The Bad Seed Mervyn Leroy (USA; 1956) Nancy Kelly; Patty McCormack
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6th April 2025; ticket: £7
to have and to have not
‘The Bad Seed’ is a title that did the venerable journey through various expressive modes. It started life as a novel by William Marsh, was developed into to Broadway play, then made it to Hollywood as a feature film, and finally adapted for TV remakes a couple of times In all its first three forms ‘The Bad Seed’ was a huge success. A best selling novel, a long running Broadway show, and a successful high grossing movie, finishing in the top 20 US box office for ‘56.
‘The Bad Seed’ as a realised idea certainly struck a chord with its audience. It may be partially accounted for by a fascination with the disjunction between the well brought up pretty little eight year old girl (Rhoda) and the cold blooded murders she commits. But perhaps to some extent its appeal to the audience was partially embedded in its setting. ‘The Bad Seed’ takes place in ‘The Suburbs’, in a generic representation of the real estate developments that were becoming the preferred homes of millions of Americans. Increasingly wealthy in an increasingly confident USA this expansion of the suburban way of life represented a psychic deterritorialisation as people turned their backs on their ethnic roots and embraced a new form of identity founded upon the burgeoning individualist consumer culture – represented most completely by the automobile – the mechanical bride.
Interestingly there are significant alterations to ‘Bad Seed’s movie plot that make it distinctly different from both the original novel by William Marsh and the Broadway play which stayed true to Marsh’s work. The Production Code Association (PCA), basically Hollywood’s movie censor, was hostile to any movie adaptation of ‘The Bad Seed’. So when Warner purchased the rights the PCA insisted on one major change. Both novel and play conclude with the mother (Christine) dying (committing suicide after poisoning her murderous little girl) and the Rhoda surviving the poisoning, and able presumably to continue her merry dance of death. Mervyn Leroy’s film treatment reversed this outcome: now Rhoda’s mother lives (somewhat improbably) after her suicide attempt and Rhoda who survives the poisoning is subsequently killed off in a final coda, struck down by a falling tree in the middle of a huge thunder storm.
So ‘poetic justice’ a la PCA sort of triumphs (the bizarre post end credit sequence in which Christine after addressing the audience, bends Rhoda over her knee and smacks her bottom, may or may not have been Leroy’s gesture of contrition, as if murder deserved at least a formal smacking) though not in a very convincing manner. The bolted on changes to the original story line look what they are: formulaic genuflection to the requirement of movieland propriety. Actually the ending with its primal earth shaking lightening and cracking thunder works to re-inforce a feeling that grows ever more insistently in the course of the film that what is at work in the scenario is the force of evil. Within the suburbs evil lurks. This makes Rhoda in some respects a precursor of Regen (The Exorcist) and to some extent the films of David Lynch. John Carpenter was certainly influenced by the film and novel.
The fundamental changes that the PCA insisted on (They were probably responsible for removing from the script earlier examples of Rhoda’s crimes that come up in both book and play but not the film: killing her pet dog and her babysitter. In the movie she is suspected of killing an old lady by pushing her off the fire escape. For a child to kill
her pet dog was simply off the Hollywood map; to kill an old woman, just about ok.) actually make the film a more resonant critique of the forces at work in America in the 1950’s.
Both book and the play revolve around the problem suggested by the title: “The Bad Seed’. At issue is whether Rhoda’s murderous psychopathy has been inherited. In book and play it’s revealed that Christine was an adopted child, and that her biological mother had been a serial killer who was sentenced to death by frying in the ‘chair’. In play and book the central issue revolves about Christine’s fears that Rhoda has inherited a bad gene from her grandmother (a recessive gene that determined her bad nature!). Christine undergoes nervous collapse at the thought that she has passed on bad seed to her daughter. But the movie is different, the inheritance issue never gains persuasive dramatic traction. The script treats the issue with diffidence. It’s never revealed (did I somehow miss it?) that Christine’s mum was a serial killer. In Leroy’s scenario Christine breaks down at the thought that her mother was wicked, but beyond her own insistence it is never convincing that she has strong reason to blame inheritance for Rhoda’s character. A kind of vacuum envelops the issue of bad seed.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
But if nature is not responsible for Rhoda’s behaviour then it must be the environment, and Rhoda’s environment comprises the new kind life styles that are evolving in suburban America. The suburbs are the source of psychic instabilities whether they be intro or extra – verted. Could it be that ‘Evil’ ‘Psychopathy’ call it what you will, oozes out of the ‘burbs’, like dark blood from an infected wound? With the pressure they exert on people to conform to the all American ideal, with their materialistic ethos and spoilt children the suburbs are incubators of the bad seed. In its comfortable setting in the concerns of the characters, these elements are all present in ‘The Bad Seed’ which of course has a significant Hollywood precursor in ‘Mildred Pierce’. Like ‘The Bad Seed’ ‘Mildred Pierce’ is dominated by a twisted mother daughter axis, set in the midst of American plenty. Rhoda feels like a younger model of the precocious spoilt Veda, Mildred Pierce’s daughter. Both ‘Pierce’ and ‘Bad Seed’ are unusually for the movie business female dominated scenarios, less concerned with action more focused on state of mind, the states of mind that were coming to define American life.
I think Leroy’s direction is self absenting. Like fellow Warner director, Michael Curtis (also director of Mildred Pierce) Leroy is experienced enough to know when to engage in Cinematic manipulations and when to let the script speak for itself with seemingly minimal direction. Coming from the stage, the script is adroitly fashioned to represent the key characters and ideas. It doesn’t necessarily need big production heightened camera work or deft splicing. Leroy is happy to stay a lot of the time in long or medium shot, enabling the viewer to see the interactions and relations, and the camera movement when it happens, works with effect. ‘The Bad Seed’ has a stagey feel, but what we are seeing is theatre; and in contemporary life it is theatre that has come to provide the role model for many of our relationships.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
