Lost in Adaptation: The Bad Seed

The Dom compares the 1954 novel The Bad Seed with its 1956 film adaptation.

Intro
(shows The Dom dressed as a knife-wielding Rhoda in a black and white bedroom)

The Dom: Uhmmm...you know what? I, uh...(takes off his wig) I think I'm actually gonna go easy on the sketches on this one; this is, uhhh...starting to get weird, even for me.

Poll
People Asked: 141

Read the Book: 7

Saw the Play: 7

Saw the Film: 21

The Dom: Hello, my Beautiful Watchers; and welcome back to Lost in Adaptation, the show dedicated to discussing the differences between films and the books they were based on. Today, we're going to be having a look at The Bad Seed, a film and novel from way back in the '50s about an adorable eight-year-old girl who turns out to secretly be a psychotic serial killer -- sorry, I couldn't think of a subtle or witty way of revealing that plot twist; so I fell back on blurting it out early on.

The Bad Seed was written by Mr. William March, a highly decorated World War I veteran. He wrote several novels and, although he was highly praised by book critics, he never gained widespread fame until The Bad Seed was published in 1954. Tragically, March only lived long enough to hear that the book was *selling* well before dying of a heart attack age 60. Amazingly, the adaptation process to turn his book into a play was started almost *immediately* after its release; and the stage production debuted the same year. The first film adaptation *also* came into being surprisingly fast just two years later in 1956, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and predominantly starring the same cast as the play. There was a second, apparently not-as-good TV movie adaptation in 1985; but I'm not gonna pay attention to that right now.

It's actually kind of *fascinating* looking at an adaptation that's been converted so *fast* between three different forms of entertainment and how that rapid adaptation, combined with going through more than the usual amount of mediums, affected what changes were made in the final product -- which is kind of a shame because that's not what I'm going to be *doing* for the majority of this episode. This is the *film* compared to the *book*; I'm not going to be including any recordings of the *play* in this. I guess the point of all that was just to let you know that I *am* aware that there is a Homo erectus in between this Homo habilis and Homo sapien.

Right, now the clumsy evolution metaphors are out of the way, here's my thoughts on the book and the film as stand-alone entities. This is one of those books that *feels* like it's riddled with clichés, but you have to keep reminding yourself that it predates these things *becoming* clichés and might even have been the *origin* of some of them. These days, we are somewhat inundated with books and films trying to scare us with the juxtaposition of an innocent-looking child being a cold-blooded killer; so there's really not much shock value in this book for a modern reader. The person or persons who get in over their head trying to cover up for a murder -- intentional or otherwise -- has also become somewhat of a commonplace trope since this book was written, so the emotional effect of *that* being in the story was also dulled greatly. So, too, the "nature versus nurture" debate -- the, at the *time*, fairly *new* question being raised by psychologists and the theme on which the entire book is based -- has now been talked to death in both professional and amateur circles with no definitive answer. I'm not saying it's a bad book by any means; I've read *bad books* -- this one's only real crime is being dated; other than that, it's a decent read if you're into this sort of thing.

That said, there were a few writing quirks involved in this book that I found a bit...odd, that *can't* be explained away by when it was written. Most of the story is told from Rhoda's mother's perspective; and the book switches back and forth between referring to her as "Christine" and "Mrs. Penmark" *constantly*, which I found a little jarring -- though that might just be because I've been on a Song of Ice and Fire bender recently, and the name that a P.O.V. character chooses to self-identify with in each chapter is super significant there; so it just seems a little off-putting when it happens at random here. Another is that this book seems far more likely than most to *describe* a conversation rather than just let you *experience* it -- what I mean by that is, where most books would use dialogue to let a conversation speak for itself, if you will...

(the following text appears:

''"Hello," Christine said to the postman. "How are you today?"''

''"Fine thank you Mrs. Penmark," the he replied. "Have you heard anything from your husband about how his new job is going?"'')

The Dom: ...this one is far more likely just to describe that the conversation took place.

(the following text appears:

Christine greeted the postman and asked how he was that day.

He responded that he was fine and politely inquired about her husband and his new job.)

The Dom: Again, not a bad book, I want to make that *abundantly* clear; if you like psychological fiction and my complaints don't sound like they'd bother you, please *do* check this book out.

Okay, let's discuss the film.

The Dom (V.O.): I'm gonna go ahead and say that it is *super* obvious that this film was *heavily* based on a play. They have one main set that they stick to as much as possible, namely the Penmarks' living room; everyone faces stage front as standard, even if that means talking to people *sideways* all the time; there's *constant* monologues either in the middle of a conversation or while people are alone; the acting is *exaggerated* as *fuck*; and they even do a *role call* at the end -- though the acting thing might also have been because it was a 1950s production and they were *all* a little bit hammy back then. Another telling sign is, there's very few time jumps within scenes -- for example, Reginald's visit to Christine to discuss criminology is one long real-time scene from his arrival to his departure; so if you stop and think about it, you realize that means that he was only there for a grand total of ten minutes.

Speaking of Reginald -- ahhhh, the '50s, a slightly more innocent time where you could apparently have conversations that would put you on a *watch list* in the 21st century.

Reginald: (meeting Rhoda) Well, isn't *she* a little sweetheart...*That's* the kind of thing that makes an old bachelor wish he were married.

Rhoda: Oh, you like little girls to curtsy?

Reginald: She's going to make *some* man very happy.

Rhoda: *I'm* having dinner upstairs.

Reginald: The loss is ours (he strokes her pigtail), all ours.

The Dom (V.O.): Ha ha, um, probably...don't leave those two alone together, just in case.

The before-mentioned over-the-top theatrical acting really did start to grate on me after a while; the actress who played Christine Penmark in particular did this quavering voice thing when she was upset, which was often.

Christine: (with a quavering voice) You hit him with the shoes, didn't you? You hit him with the shoes; that's how he got those half-moon marks on his forehead and on his *hands*!...Perhaps you'd better not *come* here anymore...Because the man's still screaming, and the piano is going *on* and *on* while he's dying in the fire! I'm hearing a man scream!

The Dom (V.O.): Come on, *tell* me that's not annoying as fuck -- ughhhh, she actually won *awards* for that performance on stage.

The standout scene in this film is near the end, when Christine has completely lost her shit because of the death that everyone just witnessed, but Rhoda is calmly practicing her piano; the music gets louder and louder as her mother loses her grip on sanity and it comes to a head, and then there's a deathly silence as Rhoda comes out the door -- it's amazingly effective. The very last thing you see in this film is a title card asking the audience to not be dickheads and spoil the plot twist for other people; I found that remarkably amusing.

The Dom: And now, let's talk adaptation.

What They Didn't Change
The Dom (V.O.): This is another adaptation that's loyal enough to its book that a list of its similarities, if worded carefully, can double up as a synopsis of its plot. Mrs. Christine Penmark lives with her eight-year-old daughter Rhoda in a rather nice apartment rented to them by a middle-aged, talkative woman named Monica Breedlove while her child's father's away on long-term business. Her daughter *appears*, on the outside, to be exceptionally well-behaved and nice, *way* past the point that a normal eight-year-old girl *should* be; she does, however, become oddly...intense about certain things -- for example, she seems deeply enraged that she didn't win a school medal for most improved penmanship and is resentful towards the young boy who did, a rather small and nervous young man by the name of Claude Daigle. Mrs. Breedlove, harboring a great motherly affection for the girl, dismisses her behavior using her own brand of amateur psychology that she's obsessed with.

However, at a school picnic, the boy is found drowned, covered in abrasions on his head and hands seemingly after a terrible accident. Christine is naturally worried about the trauma this would inflict on her child, but Rhoda seems entirely unconcerned by it. She later discovers the coveted medal in amongst Rhoda's possessions; Rhoda attempts, rather clumsily, to avoid answering questions about it, then comes up with a obviously false tale about how she'd acquired it innocently. Meanwhile, the school she goes to quietly expels her for multiple incidents of bullying and inappropriate behavior, making it even harder for her mother to convince herself that everything is fine.

Also meanwhile, the caretaker of the building they live in -- a rather nasty gentleman with an overinflated sense of his own intelligence by the name of Leroy -- started goading Rhoda, saying that he'd figured out that she'd killed her classmate and could point the police in the right direction if he chose to, letting her know that they had the ability to find blood on a murder weapon -- no matter how thoroughly it had been washed. This prompted Rhoda to attempt to incinerate a pair of her cleated shoes and, when caught by her mother in the act, eventually confessed that she had used them to *murder* the medal's previous owner. Despairing, Christine is indecisive at first, but concludes that she must cover up for her child, at least until her husband returns home so they can decide what to do together.

She then has the revelatory bombshell dropped on her that she is adopted and her biological mother was one of America's most notorious serial killers, having *murdered* -- apparently for fiscal reasons -- her husband; his entire family; and, eventually, all of her children but one, who managed to escape. She concluded that she must have been carrying the genetic disposition for murder dormant in her genes and passed them on to her daughter, the proverbial bad seed for which the story is named. Mrs. Daigle, the murdered boy's mother, turns up at their home drunk, apparently having come to the conclusion that Rhoda was involved, but not able to properly express her accusation due to her grief and intoxication. Leroy then goes just a *little* too far in his taunting of Rhoda, accidentally figuring out the connection to her missing shoes and claiming to have saved them from the incinerator, prompting her to murder him as well by setting him on fire while he was napping in the basement. After this final killing, Christine loses it completely and attempts a murder-suicide -- giving her child a large amount of sleeping pills, then *shooting* herself. However, against all the odds, Rhoda survives the overdose and is returned to her father's custody with no one the wiser of her crimes.

There are quite a few minor details that they stayed true to in this -- enough that it's really not practical to list them all, so some highlights are Rhoda's little saying with her parents about exchanging a basket of kisses for a basket of hugs and how she used it when she wished to distract her mother from questioning her, with steadily decreasing effectiveness as the story went on; wealthy Mrs. Breedlove spoiling Rhoda with gifts such as dual sunglasses and an engraved locket; Leroy doing spiteful, immature things to the residents of the building to relieve his deep sense of cosmic injustice that he didn't have the finer things in life like they did; Monica proudly claiming that she'd met Sigmund Freud himself and had been told by him that she was far too complicated to diagnose; Reginald Tasker the criminologist becoming a family friend, and Christine seeking advice from him about child murderers and the possibility that evil was a heritable trait; Mrs. Fern suggesting that Rhoda was hiding something, but not suggesting murder as such; the revelation that the Daigle boy wasn't even Rhoda's first kill as, years before, she'd pushed an old lady down some stairs because she'd mentioned she'd get something in her will; Christine pretending that she intended to write a fictional book on her situation so she could get advice on it under the guise of research.

The Dom: A good-size list of book loyalty; that's always nice to see. Now, let's see how these two young psychopaths *differ* from one another.

What They Changed
The Dom (V.O.): The first prominent change a book reader will notice is that Kenneth, Christine's husband and Rhoda's father, is now in the story; he's very much an absentee character in the book, only spoken about or remembered until the epilogue *after* Christine's death. They also made him a colonel in the army for some reason -- in the book, he was a naval lieutenant when he and Christine first met; and I'm pretty sure he was a *civilian* by the time the story begins. Monica actually tells Leroy off for his bullshit in the film, as opposed to instantly forgiving him for everything because she chose to explain it all away using her pop psychology -- in fact, everyone seemed to treat Leroy with just a bit more distaste in the film; in the book, everyone was constantly nice to him despite him being a complete dickhead, making him seem even *less* sympathetic to the audience.

Bessie Denker, Christine's biological serial killer mother -- who, incidentally, is apparently based on several real-life famous female serial murderers -- is brought up much earlier in the story. They also claim she eventually got away and changed her identity in the film; in the book, she was sent to the electric chair for her crimes. They switched it around so that instead of Christine going to see Mrs. Daigle to pay her respects, *she* came to *her* -- this is one of the aforementioned examples of the play's influence, i.e. moving as many scenes as possible to a single set. A *side* effect of this is, when she turns up at the point where she's actually *supposed* to in the story, the scenes are virtually identical; and it now seems a little unnecessary. She also never actually comes face to face with Rhoda in the book; I...can't quite decide if this is significant or not.

Christine's adopted father is miraculously back from the dead in the film, having apparently *not* been killed in a plane crash in World War II, like his book counterpart. The reason for his presence in the film is pretty obvious -- the scene where Christine realizes that she's the daughter of a famous murderer originally took place almost exclusively inside her head as she went through some of Reginald's documented case files and started remembering random *flashes* from her past. Being a visual medium, the film had to externalize this scene; so her father is made the new catalyst for this revelation via him confessing what he knew under questioning.

The debate over nature versus nurture is still a major theme in the movie, though it's presented in a slightly different way now. The book was obviously pushing the nature *angle*, but made a point of saying that no group of experts have been able to agree on the subject to date and general opinion keeps going back and forth. In the film, almost *all* of the learned psychologists and doctors *scoff* at the idea that genetics could *possibly* play the slightest part in someone's mental health.

The Dom (V.O. as Psychologist): Some sort of bad seed within you?! B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B, preposterous!

The Dom (V.O.): There's slight changes to the order of things and the usual amount of cutting out time between important scenes -- nothing outside the acceptable realms of film adapting, though. In both versions of the story, the sleeping pills that Christine used to try to kill her daughter were given to her by Monica, who thought they might help her with whatever was troubling her. In the film, however, Monica also provided her with the vitamin pills that she switched them out with to try to trick her; in the book, she went to the trouble of taking Rhoda to the doctor for a checkup, then pretending he'd suggested vitamins, buying them on the way home. I must confess, I found it way more terrifying that it was premeditated as *fuck* in the book and performed so *calmly* when she decided to do it; it was so off-putting, it makes you think maybe the bad seed didn't skip her generation after all.

The last changes of the film are by far the most significant and the most interesting. It starts with Christine telling Rhoda that she'd taken the medal she'd killed for and dropped it off the pier where the boy had drowned; then, believe it or not, they changed it so that Christine *survived* her self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, apparently with *no* long-term consequences predicted. What?! Has this bitch got an adamantium skull now? What the fuck?

Right after *that* revelation, you see Rhoda sneaking out of the house during a thunderstorm and attempting to retrieve her precious medal and -- I kid you not -- gets STRUCK BY LIGHTNING AND EXPLODES! That's right, this little monster fooled everyone, effortlessly outwitted the authorities, overcame what should have been a fatal overdose, and literally got away with MURDER; but there was one person she *didn't* take into account: MIGHTY THOOOOOR!!

(shows a black and white version of Marvel's Thor shooting lightning at Rhoda)

The Dom (V.O.): Okay, but seriously, I think what we have here is another case of the old Hays code interfering with an adaptation. While it did come out slightly *after* when the Motion Picture Production Code was at its most religiously enforced, it was still adhered to fairly well most of the way through the 1950s -- oh, uhhh, if you're not sure what I'm talking about here, you should watch the Lost in Adaptation I did on Rebecca for more information. It's easy to see why letting an unrepentant criminal go unpunished at the end would have been a big no-no, so the change itself isn't that surprising; it's just the method they went with to kill Rhoda off is so...hilarious! Immediately after the post-credits rolled, they included a humorous scene where the actress playing Christine ended up spanking the girl who played Rhoda for being a *naughty* murderer -- now, I've not confirmed this; but I suspect this is another joke left over from the play, as it has that sort of feel to it.

The Dom: Can you imagine if more movies ended with the evil characters getting their comeuppance via random acts of God?

(shows Scar from The Lion King getting hit by a meteor, Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix getting eaten by a T-rex, and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz getting run over by a train)

What They Left Out Altogether
The Dom (V.O.): You actually get a look at Claude Daigle when Rhoda is being dropped off at the picnic at the beginning -- a sickly-looking, nervous boy clinging to his mother. You also see Rhoda going over to pore at his medal a bit, so it's very believable when people start saying that she was harassing him for it later. There's a few missing scenes where Leroy goes back to his family and gets warned by his take-no-bullshit wife to stop being a dickhead to the people he works for.

Now, this is a bit uncomfortable; but the book makes a point of mentioning that Leroy was subconsciously in love with Rhoda, and his tormenting of her was actually an immature attempt at courtship -- no, seriously. Halfway through his final conversation with her, he was hinting that he was going to blackmail her with the recovered murder shoes, then suddenly pulled a 180 and tried to extradite himself from the conversation, claiming he was only joking and she should leave him alone from now on. I don't have anything to back this up, so I could be full of shit; but I got the impression that part of the reason for this was, he'd suddenly realized that he was laying the *groundwork* for molesting her later, and that had freaked even *him* out.

Throughout the book, Christine wrote multiple letters to her husband Kenneth filling him in on the major events, asking for advice, and begging him to rush home and help her -- she did it when she *suspected* Rhoda might have done something, when she *knew* she had, and when she decided to *end* it for both of them. However, upon the completion of each letter, instead of mailing it, she'd locked it away in a drawer; then, right before shooting herself, she burned them all. In a *remarkably* dark twist, Christine's murder-suicide solution was actually suggested to her by an acquaintance that she had pitched her pretend book idea to; she'd taken it to a group of friends and discussed the plot with them, and they'd all concluded that that was the *only* realistic ending -- Christine said that she *had* to agree.

The Dom's Final Thoughts
The Dom: I have...mixed feelings about the results of the Hays code's meddling in this one -- while I found Rhoda's demise amusing and satisfactory, considering what a little bitch she was throughout, it's inescapably a betrayal of the book's intentionally dark ending; and Christine surviving a bullet to the brain is just plain dumb. Other than that, this is a nicely loyal adaptation that I think the author would have appreciated if he'd lived to see it; and the influence of its previous on-stage incarnation is interesting to behold.

There's been rumors flying around for years about *another* remake with an even creepier kid and an even higher body count -- kind of ironic that it seems to be taking forever to get through development considering how fast the *first* adaptations came to be. I can't say I'm particularly disappointed -- I mean, I've never been overly fond of modernized reboots; and like I said in the book review, the subject matter may have been fresh at the time, but it's been done to *death* now 60 years later. But in regards to *this* film, pretty positive all round; I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for other films that were adapted really quickly after their books released to see if they're *all* like this.