THE BAD SEED

THE BAD SEED

Friday, August 10 - Creek Park in San Anselmo

Showtime: 8:00 PM

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1956 (not reccomedned for children)

Maxwell Anderson’s Broadway play, The Bad Seed, had run for nine months from 1954-1955, and the following year, the major players in the stage cast re-created their roles for the movie version. Besides Nancy Kelly, who had won the Tony Award for playing Christine Penmark (and would receive an Oscar nomination for the film), and Evelyn Varden, who created the role of the talky landlady, the notable transplants from the stage production were three actors who would carve themselves on the consciousness of all who saw the film: Henry Jones, who played the ill-fated handyman, Leroy Jessup; the brilliant late actress Eileen Heckart, who played the tortured mother, and the bad seed herself, Patty McCormack.

McCormack had, at the tender age of eleven, a full-fledged career in the golden age of television, already chalking up credits in everything from the earliest Hallmark Hall of Fame to Philco Television Playhouse, to the first television series version of I Remember Mama. But it was as Rhoda Penmark, “the bad seed,” that her face, and those pigtails, would be remembered. Her career continues to this day – take a close look at Liz La Cerva on The Sopranos. Yes, positively the same dame (as William Demarest would say in The Lady Eve.)

In 1956, a scary or evil child was still quite a taboo. Executives at Warner Brothers were nervous about the subject matter, including the question of whether evil could be passed down genetically. But scary or evil children would proliferate from that point forward, whether serving as a metaphor for cold war jitters or for the growing generation gap. From Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Damned (1964) to little Billy Mumy holding his town hostage in the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life,” (1961), audiences enjoyed being chilled by the idea of evil little ones, even as they clung closely to their own families. The threat of the mushroom cloud grew. By the time The Exorcist was released in 1973 and The Omen was released in 1976, evil children were here to stay.

By Kenn Rabin