I like The Bad Seed. That it's such a strange film, aside from its subject matter, may be attributable to the genius of director Mervyn LeRoy image. It's a theatrical, set-bound picture made at a time when even adaptations of Broadway plays such as Picnic and Teahouse Of the August Moon were filmed on location, not on back lots, and in color. The Bad Seed's extreme, early talkie style theatricality works its charms, giving it a spooky, near surreal quality it wouldn't have had it been made on a larger budget, in color and 'Scope.

Nancy Kelly's famously overwrought performance as the mother of the daughter from hell strikes me as right for this particular film. She comes off at times as crazier than her cute little daughter. Patty McCormack is beyond praise as little Rhoda. I agree with everyone who says that the scenes between McCormack and dim-witted Henry Jones are the best in the film. I wouldn't quite class The Bad Seed as a horror film. It could have been had it been made differently. As it is, it's too prosaic in presentation to qualify. The character of Rhoda is a monster, for sure, yet there's so much discussion of the hows and whys she's the way she is that the movie becomes a kind of "think piece" in its second half.

One curious aspect of the film (and play): I'll be damned if I can find a character I really like in it. There's a villain but no heroes. Half the characters are neurotic, the other half clueless. There's something alienating about the grownups in the film. Most of them aren't attractive, whether as to the kinds of people they are or physically. There's an underlying repulsiveness to many of them, an over the hill quality. Intentional?