DVD REVIEWS

There are not many special features in this DVD edition other than the chance to hear the adult Patty McCormack (who played the murderess little brat in 1956) talking about the film, and playwright-actor-impersonator Charles Busch discussing it as a camp classic that “plays like a gangster.”

Adapted to the screen from Maxwell Anderson's 1954 Broadway hit (based on William March's novel), this 1956 crime-family melodrama is extremely dated but watchable due to Mervyn LeRoy's tight, suspenseful direction and good acting. It is based on a false, dubious premise that evil and the instincts to kill are biologically conditioned. However, at the time, it brought to the screen the heredity versus environment argument.

Mother Chritsine (Nancy Kelly) begins to suspect that something is wrong with her young daughter, Rhoda (Patty McCormack), when a boy is found drowned in a school picnic. To acquire a coveted penmanship medallion, Rhoda kills a boy, making it appear an accident. At the climax, the mother realizes that her own mother was a murderess, and that she herself has passed on the taint, giving birth to a monster. Realizing that if she doesn't act quickly, tragedy will multiply on tragedy, Christine gives her child overdose of sleeping pills and then shoots herself.

The Production Code tempered with John Lee Mahin's screenplay. A solution had to be found for the Code provision that murder cannot go unpunished. Under pressure, the last reel deviated from the stage play. The studio was forced to excise the shocker stage ending in which the girl gets away with murder. Warner released The Bad Seed with an “Adults Only” warning, a come-on that made the movie all the more popular.

All of the original cast, Patty McCormack, Nancy Kelly, Eileen Heckart, and Henry Jones repeated on screen their stage roles. “The Bad Seed” is one of the few films to have received three acting nominations, all for women roles, two of which, Heckart and McCormack, in the same (supporting) category. Kelly, who had earlier won a Tony for her performance, lost the Actress Oscar to Ingrid Bergman (“Anastasia”) and Heckart and McCormack lost the Supporting Actress to Dorothy Malone (“Written on the Wind”). Hal Rosson's black-and-white cinematography was nominated but he lost to Joseph Ruttenberg for “Somebody Up There Likes Me”.

McCormack's career demonstrates the curse of typecasting, specifically, what do you do when youve been nominated for an Oscar at the age of 11 for playing a killer kid. In her ensuing lackluster career, McCormack went on to play other troubled characters, in “Miniskirt Mob” (1968) and in “Mommy” (1995), as “Bad Seed” smothering mother who kills to protect her daughter. In short, McCormack experienced what Linda Blair would after her nomination for “The Exorcist”.

The acting is uniformly effective, though Nancy Kelly makes the mother so saturnine and fatalistic that her outburst of frenzy when Rhoda coolly compounds her murders deprives her the audience's sympathy. Best of all is Eileen Heckart, as the distraught, bibulous, alcoholic mother of the drowned boy. The scene in which she asks Rhoda her innocent-pitiful questions about her boy's last hours is devastating, tearing at your heart.