THE BAD SEED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 21

THE BAD SEED

(Warner Bros.) R: 16 and over only ITHER psychiatry lies about us in our infancy, or Hollywood does, and those parents who ‘totter home from screenings of The Bad Seed to look at Junior with a wild surmise should be comforted to know that the psychology and/or genetics of this melodrama are fundamentally unsound. Because Dad has habitually filled in his tax-returns with a certain old-fashioned modesty, there is no reason-the experts reassure us-to suppose that Junior is destined for a life of confidence trickery, any more than little Rhoda Penmark (The Bad Seed) was fore-ordained to a career in homicide because grandmother had a lethal streak. But by the same token-or a not dissimilar one-bad psychology need not beget bad drama, and when I first read William March’s novel the impact was sufficient, as that other William might have put it, to make my knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine. Admittedly, any porpentine so_ ill-provided with: quills would have already had good reason to be fretful, but no doubt you see what I mean. Mr March is a fine writer and he wrings the ultimate bead of cold sweat from the reader. And from the novel Maxwell Anderson devised a successful stage drama, I have not read it, far less seen it, but it was a hit and must therefore have held the attention of audiences at a point well above the threshold of disbelief, But speaking for myself, I can’t say that the film-based on the play and seemingly following it closely in style-main-tains a commensurate measure of authentic chill. The fault is not to be found in the players-several are excellent and all are more than competent-but in a filmed stage play something must be added to compensate for the absence of the immediate human impact. The camera must join the cast, and the soundtrack must abet the playwright. In The Bad Seed the soundtrack is fairly good (it will be some time before I can hear Au Clair de la Lune without some mild retrospective disturbance) but I don’t think either the director (Mervyn LeRoy) or his director of photography (Hal Rosson) has consistently given the film strong enough visual imagery. There are some telling close-ups, but not enough of them, and

in general the film is (like Tea and Sympathy) too much a photographed stage presentation. But it was a novel experience to meet little Patty McCormack in the part of Rhoda, a child with the face of a cherub and the moral sense of a praying mantis; for Miss McCormack is a smart little actress, who nearly makes’ Rhoda credible. Rhoda, at eight, is an expert in the fine art of murder but it is her mother’s slow realisation of this horror, her mother’s frantic efforts to cope with the developing crisis, rather than the crisis itself, that make the drama. And with better than average acting it is possible to suspend one’s disbelief by a slight effort of will. But not quite to the end, The final curtain (which trades the book’s superbly ironic climax for a grotesque touch of Victorian melodrama) sent me stamping up the aisle.