Bad seeds

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Movie
German title Bad seeds
Original title The Bad Seed
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1956
length 129 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Mervyn LeRoy
script John Lee Mahin
production Mervyn LeRoy
for Warner Bros.
music Alex North
camera Harold Rosson
cut Warren Low
occupation

Böse Saat (Original title: The Bad Seed ) is an American thriller by the director Mervyn LeRoy from 1956, based on the novel of the same name by William March and the play by Maxwell Anderson based on it . The role of the mother, who has to take note of her child's evil, is cast by Nancy Kelly . The then ten-year-old Patty McCormack plays her daughter. Both have previously appeared in these roles on Broadway . They were nominated for an Oscar for the embodiment of their characters in the film .

action

Rhoda Penmark is an 8-year-old, well-behaved girl who has a pronounced preference for dresses and patent leather shoes with iron fittings on the soles. Her father, Kenneth Penmark, an Army officer, has been transferred to Washington on short notice and says goodbye to his daughter as she is playing the piano in her room. That morning, the landlady and friend of the family, Monica Breedlove, who lives in the neighboring house, pays the Penmarks a visit. On this occasion, she gives Rhoda an old, valuable locket and chain. They admire Rhoda's red patent leather shoes, which are shod with iron plates. The girl thanks with a little tap dance. After Rhoda's father left the apartment, the conversation between mother and daughter turned to a recent school writing competition, which Rhoda had, contrary to expectations, not won. The child is furious that her classmate Claude Daigle won the medal she coveted. A little later, Christine Penmark and neighbor Monica accompany Rhoda to the bus that is supposed to take them to a school picnic that takes place near a lake. On the doorstep they meet the simple-minded caretaker Leroy Jessup, who makes Rhoda clearly feel that he can't stand her. He is watering the beds and is spraying the child with the garden hose.

Around lunchtime, when Christine Penmark and Monica Breedlove were sitting together with their brother and an acquaintance and talking about stories of murder, they heard on the radio about a terrible accident that happened at the school picnic and in which a child was killed. While Christine Penmark still fears that her daughter is affected, the radio reports that the drowned child is Rhoda's classmate Claude Daigle. Shortly afterwards, Rhoda arrives at home on the school bus. While Christine worries that the tragic accident had disturbed Rhoda emotionally, she, apparently unaffected by the events, demands a sandwich, as she did not get anything to eat due to the death of her classmate at the picnic. When Rhoda goes outside to roller-skate a little later, she meets the caretaker Leroy. He speaks to the girl about the accident. However, the child reacts to him with a frightening feeling of coldness. Leroy then decides to scare Rhoda.

A few days later, Rhoda's class teacher Christine Penmark visits when Rhoda is reading a book in the garden. She tells the mother about some inconsistencies at the picnic and casually mentions that Rhoda was probably the last person Claude Daigle saw alive. Rhoda, according to the teacher, stayed near the jetty shortly before Claude's death and was chased away by the lifeguard. The teacher also mentions a dispute between the two children that had occurred shortly before the accident and which concerned the medal that Claude had won. Surprisingly, Claude's parents join the two women. Agathe Daigle, Claude's mother, is very drunk and openly accuses Rhoda of knowing more about her son's accident than she says. Claude's winning medal has also disappeared. Claude's father Henry is clearly embarrassed by his wife's appearance and urges them to say goodbye. Christine Penmark promises Rhoda's teacher that she will talk to her daughter in detail.

When Rhoda's teacher has left, Christine calls her daughter into the house. Rhoda asks to finish reading the page in her book. While she is still busy, Monica Breedlove appears at the Penmarks and asks about the necklace with the locket that she would like to take to a jeweler at short notice. Since Christine knows where her daughter is keeping them, she goes to Rhoda's room. By chance she discovers the missing medal of the late Claude in her jewelry box. After Monica has left the apartment, Rhoda appears in the living room. When confronted with the allegations, however, the girl downplays everything and credibly assures her mother that this argument mentioned was just a game between Claude and her. But in Christine the suspicion grows that her daughter is hiding something.

When her father visits Rhoda, he gives Rhoda a doll tea set, which she tries out with her dolls in the garden. The caretaker arrives and claims to know that Rhoda killed her classmate with a stick. However, the girl denies having anything to do with the death of Claude Daigle. The caretaker then scared her by saying that blood could never be washed away completely, which is why the police will quickly track her down. In the evening, Christine Penmark surprises her daughter Rhoda as she tries to sneak a package to the in-house incinerator. When Rhoda refuses to tell her mother what she is hiding there behind her back, she angrily snatches it out of her hand. It's the red patent leather shoes with the iron fittings. Christine switched immediately and can now explain the mysterious injuries of the dead boy. After the mother interrogates Rhoda again, the child finally admits to having hit Claude Daigle with her shoes and then drowned. Pitying himself, Rhoda says that Claude was to blame, if he had given her the medal voluntarily, he would still be alive.

After this agonizing conversation, Christine Penmark makes her daughter increasingly creepy. It is precisely because she loves her child that the situation is increasingly unbearable for her. It is hard for her that Rhoda shows no remorse. The only thing that mattered to the girl was that Claude Daigle stood between her and the coveted medal, from which she derives the justification for her anger and what happened next. Christine instructs her daughter to burn the treacherous shoes. Subsequently, a puzzling death from the past is also discussed. The Penmarks lived in a different town at the time, and an older neighbor had made friends with Rhoda. This old lady had promised Rhoda that she would receive a glass ball with artificial snow and figures when she was no more. A few days later the old woman fell to her death. Rhoda confesses to her mother when she is emphatically questioned that it was she who helped and pushed the woman down the stairs.

A few days later, Christine's father, the writer Richard Bravo, unexpectedly comes to visit. Both talk about whether crime is heritable, which Bravo denies. But when Christine remembers and brings up her early nightmares, he admits that he adopted his daughter when he was two years old. Christine notes with great dismay that she is actually the daughter of a mass murderer who was wanted across the country at the time.

The next day, Rhoda is tinkering in the garden when Leroy shows up and repeats his claim that he believed she killed Claude. He claims he rescued the treacherous shoes from the oven to hand over to the police. Rhoda then decides to move the caretaker out of the way. Unnoticed by her mother, she appropriates matches and lights the straw mat on which the caretaker is taking his afternoon nap. Then she locks the door. The man burns to death while Rhoda calmly disappears into her room with an ice cream, where her piano playing mingles with the man's death screams. After this new outrage, Christine decides to go to death with her daughter. She declares the sleeping pills that she gives the child as vitamin pills. Before Rhoda falls asleep, she wants to know from her mother where the stolen medal is now. Christine tells her that she sank them on the jetty in the lake. After Rhoda fell asleep, a gunshot was heard that alerted the neighbors and saved mother and child. While Rhoda quickly recovers, Christine is in a coma. Rhoda's father now takes care of his daughter and unconsciously contributes to Rhoda deciding to dispose of the landlady Monica, who is very fond of the child, who wants to bequeath her canary if she dies. During a thunderstorm that night, Rhoda leaves the house unnoticed by his father to go to the lake and look for the medal. While she is looking for the medal through a net in the water, lightning strikes in the jetty and tears the child to her death. At the same time, Rhoda's mother wakes up from the coma and can briefly talk to her husband on the phone.

Production, publication and background

The shooting lasted from May to July and from the end of September to the end of November 1955. The film premiered on September 12, 1956 in the United States and on September 28, 1956 in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was also shown in Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Argentina, Denmark and in November 2003 in Spain at the Sitges Film Festival . It was also published in Brazil, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Serbia and the Soviet Union. For the production company Warner Bros. the film was a financial success. On a budget of $ 1 million, he grossed $ 4.1 million, an impressive result for the time. The film also landed in the top 20 at the box office.

The actor Henry Jones spoke in the original radio reports about the death at the lake. Just as Kelly and McCormack embodied their roles in the play, Evelyn Varden also played her role as Monica Breedlove on stage.

The song, played on the piano by Rhoda and also used as a movie theme, is a French nursery rhyme called Au Clair de la Lune . Eileen Heckart, who played the mother of the slain boy, won an Oscar for this role in the film Butterflies Are Free in 1973, sixteen years after her first nomination . The composer Alex North was nominated fifteen times for an Oscar without being able to win it. In 1986 he received an honorary Oscar, which the cameraman Harold Rosson had already received in 1937.

Billy Wilder originally wanted to create a film version of the material himself , but this failed because of the rules of the American Hays Code . After Wilder had dropped the project, because of the strict censorship requirements, the end of the film was defused from the stage version and the novel. In the novel and the stage version based on it, Christine dies, while her “bad seeds” live on and new calamities are looming. In the film version, the mother survives her suicide attempt while her daughter is struck by lightning. In addition, a final sequence with a theatrical performance of the main actors was inserted, at the end of which Nancy Kelly jokingly laid her film daughter Patty McCormack over the knee, which was intended to prevent the audience from leaving the cinema in a depressed mood under the impression of what they had seen . The German theatrical version, however, had a far more tragic ending at the time. The film ended after the mother's implied suicide after giving her daughter the fatal dose of sleeping pills.

Although box-office stars, such as Bette Davis , were also interested in the main roles in the film, Mervyn LeRoy stuck to the theater-proven stars of the play.

DVD, another film version

The film was released on DVD on October 13, 2006 by Warner Home Video.

In 1985 Paul Wendkos made a film adaptation for television with the title Die Saat des Bades .

In December 2017, it was announced that another TV remake of the film was planned, which Rob Lowe would direct and act as an actor. The US release date of the film on Lifetime has been set for September 9, 2018. In this version, Lowe embodies a single father who gradually gets to the hustle and bustle of his daughter Emma and is torn between the desire to protect his daughter and still keep her from further atrocities. Patty McCormack, who originally played the daughter Rhoda, appears here as Emma's psychiatrist.

criticism

Bosley Crowther's criticism for the New York Times was on the one hand riddled with skepticism, on the other hand he spoke of a particularly captivating effect with regard to the deeds of a psychopathic child and a film adaptation that was extraordinarily different and pathologically fascinating. The information that one receives in the course of the film is comparable to the effect of a slowly running fuse on a bomb. The actors' performances were less well received by Crowther, as did the film ending, which was changed with regard to the original and lacked its devastating irony.

The criticism in the Spiegel at the time was completely negative. So was offended by the "rather absurd heredity theory", which the American author Maxwell Anderson had made the starting point of his play, which was "verbose and with little respect for the laws of cinematography for the screen".

"Film adaptation of a macabre stage drama by Maxwell Anderson; as a detective film with psychological aspects - albeit with antiquated inheritance theses - plausibly staged and well played. "

- Lexicon of international film

“Mervyn LeRoy's film is a difficult-to-classify mixture of thriller, drama and horror. In part, the play by Maxwell Anderson served as a model, and Mervyn LeRoy followed the tradition of stage production insofar as he was only interested in the emotions and developments of the actors and in the rough display of shock effects (and there are plenty of them) waived. "

- Cinema

“'The Bad Seed' is a strange yet fascinating film with a very grotesque 'Deus Ex Machina' ending that was demanded by the Hollywood moral code at the time. The fact that this current DVD release has not yet been approved for young people shows how explosive the thriller still is today, even if it remains completely non-violent. "

- Deepred's cinema :

Awards

literature

  • William March : The Bad Seed. Detective novel (Original title: The Bad Seed ). German by Leni Sobez . Heyne, Munich 1971, 142 pp.
  • Claudia Liebrand: Good girls go to heaven, bad girls are hit by lightning. Mervyn LeRoy's "The Bad Seed" (USA 1956). In: rebellious - desperate - infamous. The bad girl as an aesthetic figure. published by Renate Möhrmann , Aisthesis Verlag, Bielfeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-89528-875-3 , pp. 349-370.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bad seeds at IMDb
  2. ↑ a b The Bad Seed (1956) Articles at TCM - Turner Classic Movies (English)
  3. ↑ The Bad Seed (1956) Trivia at TCM (English)
  4. ↑ Evil Seed DVD
  5. ↑ Bosley Crowther : Screen: 'The Bad Seed'; Members of Broadway Cast Are Starred
    In: The New York Times , September 13, 1956. Retrieved August 3, 2017.
  6. ↑ Böse Saat (USA) In: Der Spiegel No. 43/1956 of October 24, 1956.
  7. ↑ a b cf. Bad seeds in the lexicon of international film 2000/2001 (CD-ROM)
  8. ↑ Bad Saat at Cinema.de
  9. ↑ Böse Saat (1956) at deepreds-kino.blogspot.de. Retrieved August 8, 2014.