THE BAD SEED 1956 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2012/04/the-bad-seed-1956.html
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, 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 to audiences some six decades ago. While other films, dismissed or misunderstood in their own time (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter) benefit from revisionism and the kind of clear-eyed, contextual reassessment of art only possible with the distancing effect of time. But more often than not, older films just take their place in our collective consciousness as works superficially cloaked in the trappings of their time. Dated vehicles 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 If the emotions are true and the stories compelling, we don’t necessarily care if the costumes are out-of-date, the dialog archaic, or style of filmmaking passé; the movie still works in the ways originally intended.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 they become near-impossible to enjoy or take seriously on any of the levels once deemed effective. 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, over-broad gestures and facial expressions) have a distancing effect on our ability to become involved in the narrative. In these instances, a film’s elder status becomes an intractable element contributing to how it is viewed by contemporary audiences. A variable which establishes the terms and boundaries of its broader acceptance.
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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
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Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark
Eileen Heckart as Hortense Daigle
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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 Rhoda’s immaculate façade isn’t perhaps masking a more disturbed, darker personality dysfunction. The mysterious death of a local schoolboy and Christine’s own epiphanic discovery of her birth lineage lead her to believe that little Rhoda might be a budding serial killer: a possessor of a hereditary “bad seed” gene passed on to Rhoda by Christine herself. What to do? What to do? What to do?
Al Hirschfeld
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.
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I personally love the Hays Code-mandated, tacked-on ending that has God’s retribution striking down little Rhoda in the middle of her most Godless act (in the play, Rhoda lives and it's the mother who dies), 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 (and seemingly interminable chunks of dialog) 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.
Although not easy to make out, that little crinoline blur in the upper lefthand corner of this screencap is an airborne Rhoda, avoiding the passiveaggressive spray of the garden hose Leroy (Henry Jones) is intent on training on her plot-significant Mary Jane shoes.
I couldn’t have been much older than Rhoda myself when I first saw The Bad Seed on TV (definitely the last time I ever took the film as seriously). I was raised in a middle-class neighborhood during a time when kids were brought up to be seen and not heard. To be obedient and polite, to say "Please" and "Thank you," and to 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 behaving 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 certainly didn’t mind that the deaths of little Claude Daigle or handyman Leroy were never shown (something unthinkable today, especially if that talentless hack Eli Roth makes good on 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.
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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 1953. 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 curious effect of making The Bad Seed more watchable, not less.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Although I consider a great many 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 the wan 2006 remake fell into (headfirst) by framing the action in ways which left the child’s evil nature left ambiguous. In the 1976 film, the child merely behaves in a normal fashion and the audience is left to project whatever we wanted onto his angelic pan. In the remake, the child actor is directed to continually glower into the camera...the result: 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.
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"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.
These days, when the bratty behavior of children is business-as-usual in every sitcom and movie I see (seriously, the sociopath at the center of the 2011 thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin is indistinguishable from and no more horrific than today's average over-entitled teen ...which may be the point) 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 presented by her size and appearance contrasted with her behavior; but also because she’s carrying on in a way we’ve long come to associate with grown-up entertainment industry brats and 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 or Elton John?
The Original Material Girl
PERFORMANCES Nancy Kelly and Eileen Heckart give the kind of robust, 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
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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 affectingly played. Heckart has some great material and much of it she plays with real poignance, but a little too much theatrical “drunk” shtick creeps into the characterization for it to avoid the occasional lapse into overkill. The film’s true 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 twofaced—creation an identifiable hyper-phony like Leave it to Beaver's Eddie Haskell—whose absolute refusal to behave in accordance to her appearance (and gender) 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 does work remarkably well as a satirical black comedy of American paranoia in the mid-'50s. McCarthyism took root when 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 unassuming anarchy let loose on the stiff, airless “normalcy” of the falsely idealized world inhabited by the adults. Like many a con man, crooked politician, and gangster throughout history, Rhoda manages to get away with murder (heh-heh) by presenting a false (but reassuring) front 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 to be remade, possibly with Rhoda's guilt left ambiguous for much of the film, the drama would have to hinge on Rhoda making people uncomfortable by her too-perfect adherence to the image of the "good little girl", or by a reluctance to accept how she could ever be be anything other than what her image projects. (1985 saw a predictably unsubtle and overobvious TV remake...a waste of time.)
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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!” and 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). In her adult years, 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 (her DVD commentary offers a wealth of behind-the-scenes info). Mining the camp-factor, the play version of The Bad Seed has become a favorite of 99-seat theater productions, often 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 a later-in-life cult appreciation for the way the laughs come at the expense of the film’s sincere over-earnestness and '50s mind-set, not the performances.
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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.
Some time ago 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. It must have a been a big "gotcha" moment back in its day, but on the night I attended, the actress playing Christine had so much trouble lifting the window blind, she was ultimately obliged to politely hold the stubborn curtain aside to facilitate her own persecution. Matters weren't helped by Leroy missing his key light, leaving him thoroughly in the shadows, resulting in Christine appearing to be engaged in hand-to-hand combat with her living room curtains.
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More shocking than anything you'll see in the film itself is this bit of mind blowing behind-the-scenes cheesecake showing prim Nancy Kelly keeping the crew "entertained" between setups (more likely, giving her gams some air on the hot set). Meanwhile, Joan Croydon (Miss Fern) doesn't seem to be getting into the spirit of things.
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Hard-to-argue-with logic "But it was his fault. If he gave me the medal like I told him to, I wouldn't have hit him!"
Copyright Š Ken Anderson
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