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Was at a conference this weekend and struck up a conversation with a publishing company representative because he had a copy of a novel (Company K by William March) I read in undergrad among his various history books. We chatted about that for a moment and then I saw that he had a copy of The Yellow Admiral that he had been reading when he had a moment, and then we spent the rest of the conversation talking about prose that might live up O’Brians

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'You still have Rhoda to be thankful for.'

William March, from The Bad Seed

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It was her duty, if her fears were grounded in fact, to educate herself, to read and study the things she'd avoided in the past--to accept any reality that faced her, however unpleasant, with courage and resourcefulness; to remedy the situation if possible; if not, to make the best compromise she could with facts.

The Bad Seed, William March

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The Bad Seed (2018)

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Reading Diary.

- The Bad Seed. William March.

During a long summer while her husband is away, Christine Penmark finds herself puzzled by the behavior of daughter Rhoda. The eight year old is so clever, charming, smart —maybe a touch too much for her age. And then there is her innate capability to charm adults around her, though other children seem to dislike and fear her. And of course, all those strange incidents that sometimes happen around Rhoda, all those mysterious deaths… But it’s not until Christine starts a careful research that she discovers just how deeply evil runs in the family…

Classy psycho-thriller from 1954, the quintessential evil child story —this specific sub-genre was not invented by The Bad Seed, but it is the most classic, essential example of it. Rhoda in that sense is the grande dame of a venerable line of murderous tykes. But the novel is less interested in detailing her often shocking exploits as it is in the chilling, slowly unraveling obsession that consumes distraught Christine as the danger she and everybody around them is in becomes increasingly impossible to deny.

A slow-paced novel peopled with convincingly realistic characters and spiced with the occasional lurid twist. Quite recommended.

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The Bad Seed (1956)

Patty McCormack was eight years old when she starred as Rhoda Penmark on the stage play The Bad Seed, itself an adaptation of William March’s novel of the same name. The Bad Seed was a sensation for the 46th Street Theatre (now the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York City, current home of Hamilton), and so too was McCormack as the most sociopathic child character ever seen on Broadway. Not often will the core actors of a stage play or musical return for a film adaptation. So what a surprise it must have been when Warner Bros. and director Mervyn LeRoy brought The Bad Seed – released two years after its Broadway debut – to theaters, with many of the crucial actors for the stage play reprising their roles. The Bad Seed, due to its plot’s construction, necessitates an incredible ensemble to deliver its fraught emotions and controversial themes.

In another unusual development, LeRoy – an uncategorizable director who could work with any genre or subgenre and was a master of adapting stage plays to screen – seems to not have coached his actors in modifying their performances for film (read: less theatrical emotions). No matter, as The Bad Seed continues to hold viewers in its grip, interrogating the balance of nature and nurture in macabre fashion.

Somewhere in a decently small, middle to upper-middle class town in the American East, the Penmark family is readying themselves for the days ahead. Father Kenneth Penmark (William Hopper) is a Colonel in the U.S. military, and needs to report to Washington, D.C. This will leave mother Christine (Nancy Kelly, reprising) and their child Rhoda (McCormack, reprising) alone for some time. But there will be frequent, welcome company from their landlady Monica (Evelyn Varden, reprising) and unpleasant company from groundskeeper Leroy Jessup (Henry Jones, reprising). Rhoda is an intelligent, sweet, spoiled young girl whom the adults – with a few notable exceptions – adore and, perhaps, too excessively compliment. Her façade breaks down in a moment when she expresses her disappointment in losing out on her class penmanship medal to a boy named Claude Daigle. A temporary frustration, reason the adults. During a lakeside class picnic, Claude Daigle drowns and Rhoda might be the last person to have seen him alive. When she returns home from the picnic, Rhoda is nonchalant, calling the rush of first responders exciting. A shaken Christine, the film (and the stage play’s) main character now must confront her swirling emotions and thoughts – not only for the deceased Claude Daigle, but for the possibility that Rhoda may have played a role in his death.

The Bad Seed also stars Eileen Heckart (reprising) as Claude’s mother, Hortense, in a brief but impactful two scenes. Joan Croydon as teacher Ms. Claudia Fern reprises, too. Character actors Paul Fix, Jesse White, Gage Clarke, and Frank Cady as Mr. Daigle round out the cast.

Upon its Broadway debut, The Bad Seed caused a stir among theatergoers. For those who had not read the book, the idea of an evil child in narrative art had never caught on before. The trope is well-worn in today’s books, movies, and television, but in the 1950s it was unique. Audiences left performances of The Bad Seed outraged towards the developments onstage – especially towards the book and the play’s original ending. The movie adaptation did not provoke such an uproar, in part due to the Hays Office, enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code (a self-censorship guideline from the major studios that enforced from 1934 until the creation of the MPAA ratings system in 1968), altering the conclusion. The Code sometimes inspired clever, inventive filmmaking from directors attempting to prod its puritanical edges. But more often than not, it hampered films, including the subject of this write-up. Mervyn LeRoy’s adaptation of The Bad Seed contains an anticlimactic, out-of-nowhere ending – all thanks to the Code – that elicited exasperated shouting from yours truly. Just as the orchestra swells in the film’s dying seconds, a title card appears urging the audience not to spoil the film’s climax to others. For good reason, too – I would have been much more disinterested in the movie if someone only gave me generalities of the plot with a fully-spoiled ending. The Bad Seed represents one of the most intriguing stories of how its enforcers influenced the artistic direction of the film before it ever came to theaters.

Everything else about The Bad Seed, however, is fantastic filmmaking.

It begins with the acting ensemble. As the first-billed actress, Nancy Kelly, whose career had been exclusively on the stage over the last decade before this film adaptation, has the performance of the film in a role demanding her to wrestle with the primal forces of nature and a parent’s instinct to nurture. Theatrical acting may not suit some audiences, but Kelly’s tenuous glances, uncertain speech, and inability to process the possible actions of her darling daughter help the viewer understand the horrific dilemma she soon finds herself in. Such dilemmas are not possible without Patty McCormack as Rhoda. McCormack was eleven years old when The Bad Seed made its cinematic debut, two years removed from its initial Broadway run. The two years make a notable difference. The dramatically mature content of The Bad Seed seems more suitable for a tween than a pre-tween – McCormack’s older age (relative to a younger child) lends greater credence to her character’s sociopathy.

The other two actors reprising their roles from the stage play have their characters nailed down as well. As the slimy Leroy Jessup, Henry Jones and his hunched posture and smarmy demeanor, positions Leroy as Rhoda’s foil. Rhoda and Leroy’s always-tense relationship is a masterful collaboration between the actors, age difference and all. Neither may be sympathetic characters, but one can always feel – even without dialogue – the mutual disregard both hold for the other. Eileen Heckart, as Hortense Daigle, is barely in the film. Hortense is inebriated in both of her scenes, oscillating between a range of damaging emotions that drunkenness can only accelerate. She is the one we feel most sorry for, as the hurt of losing her only child – and the suspicion she harbors towards Rhoda regarding her involvement in her son’s death – becomes the only part of her being.

Upon the stage play and the film’s release, the American public was still debating whether morality might be hereditary – an idea more en vogue mid-century as opposed to the present. I do not wish to delve into the depths of the speculative or pseudoscience, but this is the idea that animates much of Christine’s actions across The Bad Seed. So if her concerns and the actions of other sympathetic characters in this film seem silly in that psychological regard, note the difference in values and beliefs of the time before rendering more sweeping judgments. The film’s screenplay, by John Lee Mahin (1932’s Scarface, 1941’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), is fixated on this philosophical debate to the extent that the Hays Office seemed not to have cared about the near-constant consumption of alcohol from the adults across the entire film. This is not the uncomplicated existence that many audiences associate with 1950s American culture. Underneath of the coating of the placid Eisenhowerian America – comfortable lodgings for almost everyone, loving nuclear families, communities where everyone knows each other by name, lush open green spaces – is the acknowledgement of malevolence and ongoing trauma mostly left unmentioned. For its release date, The Bad Seed, in terms of its presented ideas and approach, is a daring work, and would inevitably spawn imitators.

Many of those imitators falls between genres, resting somewhere within the spectrums of horror films and thrillers. Most of the horrific details are out of sight. Violence occurs off-screen, leaving the audience to piece together the accounts of various characters in differing degrees of distress. In the film’s most abhorrent moment, one can hear the effects of a violent action – a decision that feels just as justified than if the filmmakers wanted to show some part of it. Like any thriller movie, a layer of tension applies across the picture, with Harold Rosson’s (1939’s The Wizard of Oz, 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain) disciplined cinematography performing visual slights-of-hand to keep viewers guessing. Rosson’s cinematography even incorporates atmospheric lighting in some instances to the extent that one could make the case this is a film noir. Where does The Bad Seed lie on a spectrum (or spectrums) of genres? I am not entirely sure myself, but I – as of the publication of this write-up – lean towards classifying this as a thriller movie that pulls from horror and film noir traditions.

By virtue of both its timing and understanding of psychology, Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed treats Rhoda’s sociopathy as if it is paranormal. That faux-paranormalism is why I suspect some consider The Bad Seed a horror movie. The Bad Seed, like many (but not all) films from Hollywood’s Golden Age, do not treat psychological concepts with much grace or nuance. So for a viewer in our present day who has never seen The Bad Seed or is aware of the narrative from the original novel or stage play, do not expect much skepticism over the concepts morality as hereditary or of the existence of natural-born killers. This is where The Bad Seed is most obsolete, and it is no minor weakness.

As the film concludes, The Bad Seed replicates the post-play entrances and bows that usually occur as the audience applauds at curtain. Well before too many movies relied on metatextual humor in the body of their screenplays, The Bad Seed, during these final credits, provides a physical, winking nod to all of the conflicted emotions that one has been harboring for its runtime. Though the film’s treatment of its sociopathic character is regressive in terms of how it frames neurodivergence, the acting ensemble boosts what otherwise might have been soapy slop to a fantastically chilling thriller.

My rating: 8.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.