The Bad Seed (1956)

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Starring Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Henry Jones, William Hopper, Eileen Heckart, Paul Fix, Jesse White, Gage Clarke.

Film version of Maxwell Anderson’s stage melodrama of a homicidal eight-year-old sociopath (McCormack) is more campy than chilling, but not a total waste. Tellingly, Jones’ grimy gardener is the cleverest character onscreen, able to see through little McCormack’s malevolent saccharine (think he’s doomed?); meanwhile, mother Kelly slowly catches wise, but not quickly enough. When McCormack is in full-on cloyingly manipulative mode, the picture is compulsively watchable—pity that all of her most cold-blooded shenanigans take place off-screen. But that’s the Production Code for you, and aside from how hopelessly dated the storytelling is (director LeRoy wasn’t canny enough as a filmmaker to attempt vivid suggestions of the macabre, and instead infuses everything with static neutrality), it’s also relentlessly stagy. The long, talky scenes of characters discussing psychology and nature-vs-nurture drag both the pace and general interest. That cop-out deus ex machina ending—to say nothing for its “curtain call” denouement replete with a naughty-child spanking—just plain stinks. Why should such lurid material be treated with a clinical brand of pseudo-high class? They should have just let that pig-tailed brat lie and scheme and execute at will!

53/100