Beautiful, moving film.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This film is staged ham. Not surprisingly since most of the cast was apparently held over from its Broadway run. Only the mother Nancy Kelly seems to have caught on that she's acting in a film here. Everyone else is hamming it up for the cheap seats. That kid. Yikes. She delivers her lines like a brat in a community theatre production of Little Orphan Annie. This is conceivably the worst performance by a juvenile I have ever seen committed to film. Ever. The drunken mom of the dead boy? Holy ham bones, Shakespeare, she's playing to seats to cheap and so far away she might as well be in Yankee Stadium. Similarly, the teacher and the gardener fair very poorly. Hard to believe a veteran director of the big screen would let his actors run away from him like this. Maybe it would have worked on Philco's Monster Horror Chiller Theatre or whatever they called it on the 50s b00b tube.

Nature or nurture? Can a person be born evil or is wickedness always the result of a bad upbringing? These are the questions that arise as 8-year-old Rhoda (Patty McCormack) proceeds to bump off anyone who gets in her way.The first few scenes of The Bad Seed drip with an exaggerated saccharine sweetness that is difficult to stomach ("What will you give me for a basket of kisses?" asks Rhoda; "A basket of kisses? Why, I'll give you a basket of hugs!" comes her father's reply). Some might believe that director Mervyn LeRoy was deliberately aiming for high camp. Others have surmised that the over the top theatricality was the result of a stage cast unused to performing in front of a camera.Another possibility, and one that I he subscribe to, is that LeRoy intended for the excessive fawning of his central family to catch his audience off-guard, the cloying sentimentality at complete odds with the harrowing emotional pain and suffering later endured by those most affected by Rhoda's unspeakable acts. It certainly had that effect on me, the breakdown of Rhoda's mother (Nancy Kelly) and the anguish of Mrs. Daigle (Eileen Heckart), mother of dead child Claude, coming as quite a shock given how unbearably happy everyone is at the start of the film.Extremely daring for the day, the film not only deals with the touchy subject of child murderers (rare, but not unheard of), but also depression, mental breakdown, alcoholism, and suicide, ultimately making it quite the traumatic experience despite the staginess of the acting. It also manages to deliver not one, but two twist endings, the first very effective, the second bloody ridiculous, but oh so entertaining. And to cap it all off, we get a cast call that sees each performer taking a bow, closing with Kelly putting McCormack over her knee and giving her a good spanking. WTF?!?!

I have only seen a few horror flicks that are centered around a child being the source for the scares. that is because i am extra ordinarily freaked out by innocent little children doing horrifying abominations agents common moral ground. this film follows a delightful little girl as she goes on a murder spree, and all the bloody fallout. honestly wondering how the concept base for this movie got past the rating people at the time.just so ya know the adults don't know the little girl is a killer for most of the film. its kind of like a murder mystery with a despicable truth, but the audience knows it the whole time. this film really captures the idea of making the viewer feel helpless to the oncoming train.

A great film about the psychopathic Rhoda. Although some acting leaves something to be desired, the film still holds up well. It is surprising how suspenseful some scenes are 60 years later. I would think that it would not hold up well to a contemporary audience, and although some aspects don't, the film as a whole really does. Perhaps one of the more memorable scenes is when Monica and Christine both incoherently talk to themselves after seeing a man burned alive. The overlapping sound was just unnerving. The ending of this film shows evidence of the production code of the time. The clear good coming out better than evil felt bland. Although I still enjoyed the film, I would love to have seen the unhampered result.