Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E18, "The Older Sister"

Lizzie Borden is an American obsession. Did she do it? If she did, did they have it coming? The detailed timeline, the almost-but-not-quite closed circle of suspects, the hothouse atmosphere, the family tensions, the role of gender and (potentially) sexuality: whatever oxygen-to-fuel ratio a crime needs to inspire decades of adaptations, riffs, and allusions, this one has it. It’s naturally story-shaped, so it begets stories with ease.

“The Older Sister” is a good, if not exactly revelatory, example of the breed. It stands out partly for its focus not on (solely) Lizzie Borden but on the Borden sisters—Emma (Joan Lorring) as well as Lizzie (Carmen Mathews)—and partly for not restaging the murders but instead taking place one year later. These small shifts in perspective are crucial to the story’s particular identity. It’s a smart, well-developed piece.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

and gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.

We hear this indelible nursery rhyme in Hitch’s intro and then again—now in a grating, childish monotone as a little girl paces the street outside the Borden house—once we head into the episode proper: that immediate repetition gives a rough impression of what the remaining Bordens have been dealing with all year. They’ve heard it before. They’ll hear it again. It never stops.

Before the murders, from what we can tell, the Borden house was a suffocating, joyless place. After the murders, it’s just the same. Its interiors loom over its people, surrounding them in dark wood and shadows.

Emma Borden has reached her limit. She’s sneaking away to nearby Fairhaven—literally sneaking, as if she’s a child slipping away from her parents—and the maid, Margaret (Pat Hitchcock), is leaving too. When she goes away, there will be no new maid to replace her.

Margaret only stayed so long, she says, for Emma’s sake, and that makes sense: as played by Joan Lorring, Emma is blonde, doll-like, innocent, a vulnerable contrast to Carmen Mathews’s stern, solid, haggard Lizzie. Emma is a damsel, and Lizzie is a dragon.

“I only know that I can’t stand it no more,” Margaret says. “I’ll be minding my own business, there she’ll be, standing there, just looking at me. She knows every move we make. It’s more than a body can stand.”

Lizzie’s presence is oppressive in part because she embodies all the dark, fraught loneliness of the house. She feels it too, but since she’s the reason for it, she can’t escape it. It’s obvious early on that there’s a pathos to her that Margaret, at least, is refusing to see.

Into this repressed American Gothic fug comes the bright, brisk, and snappily modern Nell Cutts (Polly Rowles). She’s from Sacramento—busier, newer, and sunnier than Fall River, Massachusetts, and she carries her sense of place with her—and she’s here for a story. Specifically, she’s here for a true crime story, and the script nails the queasily entrancing feeling even unethical examples of the genre can have, where a genuine sense of history, journalism, and analysis, complete with a reverence for detail, sits shoulder-to-shoulder with flippancy (“Cold mutton soup in August, no wonder someone committed murder”) and lurid voyeurism.

Nell’s not afraid to bulldoze, manipulate, and lie to get what she wants, but while Emma falls for her tactics—oh, you described a generic-sounding prospector, so you must specifically know my uncle the prospector!—Lizzie doesn’t. She gets Nell out, but it’s too late: the poisonous stasis in the house has been shaken up.

This is another episode that rudely shakes up my usual format by putting the major reveal of the episode partway through. Since so much depends on it, I’ll discuss it here and save the last, far-less-twist-like development for the official spoiler section, but note that spoilers for an earlier development will be above the break.

Nell’s fixation on the vanished axe sends Lizzie off to fetch it from a hidden compartment behind the fireplace, and Emma is startled to see it, but only through a kind of dreamlike haze: “I always wondered the axe got to. I didn’t see how they could search and search and never find it.”

Lizzie admits that she hid it: “I had to,” she says, and in another minute, the episode reveals why. It’s half-a-step away from the most obvious answer, which is why it’s part of the conversation at all: no one needs a reveal that Lizzie Borden committed murder.

It was, of course, Emma, but over this long last year, the sisters never discussed that Lizzie covered up for her and took the blame for her crime. Emma didn’t even fully understand the first part until now; Lorring gives her buffered innocence a horrifying tilt in these later scenes, making Emma a kind of child-woman who’s willfully ignorant of all the suffering and work that let her pretend everything will work out for the best (for her, anyway). There’s an intimacy between her and Lizzie, but it’s incredibly, painfully unbalanced—not only in terms of what they offer each other, but also in terms of how well they perceive each other.

It took Emma a year, and a pretty direct confrontation, to work out that Lizzie saved her. She may have wondered about that axe, but she never went so far as to suspect the most obvious person of hiding it for her; like a fair number of murderers, on a basic level, Emma does not really believe in other people. Meanwhile, how did Lizzie know within seconds that she needed to help her sister cover up two brutal murders? “I saw your face. That was all I needed.”

One of the best details in that regard is that Lizzie, wondering how Emma could do such a thing, admits that of course she hated their stepmother too, and Emma has to rush in and assure her that no, she couldn’t possibly have hated her as much. Emma lives in a world entirely governed by her outsized emotions; she can’t believe that they had equal hatred but unequal amounts of self-control or morality. On some level, she believes that everything she does is purified by how intensely she feels. (Almost everything, anyway: she does, in a painful aside, apologize for killing Lizzie’s kitten: she can’t justify that spillover of her rage even to herself.)

That ties into the lopsided nature of any protectiveness between them, too. Lizzie knew the truth, and she sat through questioning and a murder trial and the eternal ruin of her reputation. No Fairhaven trip for her. Meanwhile, Emma even wore Lizzie’s apron when she committed the murders. Not to frame her, but simply because she wasn’t thinking about her at all: “It was the handiest, Lizzie.” Even when she knows the truth, she still—almost in cuddly rhapsodies, nuzzling Lizzie’s hand as she remembers it all—acts as if Providence rescued her: “Nobody saw me. Somebody protected me.” Lizzie’s right to insist, “I protected you,” and right to finally notice that it never went the other way. It’s as if saying it all out loud for the first time lets her hear how ill-used she’s been.

Lizzie: What would you have done, Emma, if they’d found me guilty?

Emma: Oh, I didn’t worry about it. I knew the answer would come to me when the time came.

Lizzie: So you didn’t worry about it. You let me go through with it, sitting in court, the crowd hating me, hissing at me, wanting me dead.

It is, perhaps, at last too much of a push against Emma’s illusions. She retreats into delusion, preparing to kill “Mrs. Borden” once again, and when Lizzie pushes against that, daring to mention taking Emma to a doctor, she retreats into delusion and canniness: “Do you want to shut me up, Lizzie? I wasn’t meant to be shut up.” She can finally read Lizzie, but only when Lizzie is a danger to her; even in these few minutes, she chooses not to understand. She forgets once again that Lizzie is the only reason she’s still free: “I do what I have to do. The rest takes care of itself.” No, it doesn’t! Lizzie took care of the rest! She told you so five minutes ago! If you kill Lizzie, who will save you this time?

The script oversells Emma’s final turn just a little. I like how she clearly sees herself as a righteous person living in a glowing world of purpose and care; that’s a measured, interestingly self-serving psychological state. When she starts talking about seeing the axe’s reappearance as a sign that there should be “another,” the delusion feels too generic and superficial. But that’s a small wrong turn in an episode that is otherwise a strong character study of solipsism and sacrifice.

The Twist: Nell-ex-machina comes back to get a statement, breaking the tension between the two sisters … and discovering the axe. Lizzie’s protective instincts return, and she shuffles Emma off to Fairhaven and prepares to take the blame again. Right as Lizzie begins giving a stiff, supposedly cold-blooded statement, an intuitive Nell realizes the world’s been blaming the wrong sister. Fearing she’ll print the truth, Lizzie brandishes the axe at her until Nell believes her after all and, of course, flees. Lizzie is left with only her cat for company.

As I said, this is one of the episodes where tagging the ending spoilers like this isn’t all that accurate. The true twist is Lizzie Borden as an innocent, loyal sister, a martyr for a sister who does not deserve her; the ending simply sees her commit to that even more. She makes the same choice here that she did a year ago, only now she makes it with a full understanding of the lonely misery it will earn her. Her existence was narrow and painful at the start, and it’s even narrower and more painful at the end.¹ This time, she doesn’t even have the illusion that Emma will be grateful. By now she knows better.

The episode structure—a mid-story twist followed by a final confirmation of character and motivation—is unusual for AHP, but it makes for a rich, compelling character piece because it gives us time to sit with the revelation of who the characters really are. The last few minutes even pack in a stunning bit of almost accidental cruelty—Nell saying, “Now I know why Emma left,” to a self-sacrificing, abandoned Lizzie—before landing on a fade-out straight from a horror movie. The eerie, wailing music is the perfect soundtrack for Lizzie’s dead-eyed retreat to the sofa, especially with Mathews walking like she’s trying to keep her body from flying apart into a thousand pieces. Her hand moves mechanically, petting her cat without fully perceiving it; it loves her, and she loves it, but it’s not enough.

This is a haunted house now, if it wasn’t already.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Lillian de la Torre (story), Robert C. Dennis (teleplay)

Up Next: “Shopping for Death”

1. But every cloud has a silver lining, so I’m glad the kitten-killing Emma is now far away from the affectionate Orangey. (Wikipedia says that’s an uncredited Orangey, anyway.) ↩︎