Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bad Seed,’ As an Evil Adult Meets His Match in a Child)

Leroy, a house handyman [played by Henry Jones] [to eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark]:“I thought I'd seen some mean little gals in my time, but you're the meanest. You wanna know how I know how mean you are? 'Cause I'm mean. I'm smart and I'm mean, and you're smart and you're mean. And you never get caught and I never get caught.”— The Bad Seed (1956), screenplay by John Lee Mahin, adapted from the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March, directed by Mervyn LeRoy

This week—and month—devoted to Halloween, TV schedules are filled with all kinds of horror. Much of it is filled with obvious plot twists and onscreen gore. Few of these programs compare in subtlety and scariness to The Bad Seed, an Eisenhower-era shocker that, despite its attempts to placate Hollywood’s censorship office, can still send chills up the spine seven decades after its release.

It’s a sign of our degenerating popular taste that some online viewers actually thought this movie moved too slowly. Listen, this is hardly Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, okay? You don’t need to see knives raised or blood spilled to feel the suspense ratchet up in this thriller.

You thought that the “Mean Girls” of the Lindsay Lohan movie were bad? They only murdered reputations. Pig-tailed blonde Rhoda (Oscar-nominated Patty McCormack) is onto bigger game. Her sweet smiles mask a penchant for lying, theft...and much worse. 

The only adult who senses the monster beneath Rhoda’s placid, perfect surface is Leroy, a spiteful, leering, Uriah Heep in gardener’s garb. It takes one to know one, as they say. Yet even he doesn’t grasp just how evil she is for the longest time.

Like other characters in the film, Leroy went through a transformation from the printed page to this 1956 film version, then again into a 1985 made-for-TV remake and a 2018 cable thriller, with Blair Brown and Rob Lowe taking turns as Rhoda’s puzzled, terrified parent.

The depiction of the novel’s Leroy, an African-American in the Deep South, would strike modern readers as racist. For whatever reason, he was transformed for the stage and screen as poor white trash.

The dialogue above is as deftly acted as scripted, with Jones’s Leroy modulating from mocking and antagonizing the little girl into grasping that she really is capable of the evil he was only implying before.

In the Fifties, parents threw up their hands over how they could have given birth to and raised troubled, even delinquent, teens. The Bad Seed dared to imagine that the problem dated from the beginning—through heredity. 

To me, that’s a far more frightening explanation than the one offered in the Sixties and Seventies by Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: that it was all the fault of a devil, working black magic outside a poor, innocent darling.

Incidentally, McCormack—as remarkable a child actress as Broadway and Hollywood have ever seen—is 80 years old now. Eight years ago, in a clever bit of stunt casting in an otherwise inferior remake of this cult classic, she did a cameo as little Rhoda’s psychiatrist.

You can just imagine the writer of the teleplay, Barbara Marshall, gleefully rubbing her hands together before typing this bit of dialogue for “Dr. March” (a nod to the author who created it all): “I told Emma she reminds me of me."