Sunset Gun

One Mean Little Gal: The Bad Seed

This year's Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs honors the most brilliant, baneful brats of them all, Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed. The picture shows today, followed by a discussion with Miss McCormack, who most recently played Pat Nixon in Frost/Nixon. She's got a lot of intriguing things to say about her evil little cutie Rhoda, along with numerous other things -- like working with Orson Welles on the ill-fated Don Quixote -- and more. Since she's one of my all time favorite movie villains, I'm running my Bad Seed worship, yet again.   

The baby blonde. That symbol of purity, beauty and goodness. In 1950’s America who wouldn’t want to have a lovely, flaxen haired child to adore and spoil? Everyone, of course. But by 1956, two important films emerged -- showing the underbelly of these perfect specimens. The more esteemed, and notorious (it was condemned by the Legion of Decency) was Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll, in which the gorgeous child bride Carroll Baker destroys Karl Malden’s masculinity whilst sleeping in a crib and sucking her thumb (never mind she’s 19 going on 20). While other relevant issues pervade Kazan’s masterful take on Tennessee Williams, the lingering image is of Ms. Baker in that crib…an iconic vision of arrested sexuality.

But just as viewers took a gander at Baby Doll, they had another blonde to contend with -- a much younger, smarter and deadlier one -- The Bad Seed. Pretty 10-year-old Patty McCormack playing an 8- year-old in pig tails and pinafore skirts as Rhoda Penmark, a curtsying, cutie-pie brat who’ll manipulate, terrorize and kill anyone who gets in her way. Both actresses’ were deservedly Oscar nominated for their performances but it's Mervyn LeRoy’s picture, though much loved by cultists, that remains highly underrated.

Part of the problem may lie in the transfer from play to film. LeRoy rightfully transported nearly all of the actors from the successful stage play (most likely to the annoyance of Warner Brothers who probably desired a bigger star for Rhoda’s mother) but was forced to change the ending. In the play, an unstoppable Rhoda continues her evil while after her killings, she chillingly plays her continual practice piece, "Claire de Lune" on the piano. Perfect. In the picture however, she is socked with a lightning bolt. O.K, also perfect. But, (and I'm not endorsing the harm of children here, even evil children), Warner Brothers made LeRoy further punish Rhoda, or in this case Patty, by having cast members spank little McCormack --assuring the audience this was all a bunch of fun. You know, burning, drowning, murdering kids with tap shoes -- fun!

And yet, in an early bit of camp -- The Bad Seed is fun. Gleefully, unapologetically and relevantly fun. In its own way, the end changes just make the picture even more inadvertently subversive. How we love to hate little Rhoda. And for some of us (myself included), how we love to love her…she’s just too damn full of vicious personality. I even go so far as to nearly (I say nearly) champion her actions and wish she would invoke more harm (film wise) before her inevitable demise.

But enough of my sick adoration and to the movie itself. Living with her mother Christine (an understandably neurotic Nancy Kelly) and mostly absent father (William Hopper -- Hedda Hopper's son) Rhoda's life is one of privilege and attention. When kissing her father goodbye he asks “What would you give me for a basket of kisses?” Rhoda coos back: “A basket of hugs!” Landlady and supposed expert in psychology, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden) dotes on Rhoda, applauding her out-moded manners and showering her with presents -- one being rhinestone movie star glasses that Rhoda, of course, loves. As she prattles on about Freud and abnormal psychology, the rather ridiculous Breedlove cannot see the freakish behavior in front of her. She's blinded by all that bright, beauteous blonde.

But Leroy (a scene stealing Henry Jones), the disturbed, somewhat perverse handyman disrespected by the household can see right through Rhoda (you even get a sense he's got a thing for her), leading to some of the picture's most inspired moments. Man does Leroy dig into snotty Rhoda after a fateful class outing leaves one child dead; not coincidentally, the class-mate who won the penmanship medal over the all perfecting Rhoda (“Everyone knew I wrote the best hand!” she hollers in sour grapes dramatics). The little boy is drowned and Rhoda returns home as if nothing happened. "Why should I feel bad? It was Claude Daigle got drowned, not me" she insists. And then she goes roller skating. Meanwhile, her mother becomes increasingly rattled and the boy's mother (an inspired, heartbreaking Eileen Heckart).

Though some have a tough time with The Bad Seed’s talkier sequences (especially when Rhoda’s not around), to me they are an intriguing look into ideas that would later be seriously considered, scientific even. They also point out how psychology can’t explain everything (hence, a bad seed) as the one woman (Breedlove) who brags of her knowledge, fails to sense anything wrong with a child who is, at the very least, self obsessed to the point of vapid narcissism. Never mind she’s a murderer.

And, the golden moments come, again, between Leroy and Rhoda who argue like two prison inmates waiting for lockdown. Though Rhoda finds him revolting, he’s the only adult who can actually frighten the child with his taunts of “stick blood hounds” or the dreaded electric chair, a fate he swears she'll meet. “They don’t send little girls to the electric chair!” Rhoda protests. “Oh they don’t?” He answers. “The got a blue one for little boys and a pink one for little gals!”

Though films like The Omen or The Good Son have tried, nothing compares to The Bad Seed -- and no child actor has out-seeded McCormack. Calm and cool, she can also rip into fits of rage that are both terrifying and hilarious. Perfectly balancing a disarmingly adult demeanor with the tantrums of a little girl, her performance is even more impressive in that it’s the blueprint. Where did McCormack learn this wonderful balance of over-theatrical camp with an icy, realistic serenity? And before John Waters became obsessed with her?

A classic and first of its kind, the then shocking Bad Seed holds up, albeit with a tad more camp, but with just as much psychotic gusto (I'm not sure what to think about the talked about re-make). Revel in McCormack’s Rhoda, a character even the obnoxiously talented Dakota Fanning couldn’t play. Agree with Leroy who spits out: “I thought I saw some mean little gals in my time, but you're the meanest!” And, what the hell, worship little Rhoda -- the itty bitty ultimate queen bitch goddess.

Patty's 1956 single on Dot Records "Bubble Gum."

Obscure Objects Of Desire: The Virgin Suicides

In real life, memories don’t follow the patterns of a typical movie. Recollections are not played out in fully developed narrative timeframes, perfectly balanced and structured strands of thought, or tangible, easily understood events. Memories can be visited but never wholly embraced. They can be strong and unforgettable, but bit by bit, they lose their edges, making them, for many, even more melancholic.  The more they elude us, the less simplistic they become -- never just happy or sad, but mysterious and bittersweet, replete with or bereft of emotion for reasons often beyond comprehension.

Sofia Coppola's poetic, tragic and mysterious The Virgin Suicides (released nearly ten years ago and, which emerged to me today, a memory itself while thinking of my siblings), captures the ambiguity of such hazy recollections with tender, albeit horrifying ennui.

Adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Coppola's picture doesn't tell a story; instead, it leaves a swoony, foggy impression, a darkly beautiful intangibility filled with almost torturously elusive feeling. Set in Michigan in the early '70s, the film is marked immediately with the pall of death and the dangling unknown of why it happened. The five teenage Lisbon sisters -- all blonde and beautiful -- kill themselves, and a group of smitten teenage boys struggle to understand why. The suicides are a defining period in these boys' lives, but even as they narrate the film, they have never gotten their heads around the loss. In an unusual narrative and cinematic point of view, the boys wistfully re-create the girls' lives through a swiped diary, bits of bric-a-brac memorabilia and remembrances of voyeurism, idealism and fleeting carnality. Never really understanding these girls as living, breathing flesh, their communication acts much like modern ways of "connecting" -- through the computer, through online social networking, through pictures, through texts. Just as now, interacting with the real person as opposed to an idealized representation is usually much messier, much more real and much scarier.

Which connects to the death of 13-year-old sister Cecilia (Hanna Hall). The suicide places sisters Lux (Kirsten Dunst), Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Mary (A.J. Cook) and Therese (Leslie Hayman) into a mourning period marked not by obvious wailing drama, but by a peculiar inwardness that only sisters can understand. When one feels alienated by their parents, the bonding of siblings is frequently strong -- so intense that secret languages and, in the case with my sisters, coded words and private hand signals, are created to invent one's own world. These are the people who understand you. But blood bonds can be frightfully concentrated, and in the worst cases, veer into madness. 

So when a psychiatrist tells the grieving parents (Kathleen Turner and James Woods) that the girls need more social contact, they allow the sexually curious Lux (with sisters and their assigned dates in tow) to attend a homecoming dance with heartthrob Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett). After an innocent, oddly heartbreaking transgression occurs, the strict Roman Catholic family (led mostly by Mom) cloisters the girls in the house, taking them out of school and depriving them of all social contact. Of course, this can't come without consequences. The girls will grow ever closer, ever secretive, and ever destructive.

But Coppola doesn't place those consequences within a moral straitjacket -- no one is demonized, and no one is entirely understood. Many criticized the picture for its lack of fully developed characters, but that is exactly the point. Who are these girls? These girls are memories, these girls are tragic beauties put on pedestals. These girls are characters one writes books about, but one never truly knows. And the not knowing is part of the tragedy (does anyone really want to know them? Or do they want to keep them? Or stare at them? Or, after a night of passion, leave them waking up alone and cold in a football field?). And then these are girls, who committed, really, in the plain light of day, an ugly act that turned their young, lilting beauty and promise of a full life into rotting corpses. Death. The urn your heartbroken, morbidly curious stepsister opens after a game of Scrabble.

The Virgin Suicides is shot with a gauzy, haloed beauty that is obsessive but never perverse (and the haunting music by Air is especially poignant and otherworldly). The point is to capture an adolescence lost, both to the sisters and to the boys themselves. Coppola's intelligence, sensitivity and ethereal style avoids obvious irony and easy interpretation, which can be maddening -- but then suicide is maddening, both for those who achieve the act and those who suffer the aftermath. Coppola's vision of this uptight suburbia is made both erotic and exotic by these fairy-tale Rapunzels who live there -- troubled, creative and intriguing girls trapped in the unfathomable and misty glaze of worship and memories.

The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing: Insomnia

I've been suffering from terrible insomnia. In dishonor of my frequent affliction, I've turned off the Roy Acuff (note to self: Roy Acuff is haunting brilliance but he does not make me go to sleep...my mind wanders to birds and night trains and murder). So in went Erik Skjoldbjaerg's "Insomnia," the original and better picture (Christopher Nolan re-made it with Al Pacino and Robin Williams). Not only does the movie put me in touch with my depressive Swedish roots, but it reminds me why I revere Stellan Skarsgård. I'm re-posting my original take...fresh words coming soon.

Film noir is characterized by certain essential ingredients: the duality of a man's tormented soul; expressionistic black-and-white lighting; dusty rays of sunlight barely peeking through thick venetian blinds in a private detective's office; Barbara Stanwyck; Humphrey Bogart; Raymond Chandler. For hardcore purists, noirish films such as John M. Stahl's Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, Raoul Walsh's western Pursued and Alexander MacKendrick's gloriously talky, Clifford Odets-scripted Sweet Smell of Success do not fit into the formula. The settings aren't right; the stylistics are off. But that's just nit-picking academic/nerd soulessness.

And so, despite the stylistic and thematic tenets that unify the genre, it need not conform to its literal meaning of "black film." As in the aforementioned films, black can be Gene Tierney's heart, black can be a Spanish-American-War veteran, black can be a wicked gossip columnist. Nowhere is this so provocatively demonstrated than in Swedish director Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia, a picture that proves that light can obscure as much as it reveals.

After a jarring opening sequence -- the artistically lyrical murder of a young woman -- Insomnia begins with deceptive simplicity. Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård), a Swedish detective, and his partner, Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal), are brought to Norway to investigate the slaying. Stumping local authorities, the proficient killer has left little clues -- he even shampooed the girl's hair after her death (kinky clean). Hence the need for Jonas, who, though caught in "intimate conversation" with a witness in his last case, is considered the best homicide detective in the field.

Using the victim's backpack as a lure, Jonas entices the murderer to the shed where he committed the crime. An easy trap, but not too easy. The criminal sees his pursuers and flees. During a confusing chase through a thick Norwegian fog, Jonas shoots a figure he presumes to be the wanted man. Unfortunately, it's his partner, who dies before his very eyes. To avoid getting busted for his blunder, Jonas covers up the crime, then must make a disturbing pact with the person who knows the truth: the killer himself.

What happens next pushes the film into the territory of a noir thriller wrapped inside a morality tale wrapped inside a character study of a man plagued by neurotic and sociopathic decay. Rather than simply rely on the standard methods of a crime story (which Nolan did to a certain degree with his re-make), Insomnia indulges the viewer with scenes inside Jonas's disturbed, haunted head. An insomniac, Jonas constantly battles with the useless shades covering the window of his hotel room. He cannot stand the light. Stuck in the throes of a blinding Arctic summer, Jonas becomes more and more agitated and, without his partner around to keep him in check, outright despicable. He tampers with and plants evidence and displays a selfish and altogether conflicted personality.

Yet because of his ambiguity, I cannot hate him. He's far too human. Despite his icy exterior, he's filled with a feverish lust (insomnia can bring on odd rushes of sexual longing at the strangest moments). Such lust emerges in two situations where he mistakes innocent flirtation for something much more significant than it really is. On the way to a crime scene, a teenage witness allows him to stick his hand between her legs, but the moment, not surprisingly hot and forbidden and exciting for a moment, rapidly sours. Of course. And then, while willingly receiving a pass from a pretty hotel receptionist, Jonas takes things too far by roughly biting at her breasts and her body -- she runs away terrified. He blows that one too. Yearning for more, only to be repelled, he is left a broken-down, dirty old man. A creep. And yet, we feel sorry for him. I certainly do.

Much of this lies in Skarsgård's complexity. Repressed and unctuous yet oddly handsome and sickly swaggering, he gives a performance so compelling that one could easily picture him as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Skjoldbjaerg did right in casting Skarsgård, for the director's vision of a man being suffocated by light would not have worked with a predictably "disturbing" actor. Skjoldbjaerg also did right by not making his neo-noir a typically pedestrian display of expressionistic shadowing to reveal the dualities of a man's soul (how many times have we heard that?). He instead creates a world of pale yellows that envelop his character like a humiliating urine-stained sheet a terrible mother would shame her son with. A sickly, stifling and embarrassing world that darkness can't obscure.