The Bad Seed Revisited (This is for Jack D)

Mr Donahue is unwell so to cheer him up here is a quick look at one of his and Rich's favourite fillums.
It is the brilliant

made in 1956 and based on the Maxwell Anderson play which starred Patty McCormack

 

Nancy Kelly

and the extraordinary Eileen Heckart

Now my copy of the DVD is in storage in Sydney so I have decided to tell the story from memory.  Any fans of the film who loathe  mistakes should probably read no further. Acting students will learn lots about facial and body gesture by studying the screen grabs closely.

The film is set in a New England town and in particular the apartment that Col Kenneth Penmark (William Hopper) 

and his wife, Christine (Miss Kelly) and their daughter, Rhoda (Miss McCormack)  rent above the domicile of their syrupy landlady, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden). All three actresses appeared in the play on Broadway so have learned their lines pretty well.

Well, all seems alright in this comfortable neighbourhood surrounded by leafy gardens and white middle class propriety but Col. Penmark has to go away on a service job leaving his slightly nervy wife and child at home. Rhoda is not your usual eight year old. She is absurdly clean and neat and seems to have no child social skills whatsoever. It soon turns out that she has two sides ... 

A) the butter wouldn't melt Rhoda

and B) the child weaned on the tit of Medusa.

Anyways, she goes on a school excursion  with desire in her heart for a penmanship medal she thinks she should have won. She follows the winner, little Claude Daigle, to the end of a pier and after battering his pudgy fingers with her tap shoes, rips off his medal and pushes him in the lake to drown.

When Rhoda  returns home Christine is already in a state of hysteria having heard about a missing tyke and thinking that maybe it was Rhoda that choked on the duckweed.  But in swans the little devil as calm as a millpond. She asks for a sandwich. and goes off to the scuppernong arbour to play like she has just got home from a pie bake.....

........while the little Daigle boy lies stiffening by the second on the mortuary slab.

Christine checks on Rhoda

 and marks  her serene demeanour and that the tragedy has had no effect on her whatsover. Her nervous condition goes up another notch.

Well, when the school teacher, Miss Fern, pops in (another veteran of the Broadway production; you can see from the photo she's an old hand)...

to tell Christine that Rhoda was the last to see little Claude alive, poor Christine shoots up another few degrees in the twitch and worry department.  Actually Miss Fern should have been more concerned about the standard of her  teaching staff that afternoon.  Here is the rowing instructor about to launch one of the children into the lake.

Christine's father, a famous criminologist ( Paul Fix, not from Broadway)

 arrives for dinner that evening and the subject of inherited criminality arises, as it does.

Christine harbours the feeling that all is not well with her pink and pressed offspring but Monica is stalwart in her defence

"Leave her alone!  She is beautiful and perfect and I am going to leave her all my jewels when I die!"

PING!  goes the lightbulb in Rhoda's murderous little brain.

Now there is a very attractive handyman called Leroy ( Henry Jones)

 who skulks in the basement, playing with his excelsior (the words, 'scuppernong arbour' and  'excelsior' have always fascinated me so much so that despite having Google and being able to look them up I have decided to leave their exact meaning an eternal mystery)  Well, Leroy suspects that Rhoda has a lot to do with little Claude's death and teases her

 into believing that the po-leese and their "stick blood hounds" will find the murder weapon and she will fry in a child size E-lectrick chair.

 Rhoda is not pleased

and PING! hatches a plot to fix the filthy man.

Then a very saddened Hortense Daigle (Miss Heckart) and her put- upon husband 

arrive to find out if Rhoda knows the whereabouts of the penmanship medal that we know is in Rhoda's treasure box.

Hortense is scary with drink but our demon child maintains exquisite poise

even in the face of lunatic histrionics

and blistering alcohol fumes'

Things heat up when Christine rifles through Rhoda's pretties and finds the dead boy's medal. By now her loony meter has gone off the chart. She confronts a still cucumberish daughter and all use of her hands is lost.

Rhoda drives Christine even more bats by denying everything, admitting everything and deciding that a little lovey dovey is all it needs to get back on track.

"Oh, I have such a pretty Mother"   "Rho...daaa!"

It is clear that Rhoda is a killer with no conscience. But what to do?

Now the steam rises. 

Miss Fern declares that Rhoda is not welcome back at Fern School and Hortense returns after another week on the Jim Beam.

"Rhoda can't come back to Fern School"      "Where is Claude's med.....aaaaaaa....l!!!!" 

Rhoda decides she has to get rid of the murder weapons..... the  tap shoes.   Which is not too soon because their infernal noise has been annoying the neighbours for months. So she drops them down the incinerator shoot.  Leroy tells her now he knows what she did to little Claude and that he has the incriminating evidence under his excelsior. She loses her cool for the first time and it is not a pretty sight

"Give me those shoes!!"

Simmering  and you are now hiding under your seat.

Well the little witch has a plan. She waits til the disgusting Leroy is fiddling with his excelsior and sneaks down into the basement while he is having a post excelsior nap on the excelsior.

And she drops a lighted match on his seamy bed and up he goes into the atmosphere with quite a deal of black smoke accompanied by a degree of hefty shrieking. That excelsior sure burns good.

Full boil

Christine is now on the brink of being committed and when her father admits that she was adopted  her hands move up her body and she performs a Grecian theatrical gesture which symbolises her wish that she was Rhoda-less.

He tells her who her father really was

 and she decides she'll have to give Rhoda a lethal dose of vitamins and poison.

Rhoda then admits that she was also responsible for the deaths of her little sister.

and her little brother

 and her second cousin in Milwaukee 

But there is a happy ending.  Rhoda swallows the penmanship medal and starts to choke. Christine realises that strict parenting was all that was needed after all. 

and the medal comes back up. 

Christine then dies of nervous exhaustion. 

Little Rhoda goes down to the lake in a thunder storm to do some night fishing

and at the end of the pier finds a box of treasure

 containg enough money for her to go to a technical college in Texas and then go into politics