2021 movie #174. 1956. Except for a bad temper, little Rhoda seems perfect 8 yo with pigtails. But she is actually a murderer which drives her mother into a nervous breakdown. Patty McCormack was exceedingly creepy as Rhoda. ( )

Rhoda (Patty McCormick) is a child who is very adult in her ways – she’s prim and proper and seeks to be the best in everything she does. When one of her classmates wins a pin in a school competition Rhoda becomes enraged and when, shortly afterwards, the classmate drowns in an inexplicable accident Rhoda falls under suspicion. Timid mother Christine (Nancy Kelly) becomes increasingly concerned about Rhoda’s apparently sociopathic behaviour and becomes more-and-more desperate as she convinces herself that Rhoda is a murderous “bad seed”. Written by John Lee Mahon (from Maxwell Anderson’s play and William March’s novel), “The Bad Seed” is a slow-burn, classy, nihilistic horror film that deals with some challenging subject matter, not least being an apparently evil, conscience-free child. The screenplay is a strange psychological meditation focused on the classic nature versus nurture debate – all of which is negated by a mind-blowing final shot that suggests a godlike supreme being overseeing everything. The film presents every character as suffering from some sort of mental disfunction. Rhoda is manipulative, emotionless and psychopathic; Christine seems to have some form of imposter syndrome that leads her to be overly contentious before she reaches a final breaking point; husband and father, Kenneth (William Hopper) is absent and unavailable; housekeeper Monica (Evelyn Varde) is obsessed with psychoanalysis; handyman Leroy Jessup (Henry Jones) is cruelly manipulative; Rhoda’s school headmistress Claudia Fern (Joan Croydon) is stressed and strung-out and Hortense Daigle (Eileen Heckart), the mother of the drowned boy, is a raging alcoholic. All this adds to a surface confection of correctness and manners under which seethes a boiling stew of seething madness. Director Mervin LeRoy does well in corralling all these characters and their conflicting emotions into a narratively satisfying film. There is very little explicitness with most of the “action” implied. LeRoy keeps the film deliberately stage bound – there are very few sets, which allows the focus to be kept squarely on the performers and the cleverness and nuances of their performances. Performance wise Patty McCormick steals the show with an amazing take on Rhoda that moves from curtsying sweetness and light to screaming viciousness in the blink of an eye. “The Bad Seed” is quite a radical film for its time, both in its subject matter and its treatment of that subject. It is nicely paced, and understated despite being full of drama and delivers an incredibly left field, out-of-the-blue ending that will leave you mouth agape. ( )