitely worth the viewer's time. Eventually, it becomes as haunting as the specters said to roam the "Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast" in Fall River, Massachusetts. The same town where, incidentally, the real-life Lizzie Borden lived and, in 1927, died.

But not as a convicted felon.

And not by hatchet murder.

The Legend of Lizzie Borden can be viewed on YouTube