Review #590: 'The Bad Seed' (1956)

Hollywood had dealt with the precocious little girl before with the likes of insipid movie starlet Shirley Temple. But by the mid-1950's the sweetness and innocence of the diminutive lassies with pigtails and pretty summer dresses had been tarnished by the advent of youth movements, and particularly the media attention of juvenile delinquency. The parental fear of something sinister brewing within their own little treasure is addressed in The Bad Seed, and the horror archetype of the creepy, evil child was thrust onto cinema goers, a tool of the uncanny and frightening monstrosity that still finds an audience in modern cinema (Insidious (2010) or Mama (2013) for example).

But compared to the more direct horror of our modern child-monsters, Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack), the titular 'bad seed' of this narrative, presents herself as a wholly innocent girl, clinging onto parents and adults, subtly manipulating them with a pristine veneer, but hiding churlish glee. In early scenes Rhoda's doting landlady, Monica (Evelyn Varden), notices that whilst Rhoda's contemporaries wear the fashionable styles of the times (jeans and t-shirt), she still wears the attire of idealism - it seems, even in the '50's this vision of childhood is a lost image of Victoriana. But this is a petulant child, one of those girls who could 'scream and scream' until she gets what she wants (I've encountered a few adult "girls" who have the same temperament - encounters that are largely unpleasant).

After losing a gold medal award at her school, Rhoda and her school friends go out for a picnic, and, off-camera, she pesters the little boy who had rightfully won the award. At home her mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), holding conversation largely about the hot topic of the time, psychoanalysis - a preoccupation that is thinly thread throughout the film, - hears on the radio of the news that a child at the school picnic has drowned becomes fraught with anguish. But on arrival home, the precocious Rhoda walks in stating that the incident was "fun". This detachment from the event concerns Christine, but as time goes by, the mother begins to suspect that Rhoda is not an innocent in this death, and begins to unravel her daughters manipulative nature, believing eventually that Rhoda is a murderer.

Aside from the heavy Freudian psycho-babble presented by the intellectuals that surround the Penmark family (the father, Col. Kenneth (William Hopper) is absent during Christine's mental collapse, away as he is for work), the film also portrays another social issue that still is topical today, the question of nature and nurture on the subject of child-rearing. As mother casts doubt upon the validity of her child's innocence, and begins to see the manipulative make-up of the girl, the issue of her own hereditary and parentage comes into question. This highlights rather naively, that there would be no way that a child raised in a stable home could commit any kind a atrocity, and that this behavioural trait is strictly for the lower classes. But this is a minor quibble.

The film came to the screen through novel written by Willaim March (who died the same year of publication, 1954), then through the stage production written by Maxwell Anderson, to the screenplay written by John Lee Mahin and directed by veteran director Mervyn LeRoy. It is brilliantly cast, and particular attention should go to McCormack's performance. As a girl who presents innocence, but has the ability to snap and commit murder, she brings those juxtapositions with bravado and skill. It is also a quite frightening performance. It was a low budget film that garnered four academy award nominations, and introduced the concept in horror cinema that the monster is not always the uncanny icons such as the wolf man, but that the monstrous lives within humans. This, four years before that horror trope began its enduring mark on cinema with Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). You may never look at an innocent little child in quite the same way again.


Directed by: Mervyn LeRoy
Starring: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Marc Ivamy