The Bad Seed (1956, Mervyn LeRoy)

 
The Bad Seed
1956|Mervyn LeRoy

The little girl examines her reflection in the mirror, both pigtails neatly braided, her dress spotless and wrinkle-free. Outwardly, she presents the perfect image of a well-mannered 1950s schoolgirl. Perhaps a little too perfect. Look closer and you may notice the slight scowl in her brows, the subtle grimace on her face, or the cold gleam in her eyes when she espies something she desires. Before long, her carefully maintained façade melts away and reveals an eight-year-old sociopath, devoid of sympathy for other human beings and driven only by her own selfish whims.

The performance by young Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark, the little horror I just described, is fascinating in its obviousness. From the film’s opening, she (the actress) makes no pretense to being anything other than an insufferable brat. That might seem counterintuitive to her character’s agenda to convince everyone around her that she is the perfect child, an endeavor in which she proves all too successful. But McCormack’s performance is part of the film’s darkly humorous appeal, so broad and transparent that it renders the rest of the characters ridiculous for believing it.

There’s a similar artificiality in many of the film’s performances. Director Mervyn LeRoy made the unusual decision to bring over nearly the entire Broadway cast of Maxwell Anderson’s source play, and many viewers have dismissed the performances for their overt theatricality, the most common charge being that the actors perform “to the back row.” But I feel this is all part of the movie’s bizarre atmosphere. The Bad Seed is often classified as a horror movie because of the killer child at its center, and there’s no denying that Rhoda influenced a legion of creepy kids in cinema (only four years later, a small army of blond moppets wreaked havoc in Village of the Damned). But this is not horror; it’s pure melodrama at its most hysterical, so fraught with overheated emotions that the characters practically gnaw their way off the screen.

As McCormack plays Rhoda as a self-aware monster in Shirley Temple clothing, so Nancy Kelly plays the mother, Christine Penmark, as a woman also hiding behind a social mask. Hers is a master class in theatrical mannerisms, all dramatic posing, hand wringing, and spouting as much dialogue as she can in a single breath in near singsong. In Kelly’s hands, Christine seems to be acting the part of a happy 50s housewife as much as Rhoda is acting the part of a perfect child, but the long-suffering mother’s insecurities threaten to bust through the surface at any moment. From the opening of the film, she seems to have an innate suspicion of her daughter even before she has any reason to do so. When one of Rhoda’s classmates mysteriously drowns at a school picnic, those suspicions come to a head, and it’s all Christine can do to maintain her poise over the course of her feature-length emotional breakdown. Kelly’s performance is mesmerizing, gradually shifting from the somewhat troubled yet graceful woman we see at the beginning to a slumped, careworn basket case by film’s end. It’s tempting to call it all surface, but in the quieter moments, when Christine is left speechless and pensive, Kelly shows great nuance, some unspoken feelings remaining hidden beneath the outbursts.

The original play was a one-set production, with every scene taking place in the Penmarks’ living room. LeRoy does little to open the movie up, largely confining the action to that one room, which only ratchets up the hysteria as mother and daughter (Daddy conveniently leaves for military duty early on) are left to confront the sordid skeletons in their impeccably decorated closet. Other characters further complicate matters in a series of grand entrances and exits, including an invasive landlady (Evelyn Varden), a lowlife gardener (Henry Jones in a deliciously pervy performance), and most significantly Mrs. Daigle (Eileen Heckart), the drunken mother of Rhoda’s drowned schoolmate. Through repeated battles of words, these characters are mined for every ounce of histrionic worth, and the actors play the hell out of them. Some call it camp, but I have no doubt that the actors are intentionally playing for laughs, including Heckart, who manages a fine balance between tragedy and comedy. It all steers the movie toward a subversive social satire, exposing suburban family living as a hotbed of repressed neuroses and coddled serial murderers.

Now I know we’re getting into Douglas Sirk territory, and my fellow film geeks may be quick to point out that Mervyn LeRoy was no subversive auteur. That’s very true. LeRoy was a consummate professional who churned out a career’s worth of polished, sophisticated Hollywood entertainment over the course of four decades, usually with top stars and in a variety of genres. But I find it hard to believe that he didn’t have something up his sleeve with this one. The man knew how to make studio movies. He knew how to direct performances for the screen. Yet he deliberately chose to retain the play’s stage restrictions and a cast with no box-office clout and their heightened performances intact. And he certainly understood the humor in it. Did he perhaps intend something deeper than just another screen translation of a Broadway smash, or am I just giving him too much credit for the camp qualities? Whatever the case,The Bad Seed remains for me a gleefully perverse oddity, so relentless in its mannered exaggeration that even its oft-maligned, censor-approved ending, which substitutes a cathartic explosion for the play’s chilling irony, feels relatively organic.

— Felix Gonzalez, Jr.

CAST: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden, William Hopper, Paul Fix, Jesse White
COUNTRY: USA