Author: Nathaniel Thompson

In the cool, crisp autumn of 1956, moviegoers were introduced to one of the screen’s most shocking and influential psychopaths: Rhoda Penmark, a precocious, perpetually smiling eight-year-old girl who secretly plots and executes the murders of anyone who stands in her way, regardless of age. The film went on to rack up three Oscar acting nominations for its cast, all carried over from the popular Broadway version: Patty McCormack as Rhoda; Nancy Kelly as her distraught mother, Christine; and Eileen Heckart (who went on to win in 1973 for Butterflies Are Free) as Hortense Daigle, the shattered mother of Rhoda’s first victim and the deliverer of the film’s most harrowing monologue. The film went on to become a horror classic, cited as one of the twenty scariest films of all time by Stephen King in his watershed book, Danse Macabre and remade for television twice. It also inspired decades of underage serial killers in such films as Devil Times Five (1974), The Omen (1976), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), Halloween (1978), The Children (1980), Bloody Birthday (1981), Mikey (1992), The Good Son (1993), and a famous sci-fi variant, Village of the Damned (1960). McCormack would even turn the tables and play a crazed mother in the 1992 horror film, Mommy. However, only those who had seen the Broadway play written by Maxwell Anderson or read its 1954 source novel by William March realized how much of an overhaul had been done to make it acceptable for the big screen. Horror films had long been difficult to get through Hollywood’s Production Code (also known as the Hayes Code), which was instituted in 1930 but was only enforced with fervor in the middle of 1934 due to public pressure. The Production Code Administration, or PCA, was the office founded to supervise each film from script stage to theatrical release, with studios sending in changes to each draft for approval along the way. Even major literary properties like East of Eden had to be toned down for adaptation, and it wasn’t difficult to notice that this particular art form was put under much heavier restrictions than any of the others. Among the taboo lines no film could cross were letting criminals go unpunished, disrespect for the law, blatant sexuality (especially prostitution or homosexuality), and drug use. The Code has since garnered a reputation as a stodgy set of handcuffs placed on artists for decades, though the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated; it wasn’t that these themes were taboo per se, but they had to be handled in a manner that was discreet enough to be within the parameters of what would be considered good taste. Therefore, you still had films like The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Strangers on a Train (1951) filled with edgy behavior, but it was just understated enough to fly through for general audiences. This disconnect between cinema and the other arts was especially evident when The Bad Seed hit Broadway in 1954 mere months after the novel’s publication, and the production was cited as another in a line of “amoral” productions like The Children’s Hour. The play caused a stir with its firm stance on the impact of heredity versus environment, opining that the former is a much stronger influence – especially if you have a secret serial killer lurking in your bloodline. From this point out it’s impossible to avoid spoilers for this and a semi-famous mystery novel, so turn back now and see the film if you haven’t already. The novel, play, and film all share the same plotline and many identical passages of dialogue. Rhoda Penmark lives happily with her mother, Christine, but her father is often away on business. When a classmate of Rhoda’s, Claude, is found drowned near school, Christine notes that the dead boy had won a penmanship medal that Rhoda had desired with a feverish intensity. When Christine discovers the medal in Rhoda’s possession, she begins to worry that her daughter may be responsible for other deaths and could be capable of more, especially when maintenance man Le’Roy Jessup repeatedly provokes Rhoda about her role in Claude’s death. When Le’Roy ends up burning alive on his bed made of excelsior and Christine learns that her real biological mother was actually an executed murderer, she takes the only action she can rationalize: dosing Rhoda with a fatal amount of sleeping pills and then shooting herself. Both the novel and play end with an outrageous stinger, the latter so potent on stage that it had audiences gasping and howling. Christine succeeded in her suicide attempt, but as her neighbors and husband discuss the tragedy, there’s one bit of comfort: “At least you still have Rhoda!” The little maniac comes skipping out on stage, having survived the attempted poisoning and now free to continue her mayhem right under her father’s nose. Despite the story’s immense shock value, it’s worth noting that Rhoda wasn’t literature’s first underage modern murderer; in 1949, Agatha Christie had crossed that dangerous line with her 1949 novel, Crooked House, whose killer is revealed to be a spoiled 12-year-old girl whose homicidal tendencies erupt when she’s denied ballet lessons. Though acclaimed, the novel was considered too hot to touch until the current millennium when it finally became a 2008 radio production and a 2017 feature film starring Glenn Close (with its disturbing ending intact). The rocky path of the film version of The Bad Seed began on 9th December 1954 when Warner Bros. rep Finlay McDermid sent a synopsis of the play to the PCA’s usual studio contact, Geoffrey Shurlock, advising thoughts on its content. A handwritten internal note from “Murf” at the PCA quickly opined that the story “is unacceptable on the grounds that it is subject matter which can do younger people in our audience positive harm. The identification of youngsters with Rhoda, the eight year old, will be very complete. They will understand her effective killing of three persons who stood in her way, while at the same time, since Rhoda is a poised, charming child, they will completely miss her psychotic and tragic nature. To my mind this is a very dangerous combination.” A few days later on 14th December, Shurlock formally replied directly to studio head Jack L. Warner: “We regret to report that we believe this material to be in violation both of the spirit and of the letter of the Code. It seems to be specifically in violation of Section 12 of the Special Regulations on Crime, reading: “Pictures dealing with criminal activities, in which minors participate, or to which minors are related, shall not be approved if they incite demoralizing imitation on the part of youth. In addition to this specific objection, it seems to us that this type of material would be enormously dangerous as a basis for a motion picture to be played before mass audiences generally. The portrayal of an eight year old murderess with no conception whatever of right and wrong, and who in the course of the story, would be shown successfully and with impunity first drowning one of her schoolmates and later burning a man to death, could hardly escape having a very powerful effect on impressionable children who might see it. Furthermore, we cannot envision any treatment of this story which would make it acceptable under the Code. It seems to us impossible to remove the pervasively evil flavor of the play, and it would be difficult if not impossible to thin up any punishment for an eight year old murderess that would adequately counteract the obnoxious influence of the story on susceptible children.” At the same time, writer-director Billy Wilder was considering buying the property himself to produce as an independent film (amusingly, he had directed the 1934 feature Mauvaise Graine, or “Bad Seed”) and asked for the PCA’s opinion on the project. Also pursuing the rights was MGM, who submitted a copy of the play to the PCA with a suggestion by the studio’s Robert Vogel for an alternate ending: “I think it will be apparent to you as you read this, that – if only for dramatic reasons – we would not for a moment consider the possibility of showing the murders on the screen. I believe you will also recognize that Rhoda is obviously a monster, not a character for whom audience sympathy is created. Furthermore, I do believe it would be very simple to change the ending so that Rhoda gets a view of an insane asylum instead of a basket of kisses.” 20th Century Fox was also seriously courting the play and submitted it third to the PCA, receiving a nearly identical response. The growing number of queries about The Bad Seed spurred Shurlock to pen a lengthy January 15, 1955 memo following an in-person meeting with Billy Wilder and agent Irving Lazar, determining that “even if an acceptable Code treatment could be devised, we still felt that this property presented a serious matter of industry policy. This feeling lay in the possibility that a picture dealing with a child murderess, no matter how treated, might prove so repulsive to the type of audience to which motion pictures appeal, that serious injury might be done to our business in possibly discouraging people from seeing movies with their families in the future.” Ultimately the PCA made a firm decision that any story dealing with a child murderess would not be approved under any circumstances. Period, end of story. Or so it seemed. Warner Bros. pressed ahead and snapped up the rights away with writing and directing duties handed over to Mervyn LeRoy, a prestige filmmaker for the studio who had started out with unflinching Pre-Code favorites like Three on a Match (1932) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) before moving on to major films like Anthony Adverse (1936), Random Harvest (1942), and Madame Curie (1943). He had just done a major service for the studio by translating the famously salty play Mister Roberts into an acceptable 1955 film, so why not let him have a go at this, the most notorious and seemingly...