Kelly, who had earlier won a Tony for her performance, lost the Best Actress Oscar to Ingrid Bergman, who made a welcomed comeback in “Anastasia.” One of few films to have received three acting nominations, all for women roles, The Bad Seed earned nods Eileen Heckart and McCormack in the same (supporting) category. In the author’s hands this is adequate material for an absolutely first class novel of moral bewilderments and responsibilities nearest the heart of our decade.”Īll of the original cast, Patty McCormack, Nancy Kelly, Eileen Heckart, and Henry Jones reprised their stage roles in the screen version. But nowhere is this gift better displayed than in The Bad Seed–the portrayal of a coldly evil, murderous child and what she does to both victims and family. He has proved it again and again in the other novels and short stories, all of them floored and walled in what Clifton Fadiman decided to call “Psychological acumen”. He announced it in Company K, a novel published twenty years ago and equaled only by Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers as a sampling of men at war. Times: “Let it be said quickly, William March knows where human fears and secrets are buried. Reviewing the book’s author’s career, James Kelly wrote in the N.Y. It released The Bad Seed with an “Adults Only” warning, a come-on that made the movie all the more popular. Warner benefited from the feud with the feud with the Production Code Administration. The studio was forced to excise the shocker stage ending in which the girl gets away with murder. Under pressure, the last reel deviated from the stage play. A solution had to be found for the Code provision that murder cannot go unpunished. The Production Code tempered with John Lee Mahin’s screenplay. Realizing that if she doesn’t act quickly, tragedy will multiply on tragedy, Christine gives her child overdose of sleeping pills and then shoots herself. At the climax, the mother realizes that her own mother was a murderess, and that she herself has passed on the taint, giving birth to a monster. To acquire a coveted penmanship medallion, Rhoda kills a boy, making it appear an accident.

Mother Chritsine (Nancy Kelly) begins to suspect that something is wrong with her young daughter, Rhoda (Patty McCormack), when a boy is found drowned in a school picnic. However, at the time, it brought to the screen the heredity versus environment argument.

The movie is based on a false, dubious premise that evil and the instincts to kill are biologically conditioned. Adapted to the screen from Maxwell Anderson’s 1954 Broadway hit (based on William March’s novel), The Bad Seed, the 1956 crime-family melodrama, is thematically outdated, but the movie is highly watchable due to Mervyn LeRoy’s taut direction and excellent female-driven ensemble, headed by Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in Oscar-nominated roles.

Novel the bad seed