Directed by: Mervyn LeRoy
Premise: A housewife (Nancy Kelly) begins to
suspect that her daughter (Patti McCormack) is a killer.
What Works: The Bad
Seed is a classic film. A lot of the familiar plot points of the troubled
child genre are established here and echoed in later films like Orphan, The Omen,
and The Good
Son. The Bad Seed plays out with much more ambiguity than many of
its successors, holding off on revealing the truth about the child in ways that
further the mystery and create doubt about the sanity of her mother. There are
some terrific performances in the film, including Eileen Heckart as a mother
whose son has drowned, Henry Jones as a mentally disabled local, Patti McCormack
as the troubled child, and Nancy Kelly as her mother. McCormack gives the most
memorable performance here and it has become the de facto example of
manipulative and potentially evil children in film. The Bad Seed is also
interesting to watch in part because of the time it was made. Shot in black and
white and set in suburbia in the mid-1950s, the picture has a look not all the
different from Leave
It to Beaver but then uses it as the setting for a murder mystery in
which a blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl might be a psychopath. This makes
the film rather subversive in what it suggests about suburbia and about the
nature of evil. These themes were later echoed in films like Halloween and A
Nightmare on Elm Street, and places The Bad Seed, along with Psycho and Night
of the Living Dead, among the original American horror films.
What Doesn’t: The only trouble with The Bad
Seed is the ending, which is a copout. The rest of the film is terrific but
the conclusion is a let down.
DVD extras: Featurette, commentary track.
Bottom Line: Despite the faults of the ending The Bad Seed is an important film and highly entertaining. It has some terrific performances and is worth viewing by thriller aficionados or those interested in the roots of the American horror film.