#2240

😏😏😏😏

The Legend of Lizzie Borden is a 1975 American  historical  mystery television film directed by Paul Wendkos and starring Elizabeth Montgomery—in an Emmy-nominated performance—as Lizzie Borden, an American woman who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. It co-stars Katherine Helmond, Fritz Weaver, Fionnula Flanagan, and Hayden Rorke.

The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) exists because the director and writer saw in Lizzie a perfect vessel for the anxieties, fascinations, and cultural shifts of the 1970s. The film is less about 1892 and more about 1975.

WATCH FILM BELOW

The Legend of Lizzie Borden: A First‑Person Reflection on Doubt, Contradiction, and the Birth of a Legend

I came to The Legend of Lizzie Borden with a simple expectation: if a film announces itself with the solemn line “the story you are about to see is based largely on fact,” then I should be able to trust that claim. But the deeper I went into the film, the more that opening sentence began to feel like a trap door. The director shows me Lizzie killing her father and stepmother — not tentatively, not as one hypothesis among many, but with a vivid, stylized certainty. And then, at the end, he reminds me that the case remains unsolved.

That contradiction lodged itself in my mind. Why tell me the story is factual, only to dramatize the very thing history cannot prove?

The more I sat with that tension, the more I realized the film isn’t lying so much as revealing something about the way legends are made. The director isn’t accusing Lizzie; he’s participating in the cultural machinery that turned her into a myth long before he ever touched a camera.

And that’s where the nursery rhyme suddenly clicked into place for me.

Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks…

That rhyme — catchy, cruel, and wildly inaccurate — is the real author of Lizzie’s legend. It’s the reason a century later we still know her name. It’s the reason a director in 1975 could assume an audience would arrive already primed with a sense of who Lizzie “was,” even though the courts declared her innocent. The rhyme is the cultural verdict, the one that stuck.

So when the film claims to be “based largely on fact,” it isn’t referring to the historical record. It’s referring to the cultural record — the version of Lizzie that lives in folklore, in whispers, in the American imagination. The director is adapting the legend, not the case file.

And suddenly the contradiction makes sense. The film is built on two incompatible truths:

The legal truth: Lizzie was acquitted.

The cultural truth: Lizzie is the woman who “took an axe.”

The director chooses to inhabit the second truth, because that’s the one with mythic power. He stages the murders not as courtroom evidence but as psychological theatre — a stylized, dreamlike sequence that feels less like a reconstruction and more like a cultural hallucination. It’s the fantasy the rhyme planted in the collective mind, given cinematic form.

In that sense, the film’s final reminder that the case is unsolved isn’t a correction; it’s a ritual gesture. A nod to history before returning to myth. A way of saying: We know this isn’t proven, but this is the story you came for.

And maybe that’s why the film fascinates me. It exposes the strange alchemy by which an unsolved crime becomes a legend, and a legend becomes a psychological archetype. Lizzie isn’t just a suspect; she’s a symbol — of repressed anger, of domestic suffocation, of the fear of female agency in a Victorian world that insisted women were incapable of violence.

The director didn’t “falsely accuse” her. He dramatized the version of Lizzie that America invented.

And in doing so, he revealed something unsettling: sometimes the stories we remember are not the ones that happened, but the ones we needed to tell.