THE BAD SEED 1956

For the most part, I don’t see anything inherently bad in a film morphing from one kind of entertainment into another over the course of its “screening life.” By this I mean that films; a populist entertainment/art form presumed of a certain marketable topicality at the time of their release, are, by nature, vulnerable to the vagaries of time. A movie can start out as one kind of entertainment— say, thoughtful social drama—but, due to changing public tastes, evolve over time into something that gives pleasure to countless hundreds in new, totally unexpected ways (e.g., high camp).

Some films, like John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951), feel every bit as powerful and affecting today as I imagine they did for audiences some six decades ago. While other films, dismissed or misunderstood in their own time (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter) benefit greatly from revisionism and the kind of clear-eyed, contextual reassessment of art that’s only possible with the distancing effect of time. Most commonly though, older films just take their place in our consciousness as works superficially cloaked in the trappings of their “time,” addressing otherwise timeless concerns of love, death, humanity, and hope. If the emotions are true and the stories compelling, we don’t necessarily care if the costumes are out-of-date, the dialog archaic, or style of filmmaking passé. The movie still works in the ways originally intended.

What seems to play havoc with a film’s continuing relevance is a non-scientific equation that takes over-emphatic, up-to-the-minute immediacy, multiplies it by sensationalism, and adds a dash of self-seriousness. The result is usually something so mired in a particular time, place, and mindset, that it’s near-impossible to enjoy or take seriously on any of the levels that may have been effective at one time. We see it in highly-stylized dramatic films from the 30s and 40s, where stage-bound acting techniques (characters speaking into the distance rather than to one another; gestures and facial expressions that indicate emotions broadly) have a distancing effect on our involvement in the narrative. In these instances, a film’s elder status is an intractable element of how it is viewed by contemporary audiences and establishes the boundaries for its broad acceptance.

When psychoanalysis was new, juvenile delinquency in its infancy, and post-war conformity at its height, Maxwell Anderson’s Broadway 1954 play, The Bad Seed (adapted from the 1954 novel by William March) must have been quite the eye-opener. A thriller about a sociopathic 8 year-old serial killer sounds like a weed among the roses in a Broadway season that saw the premieres of Peter Pan and The Pajama Game, but the chillingly original premise and by-all-accounts remarkable performance of little 9 year-old, anti-Shirley Temple, Patty McCormack, made The Bad Seed into a solid hit. Co-star Nancy Kelly won the Tony Award for Best Actress that year, and in a rarity for Hollywood, virtually the entire principal cast was recruited to recreate their roles for the 1956 film adaptation.

But not everything that plays well across the footlights survives the magnification of the movie screen. Suffering from a perhaps too-faithful adaptation that had characters doing nothing but conversing for fitfully long stretches while engaged in a lot of theatrically fussy “stage  business,” the close-up lens trained on The Bad Seed seemed to amplify the dubious premise of the plot (hereditary homicidal tendencies) while doing nothing to add verisimilitude or spontaneity to the progressively melodramatic proceedings.

Nancy Kelly as Christine Penmark

Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark

Eileen Heckart as Hortense Daigle

Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup

Navy Colonel Kenneth Penmark and wife Christine seem to have the ideal child in their little Rhoda: an angelic, near-perfect package of pigtails and ruffles, adorned with girlish grace and good manners. When Kenneth is called away to Washington for business, Christine (who’s wound a little tight from the get-go) begins to suspect that perhaps Rhoda’s immaculate façade isn’t masking a more disturbed, darker nature. The mysterious death of a local boy and Christine’s epiphanic discovery of her own birth lineage lead her to believe that little Rhoda is a budding serial killer; possessor of a hereditary “bad seed” gene passed on to Rhoda by Christine herself. What to do? What to do? What to do?

I make light of the preposterous-sounding premise, but quite honestly, when removed from the gimmicky “serial killer gene” plotline, The Bad Seed is pretty solid thriller material and might have even tapped into the post-war/ McCarthy-era “banality of evil” zeitgeist of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (released the same year) had it managed to sidestep the theatrical histrionics and showed more faith in presenting a dark vision of idealized suburban perfection.
* Spoiler Alert! If you've never seen The Bad Seed, read no further. Run, don't walk, and get your hands on a copy of this film NOW! You're in for a treat. Come back later...we'll still be here.
I personally love the Hays Code-mandated, tacked-on ending (in the play, Rhoda lives and it's the mother who dies) that has God’s retribution striking down little Rhoda in the middle of her most Godless act, but feel it would have been even more powerful without the survival of the mother and her guilt-leaden hospital bed confession.

Thematically, The Bad Seed is ill-served by how deeply the plot is mired in outmoded Freudian psychological theorems. Stylistically, its effectiveness as a suspense thriller is undermined by an overwrought theatricality that turns every scene that should be gripping melodrama into a satire of American suburban ideals.

That little crinoline blur in the upper left-hand corner is an airborne Rhoda, avoiding the passive-aggressive spray of  the garden hose Leroy (Henry Jones) appears intent on training on her plot-significant Mary Jane shoes.

I couldn’t have been much older than Rhoda when I saw The Bad Seed on TV for the first time, and that was probably the last time I ever responded to it as intended. I was raised in a middle-class neighborhood during a time when kids were brought up to say  “please “and “thank you” and never, but NEVER speak back to grownups. So it shocked the hell out of me to see a little girl who could have stepped out of an episode of Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver behave so monstrously. The idea that a kid could exert any power over their own lives at all was alien enough, let alone plan and carry out vicious murders with nary a trace of remorse.
I didn’t mind that we weren’t shown the deaths of little Claude Daigle or Leroy the maintenance man (something unthinkable today, especially if that talentless hack Eli Roth makes good a long ago threat/promise to remake this film)  because my fertile kid’s imagination furnished all the gory details. I remember being very torn up by the grief of Eileen Heckart’s Mrs. Daigle and the sound of the gunshot near the end nearly sent me flying off the sofa. The strongest memory I have is of Rhoda’s final trip to the boathouse. It was spooky enough that she was out by herself at night in a rainstorm, but I thought maybe her maddeningly clueless father was going to wake up and catch her red-handed with the medal. That bolt of lightning hit me like ...well, a bolt of lightning. OMG! I had NEVER seen a kid killed in a movie before and that image stayed with me for many a nightmare.

Evelyn Varden portrays annoying landlady and neighbor, Monica Breedlove. 

Naiveté definitely has its advantages with some films, so at least I get to say that I had one pure experience of The Bad Seed. Perhaps the closest one can get without time-traveling back to the 50s.

Over the course of the next several years however, The Bad Seed, almost imperceptibly, went from serious to hilarious in my eyes. The pitch of the film had always been a little high, but with maturity, the passing of time, and changing tastes, The Bad Seed started to look as dated and reactionary as one of those “social guidance” films of the 50s and 60s. A turn of events that’s had the unusual effect of making the film more watchable, not less.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Although I consider most real-life children to be monsters, I think it’s extremely difficult to make them look menacing on the screen. The 1976 film The Omen sidestepped the pitfall its 2006 remake fell into (headfirst) by having the child’s evil nature left ambiguous. The child merely behaved in a normal fashion and the audience was left to project whatever we wanted onto his angelic pan. In the remake, the child actor is directed to continually glower at the screen; producing the surely-unwanted effect of a child suffering a tummy ache rather than the conveyance of a subterranean malevolence within the spawn of Satan. What makes Patty McCormack so memorably creepy in The Bad Seed is that she's like a schoolyard bully dreamt up by Murder, Inc.

"You better bring them back here! Right here to MEEEEEEE!

The only reason this scene gets laughs is because Patty McCormack is scarier than hell in it. You can't believe a little girl in pigtails and a pinafore can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

 Today, when the bratty behavior of children is business-as-usual in every sitcom and movie I see (seriously, the sociopath in We Need to Talk About Kevin is indistinguishable from the average middle class brat I encounter these days) little Rhoda Penmark comes off more like a miniature Alexis Carrington than homicidal maniac. Her outbursts and threats make us giggle certainly because of the incongruity of her behavior with her size and sanitized appearance, but also because she’s carrying on in a way we’ve long come to associate with entertainment industry divas. Rhoda is rude, ruthless, selfish, self-involved, single-mindedly determined to get what she wants, and impervious to the suffering of others. Now, who doesn't think that sounds like Madonna?

The Original Material Girl

PERFORMANCES:

Nancy Kelly and Eileen Heckart give the kind of herculean performances that garner Oscar nominations, and indeed both (along with McCormack) were in fact nominated for Academy Awards. Both are very good but neither actress lets up “acting” for even a second, making every ill-tempered intrusion by McCormack a welcome one. Kelly’s stylistic excesses and singsong way of conveying sincerity may induce laughter, but the anguish her character goes through is really rather remarkably played. Heckart has some great material and much of it she plays with real poignancy, but a little too much standard “drunk” shtick creeps into the characterization for it to avoid the occasional lapse into overkill. The film’s star and absolute marvel is 10 year-old Patty McCormack. Although her performance is over- rehearsed to within a hairsbreadth,  her Rhoda is a hilariously two-faced creation - an identifiable hyper- phony like Leave it to Beaver's Eddie Haskell - whose absolute refusal to be what her appearance signifies feels like an act of guerrilla rebellion against the stuffy middle-class blandness surrounding her. Rhoda Penmark is one of my favorite movie villains. The film positively drags whenever she’s not onscreen.

Rhoda has intimacy issues

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

No longer a viable suspense thriller (not for me, anyway) The Bad Seed works remarkably well as a satirical black comedy of American paranoia in the mid-50s. McCarthyism took root because post-war America was just starting to look within its own backyard for threats to the so-called American way of Life. What did it find? Well, juvenile delinquency, for one. And what else is Rhoda but a steely-eyed juvenile delinquent in Mary Janes? (OK, a juvenile homicidal delinquent, but I’m trying to make a point.) As the perfect little angel who’ll stop at nothing to get that coveted Penmanship Medal, Rhoda is an unassuming anarchy let loose on the stiff, airless “normalcy” of the falsely idealized world inhabited by the adults. Like all the crooked politicians and gangsters throughout history, Rhoda manages to get away with murder (heh-heh) by showing the world a false image of conformity. Everyone is so slow to pick up on the rather obvious clues of Rhoda’s guilt because….well, little girls just don’t do that. If The Bad Seed were remade and Rhoda's guilt was left ambiguous, it would become clear that Rhoda makes people uneasy merely because she either conforms too much to the image of the perfect little girl, or too little. (1985 saw a predictably terrible and over obvious TV remake...a waste of time.)

Little Rhoda Penmark having one of her "moments"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

In spite of its daringly original premise and first-class credentials, I’m afraid the movie that once promoted itself as “The most shocking motion picture ever made!” containing “The most chilling moment the screen has ever unleashed!” is now an enduring camp staple, no more frightening and every bit as riotous as this scene of holy terror Jane Withers laying into Shirley Temple in 1934’s Bright Eyes (YouTube link). 

Actress Patty McCormack has embraced the cult/camp status of The Bad Seed and frequently appears at screenings, judging Rhoda look-alike contests, and answering questions about the making of the film (she is great on the DVD commentary). Mining the camp-factor, The Bad Seed has become a favorite of 99-seat theater productions, usually with an adult male cast as Rhoda. People seem to have a deep affection for The Bad Seed, either due to childhood exposure to the then-frightening film, or cult appreciation that has the laughs coming at the expense of the film’s over-earnestness and 50s mind-set, not at the performers themselves.

In the Censorship Code sanctioned denouement, Rhoda goes back to the pier to retrieve the coveted Penmanship Medal and gets more than she bargained for. In the play Rhoda survives while her mother commits suicide.

I had the chance to see a stage production of The Bad Seed and was surprised to discover that one of the big shocker set pieces of the play was a nocturnal walk through the house by a restless Christine after the death of Leroy. It’s a stormy night full of thunder and lightning, and as Christine moves to close an open window, a flash of lightning reveals the charred corpse of Leroy lunging out at her. I’d like to report that the effect gave the audience the intended jolt, but on the night I attended, the actress playing Christine had so much trouble lifting the blinds that she was obliged to politely hold the screen aside to accommodate the unexpected terrorizing by Leroy (who missed his key light, so to us in the audience it pretty much looked like Christine was just wrestling with the curtains).

More shocking than anything you'll see in the film itself is this bit of mind blowing behind-the-scenes cheesecake that shows prim Nancy Kelly keeping the crew "entertained" between setups (more likely, giving her gams some air on the hot set). Joan Croydon (Miss Fern) doesn't seem to be getting into the spirit of things.

"But it was his fault. If he gave me the medal like I told him to, I wouldn't have hit  him!"

She's got a point. It's hard to argue with logic like that.

Copyright © Ken Anderson