The Bad Seed (1956)

To disprove the rumour currently extant that I am chained in a dark cellar and forced to watch movies all day, I varied the proceedings by escaping today and going to see the Sultan's Elephant which is visiting London for four days. If you haven't read about this, it is a piece of street theatre by a French troupe which includes a mechanical elephant some 40 feet tall propelled by steam, people power, and sheer bravado.  Watching it lumber its way out of Horseguards and into the Mall left me feeling like a big kid again -- and yes it was a good feeling.  This was preceded by a quick look at the Bellini exhibition at the National Gallery (Venetian painter at the Turkish Court).  And to really show my freedom I haven't told you about visiting the Gothic Nightmares exhibition at the Tate Britain just before it closed last week which focused on Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination.  Not my favourite period of art by a long shot, but much of it was good fun with its emphases on fairies, fatal women, witches and "gloomth".  Maybe I should not add that there were two video shows -- one reproducing the sort of entertainment known as Phantasmagoria and the other showing clips from movies that may or may not have been inspired by this movement such as the original "Nosferatu" and James Whale's "Frankenstein" -- so it wasn't a complete escape.

Let me briefly comment on the above film which I haven't viewed for a long, long time but which has held up reasonably well despite some dated pyschobabble.  Based on a stage hit, it didn't shed its theatrical provenance completely, but remains fascinating in following the machinations of an evil eight-year-old who murders anyone who gets in her way and how her mother, who blames herself for passing bad genes on to her child, tries to cope.  The cast included Nancy Kelly as the mother and Patty McCormack as the devil-child with the angelic mien, both from the original cast, as were character actors Henry Jones and Eileen Heckart.  Of course being Hollywood in the bad old days, the kid had to face God's justice which, I understand, did not occur in the original.  However, having added this, one wonders why the last section which introduced the various cast members ended with a tableau of the brat being spanked.  Pretty idiotic to suggest that this might be a cure or punishment for homicide.