The Bad Seed is a 1956 thriller based on the novel and play of the same name and starring Patty McCormack, Nancy Kelly, Henry Jones, Evelyn Varden, Richard Fix, and Eileen Heckart.
The Penmark family seems pretty happy and put together, other than the fact that Kenneth Penmark (William Hopper) has to go away to do military stuff. He leaves behind his wife Christine (Kelly) and his adorable little daughter Rhoda (McCormack), in the occasional care of their landlady and friend Mrs. Breedlove (Varden).
Rhoda's something of an odd duck - she refuses to wear jeans or even pants, she's very proper and polite and well-spoken, and nothing really seems to upset her except for the fact that another child at her school won a medal for penmanship that she feels she earned. And then that child drowns at a school picnic, and it slowly comes out that Rhoda was the last one to see him alive.
Christine gradually figures out that not only did Rhoda kill the kid and steal the medal, she did it callously and deliberately, and it's not the first murder she committed - she also killed an old lady at their last house because she'd promised her a bauble when she died. When the creepy-ass groundskeeper Leroy (Jones) figures out that Rhoda killed the kid, she murders him, too, by setting him on fire, and that's basically the last straw for Christine. She poisons Rhoda and then shoots herself, and here's where the movie gets not as good.
See, in the play and the novel, Christine dies, but the gunshot allows the neighbors to save Rhoda, and the implication is that Rhoda will live with her father and just go on being a serial murderer. In this movie, Christine lives (after some time in a coma), Rhoda lives, and has a lovely conversation with her father in which she makes clear to the audience that Breedlove is next, and it's unnecessary but kind of chilling. But then she gets out of bed and goes down to the lake to try and retrieve the penmanship medal (which her mother claims she threw into the water near where the boy drowned), and is stuck by lightning!
It's so ham-handed and unnecessary, you might as well have the Shadow intone "CRIME DOES NOT PAY". Of course this was done to comply with the fucking Hays code, because one of the tenets thereof was that criminals can't get away with their crimes. As a result, this very well made thriller has about four different ends and the pacing is just whack-a-ding-hoy in the last 30 minutes or so.
But, let's pretend the movie ends with the hospital scene in which we learn that Rhoda is alive and Christine is unlikely to live. If that is the ending (which it should have been), the movie is very effective. Some of the people in the room know the truth about Rhoda, including Christine's father Richard (Fix), who adopted Christine in Australia and knows the truth of her parentage - she was the daughter of a notorious serial killer and has passed that murderous tendency down to Rhoda (she's not a product of her environment, just a "bad seed," as it were). The denial that Richard, Christine, and Rhoda's teacher (Joan Croydon) go through, and the growing horror that Leroy experiences when he figures out that Rhoda isn't just a mean kid but a fucking serial killer are all played really nicely. And, of course, McCormack is fantastic as this little girl who just doesn't understand why she shouldn't have everything she wants, right now, and why it's such a big deal that she beat a kid with the metal attachment to her tap shoes until he fell into the lake and drowned. Shout-out, too, to Heckert for her portrayal of that kid's mother, trying desperately (and drunkenly) to figure out Rhoda's part in all this; she was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for the role.
Directer Mervyn LeRoy mostly cast the movie with the actors who did the show on Broadway, and the movie is mostly shot like a play (with the exception of the changes in scene locale made possible on film), and the result is a cast that is clearly very comfortable playing these roles and delving into this disturbing story. The only real point against it is the fucking Hays adjustments, but you can't win 'em all.
Oh, the only other thing that annoyed me was that at the end of the movie, each cast member has a "curtain call" and is introduced by name, which is cool, I always like that touch. But after Kelly's, she gives a kind of "you're in trouble" look to McCormack, goes over to the couch and playfully spanks her, and that's a fourth wall break that, coupled with the fact that we just saw Rhoda get struck by lightning and fall into the lake, we didn't need.
My Grade: B, or A if you stop after the hospital scene
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: The Belko Experiment
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