In 1893 Massachusetts, 32-year-old spinster Lizzie Andrew Borden is put on trial for killing her father Andrew and stepmother Abby with an ax. The film explores complex family relationships and uses facts to provide a possible solution.
For some performers, their TV roles are just a prelude stardom. Steve McQueen used his role on Wanted: Dead or Alive as a springboard to superstar status. Eddie Murphy soared when he left TV. Ditto: Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Robin Williams. Other TV stars, however beloved, never managed the transition to movie stardom. David Janssen comes immediately to mind, and maybe David Caruso and Tom Selleck. Elizabeth Montgomery was in the latter category. A film career never got off the ground and she spent her post-Bewitched career paying the bills in made-for-TV films. She did a good job in those, but film offers eluded her, perhaps because she was already almost 40 when Bewitched ended and that’s the age when Old Hollywood tended to relegate women to mom roles. (New Hollywood is not that much different.) She was 52 when she did Between the Darkness and the Dawn, and was still beautiful, as you can see below despite the crappy captures, but she was probably past her expiration date for film stardom as a leading lady.
The TV films rarely included any nudity, or even anything close. Her only real topless scene was in that Lizzie Borden film, which does include clear nipple exposure despite being made for ABC. (Perhaps they hoped for a theatrical release? Perhaps the nipples only appeared on the DVD, and were not in the broadcast version? Or is there some other explanation? I just don’t know the back story.)
She came close two other times:
Belle Starr – 1980
(Mr. Skin has this marked “nude.” ??? I can’t make out any clear exposure.)
Between the Darkness and the Dawn – 1985. A hint of areola.
Videos here.
I have a much better copy of Between the Darkness and the Dawn, but it was broadcast on a religious network, and they cut out the “nude” scene. As a result, the only clip I have of the mirror scene is from a VHS rip. You know how that goes.
Her final season on Bewitched, which she didn’t want to do, she often was braless, and often had the high beams on.
I posted about this before, but quick recap:
Back in the day, American TV movies would often get theatrical or home video releases overseas. They’d frequently shoot extra content for those releases, especially theatrical. Remove commercials and those films get a little short. Make it a little spicy to please those Europeans and all the better.
Many times, those theatrical releases would eventually hit home video in the US. Given the era of this one, it would have been several years later. Chances are there are multiple versions floating around, the og TV cut and a longer spicy cut.
Us nerds look for running times. A recent horror movie I was trying to find had an unrated cut that was extra rare. Only way to tell? 12 minutes longer. That search didn’t pan out, so kudos to whoever found the bewitching version of Lizzy.
I notice that the film is available on Amazon Prime, free to Prime members. Any idea if that version is more (or less?) censored than the source these pics and clips are from?
Quick looks at her nipples are seen in Amazon Prime, but they are really quick and it looks like the original tv resolution so detail is hard to see. It happens while she is killing her father and you really need to be looking right at that area to even get a little view.
She’s fully nude for quite a long time and if they saved the outtakes they could really give us a great director’s cut version of this. We can always hope. I have a hard time believing that people in Hollywood wouldn’t have saved some of these nude outtakes and passed them around. Susan Sarandon joked about it once in the 70’s on The Tonight Show.
There are a ton of black market copies of Hollywood films that are out there and now people are trying to get them as some of those movies have been lost in fires. People would pay off people to get a copy back then. Guys are notorious for saving all their Playboy magazines forever. There must have been guys trying to get copies of all these nude scene outtakes these actresses were doing. Perhaps the studios themselves put them in storage and they may still be around although the film itself may not be in good shape if that was the case.
Currently there are a lot of people doing work putting together the most complete version of eurosleaze movies from the 70s. Different versions were made for different countries and places like Germany often got the most uncut ones. The actresses in these films often did amazing scenes that we hadn’t seen previously, only the German audiences. Now they are showing up in a lot of places, Amazon Prime has had quite a few. The spliced together movies will often be in English and then switch to German with subtitles for the portion only shown in Germany and then back to English. Pretty funny what lengths people will go to for this and we are the beneficiaries of their efforts.
The Lizzie Borden film was definitely shown in Europe with the nipples, not sure if it was left in the US version. I was very young, but I remember watching it on tv when it came out. The nipple shot is also so quick that it would be hard to pick up on tvs back then being low resolution and pretty small. Without freeze frame, I doubt people would even notice.
The 70s were also a time where they definitely were experimenting with a little nudity on tv. I never saw tv before the 70s so it didn’t seem unusual to me. Roots in 1977 had full topless women in the 1st couple of episodes. In ’79, Gaugin the Savage with David Carradine had a nude girl posing that was left in. PBS put Valerie Perrine nude in Steambath on which I guess is considered somewhat of a milestone. I recall seeing some movies basically uncut around 11:30 back then. Helen Mirren’s nudity in Age of Consent was left in, perhaps it was a decision of a local affiliate in Boston area.
By then the FCC had made in clear that from 10:00 pm on they had a lot of freedom and they were experimenting with satellite broadcasts as well. Johnny Carson even had satellite broadcasts with swearing left in for awhile. The Supreme Court almost blocked the FCC from censoring anything in the early 70s but the conservatives barely won out. I’ve always wondered what the course of US media would have been like if even the FCC wasn’t allowed to censor anything.
No matter what though, cable tv changed everything. It provided the Hollywood networks a virtual monopoly on all media by bringing in boatloads of cash and allowing them to own all the channels. They used naked women as a way of selling premium channels and pay-per-view later on and never really changed that format. It’s a good thing that cable tv is going away.