Get Free Ebook The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March
Discovering the right The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March publication as the ideal requirement is kind of good lucks to have. To start your day or to finish your day at night, this The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March will certainly appertain sufficient. You could simply search for the tile below as well as you will certainly obtain the book The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March referred. It will not bother you to cut your valuable time to go with purchasing publication in store. This way, you will certainly likewise invest cash to pay for transportation as well as various other time spent.
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March
Get Free Ebook The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March
Picture that you get such specific spectacular experience and knowledge by simply reviewing a book The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March. How can? It seems to be better when a publication can be the finest point to find. Books now will certainly show up in printed and soft documents collection. One of them is this book The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March It is so usual with the printed books. However, many individuals often have no space to bring guide for them; this is why they can not review guide wherever they desire.
Why must be this publication The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March to read? You will certainly never ever get the understanding and experience without managing yourself there or trying on your own to do it. Hence, reading this e-book The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March is required. You could be great and correct enough to obtain just how crucial is reading this The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March Also you constantly read by obligation, you can assist on your own to have reading e-book routine. It will be so useful as well as fun then.
But, just how is the method to obtain this publication The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March Still confused? It does not matter. You can enjoy reviewing this book The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March by on-line or soft file. Merely download guide The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March in the link offered to visit. You will obtain this The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March by online. After downloading, you could save the soft documents in your computer or gizmo. So, it will reduce you to review this book The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March in specific time or place. It may be unsure to appreciate reviewing this publication The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March, considering that you have great deals of task. However, with this soft documents, you could enjoy reviewing in the leisure even in the spaces of your works in office.
Again, reviewing behavior will constantly provide helpful advantages for you. You might not should spend sometimes to read guide The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March Simply reserved several times in our extra or spare times while having dish or in your workplace to review. This The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March will show you brand-new thing that you can do now. It will certainly help you to enhance the top quality of your life. Event it is simply a fun publication The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, By William March, you can be happier and also much more fun to delight in reading.
The bestselling novel that inspired Mervyn LeRoy’s classic horror film about the little girl who can get away with anything—even murder.
There’s something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she’s the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
Originally published in 1954, William March’s final novel was an instant bestseller and National Book Award finalist before it was adapted for the stage and made into a 1956 film. The Bad Seed is an indelible portrait of an evil that wears an innocent face, one which still resonates in popular culture today.
With a new foreword by Anna Holmes.
Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #69595 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-02-03
- Released on: 2015-02-03
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“William March knows where human fears and secrets are buried. . . . Nowhere is this gift better displayed than in The Bad Seed.” —The New York Times
“An impeccable tale of pure evil.” —The Atlantic
About the Author
William March (1893-1954) was born in Mobile, Alabama, attended Valparaiso University in Indiana, and studied law at the University of Alabama. He served in the Marine Corps during World War I and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm. After the war, he took a job with the Waterman Steamship Corporation, and worked there for eighteen years before giving up his position to devote himself to writing. March published three volumes of stories and six novels, including The Bad Seed, his final book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword
by Anna Holmes
I suppose if a novelist is going to imagine and give life to a character meant to be a memorable but also totally unexpected serial killer, it makes sense that he make her not only a young child but also a girl. Though readers may be more familiar with Macaulay Culkin’s apple-cheeked child psycho in 1993’s The Good Son, the grade-school sociopath to which all contemporary child killers can, and should, be compared is Rhoda Penmark, the focus of William March’s 1954 bestselling novel, The Bad Seed. Eight years old, with straight brown hair and a desire for tidiness that seems to border on the obsessive, Rhoda boasts an old-fashioned name and a stereotypically feminine, highly controlled style of dress and disposition that seem to be at extreme odds with her willingness to, for example, toss terrier puppies to their deaths from bedroom windows. And she’s driving her mother, the overly cautious housewife Christine Penmark, literally crazy.
Of course, it’s not just animals who invoke the wrath of Rhoda P., Kid Creep: Children and adults alike are subject to her special form of homicidal dispensation, giving lie to the nineteenth century nursery rhyme that little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” Indeed, it’s likely that part of what made The Bad Seed so terrifying and unsettling to midcentury American readers is author William March’s juxtaposition of the younger Penmark’s external performance of obedient, coquettish femininity—“Oh, my old-fashioned little darling!” exclaims one of Rhoda’s admirers, her neighbor Monica Breedlove, early on in the text—with what are commonly thought to be more masculine traits: the covetousness, ruthlessness, and lack of control that inspire most of her calculated crimes of convenience. This dissonance between how Rhoda appears on the outside and who she is on the inside is further underscored by her aforementioned appearance, all pressed dotted-Swiss dresses and trimmed bangs and perfectly twisted pigtails.
About those pigtails. In the film version of the book, released in 1956, Mr. March’s Rhoda, she of the “straight, finespun, and…dark, dull brown” hair, is reimagined as a towheaded terror in the form of actress Patty McCormack, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance. Director Mervyn LeRoy’s choice to take a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and make the celluloid Rhoda a blonde served to accentuate not just the character’s iciness but to communicate a certain innocence and fragility, making her appear more like a doll than a flesh-and-blood human being. Indeed, the film version feels prescient in the ways that it seems to presage and anticipate any number of scary killer dolls from cinematic history, including the braided moppets from the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Living Doll” and 2013’s paranormal thriller The Conjuring. Descriptions of Rhoda’s appearance and countenance in the book reinforce this: She walks stiffly and somewhat carefully; her hair is arranged in the sort of perfectly ordered, taut plaits that only a factory assembly line could produce; and she seems to be capable of two, maybe three expressions—blank solemnity, irresistible cuteness, and flashing anger.
Though not exactly a character study, it’s possible that William March’s criminalizing of a young female was supposed to be both provocative and maybe even political, that in making an adorable little girl an ice-cold killer somehow our ideas of femininity and decorum and preciousness were going to be upended, and violently. (It was the mid-1950s, after all, a time in which expectations for womanhood and the cultivation of comfortable, safe domestic arrangements were at an all-time high, expectations that came under fire in Betty Friedan’s seminal The Feminine Mystique, published less than a decade later.) It’s unlikely, however, that the film would have the same deleterious effect on the contemporary reading or theater-going public, as familiar with and desensitized as it is to the concept of the multiple murderess. (This might explain why, when Hostel director Eli Roth considered doing a remake of The Bad Seed, he made it clear that he wanted lots of blood and gore—there isn’t any in either the film or the book—explaining to interviewers that he thought Rhoda deserved the sort of horror icon status enjoyed by the character Chucky from Child’s Play, an actual killer doll. “We are going to bastardize and exploit it, ramping up the body counts and killings,” he toldVariety in 2004.)
But reading The Bad Seed, one eventually gets the sense that Mr. March is not so much celebrating expressions of female power and agency as fearing them; his contempt for the other female characters he’s created is palpable. (The men in the book are, for the most part, emasculated, impotent, or completely invisible.) There is Hortense Daigle, the drunk, hysterical, and smothering mother of one of Rhoda’s young victims, Claude Daigle; Mrs. Breedlove, a busybody neighbor who prides herself on her understanding of human behavior yet remains blind to the psychological monstrosity standing in front of her; and, of course, the anxious, selfless Christine Penmark, the person considered responsible for her daughter’s misdeeds—Christine’s own mother was a psycho killer, March explains, meaning that the evil is matrilineal—and seemingly unable to stop them.
This is where Mr. March’s book is most problematic. The esteemed feminist and literary critic Elaine Showalter, in an introduction to a 1997 HarperCollins edition of the book, explains that “as in much of March’s writing, women in The Bad Seed are more sinister than men,” and though she swats him for the book’s implicit message that at the root of much conflict and societal upheaval are “castrating wives and mothers,” Showalter does not go far enough in indicting him for these and other hoary tropes he traffics in, including but not limited to the clueless gossip; the prim, status-obsessed educator; and of course, Rhoda herself, a femme fatale who becomes the object of affection even to those who ought to fear her most. “In a sense, he was in love with the little girl,” writes Mr. March about Leroy Jessup, an apartment-building janitor whom Rhoda will eventually burn to death in a highly disturbing scene during the book’s denouement. “His persecution of her, his nagging concern with everything she did, was part of a perverse and frightened courtship.” As Showalter herself puts it, one could say the same about the relationship between the author of The Bad Seed himself and the grotesque version of femininity he imagined and then committed to paper.
It probably says something about the evolution in attitudes about gender and girlhood—not to mention mental illness and sociopathy—that William March’s book would be unlikely to have the same chilling or shocking effect were it published for the first time today. For one thing, our ideas about good and evil have been complicated and expanded upon thanks to advances in the fields of psychology and criminology, not to mention child development. For another, broadened expectations for women and girls mean that, for better or worse, we are seen as more fully realized human beings, not cartoonish ciphers that either adhere to or reject conventional ideas about what females are capable of. If there’s anything in The Bad Seed that resonates strongly today, it’s the ways in which acts of violence are celebrated as legitimate responses to thwarted entitlement. But that’s part of the problem with America, not with its boys (or girls)
One
Later that summer, when Mrs. Penmark looked back and remembered, when she was caught up in despair so deep that she knew there was no way out, no solution whatever for the circumstances that encompassed her, it seemed to her that June seventh, the day of the Fern Grammar School picnic, was the day of her last happiness, for never since then had she known contentment or felt peace.
The picnic was an annual, traditional affair held on the beach and among the oaks of Benedict, the old Fern summer place at Pelican Bay. It was here that the impeccable Fern sisters had been born and had lived through their languid, eventless summers. They had refused to sell the old place, and had kept it up faithfully as a gesture of love even when necessity made them turn their town house into a school for the children of their friends. The picnic was always held on the first Saturday of June since the eldest of the three sisters, Miss Octavia, was convinced, despite the occasions on which it had rained that particular day, and the picnic had to be held inside after all, that the first Saturday of June was an invariably fine one.
“When I was a little girl, as young as many of you are today,” she would say each season to her pupils, “we always planned a picnic at Benedict for the first Saturday of June. All our relatives and friends came—some of whom we’d not seen for months. It was sort of a reunion, really, with laughter and surprises and gentle, excited voices everywhere. Everyone had a happy, beautiful day. There was no dissension on those days; a quarrel was unknown in the society of the well-bred, a cross word never exchanged between ladies and gentlemen. My sisters and I remember those days with love and great longing.”
At this point Miss Burgess Fern, the middle sister, the practical one who handled the business affairs of the school, said, “It was so much easier in those days, with a houseful of servants and everybody helpful and anxious to please. Mother and some of the servants would drive down to Benedict a few days in advance of the picnic, sometimes as early as the first of June, when the season was officially open, although the established residents of the coast didn’t consider the season really in swing until the day of our picnic.”
“Benedict is such a beautiful spot,” said Miss Claudia Fern. “Little Lost River bounds our property on the Gulf side, and flows into the bay there.” Miss Claudia taught art in the school, and automatically she added, “The landscape at that point reminds one so much of those charming river scenes by Bombois.” Then, feeling that some of her pupils might not know who Bombois was, she went on. “For the sake of some of the younger groups, Bombois is a modern French primitive. Oh, he is so cunning in his artlessness! So right in his composition, and in the handling of green! You’ll learn much about Bombois later on.”
It was from the Fern town house, the school itself, that the picnickers were to begin their long day of pleasure; and the parents of each pupil had been asked to have their particular child on the school lawn not later than eight o’clock, when the chartered busses were scheduled to leave. Thus it was that Mrs. Christine Penmark, who disliked being late or keeping others waiting, set her clock for six, which, she felt, would allow time for her ordinary tasks of the morning and for the remembrance of those last-minute, hurried things which are so easily overlooked.
She had impressed the hour on her mind, saying to herself as she fell asleep, “You will awake precisely at six o’clock, even if something happens to the alarm”; but the alarm went off promptly, and, yawning a little, she sat up in bd. It was, she saw instantly, to be a beautiful day—the day Miss Octavia had promised. She pushed back her blond, almost flaxen, hair and went at once to the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror for a long moment, her toothbrush held languidly in her hand, as though she were not quite decided what to do with it. Her eyes were gray, wide-set, and serene; her skin tanned and firm. She drew back her lips in that first tentative, trial smile of the day; and standing thus in front of her mirror, she listened absently to the sounds outside her window: an automobile starting in the distance, the twittering of sparrows in the live oaks that lined the quiet street, the sound of a child’s voice raised suddenly and then hushed. Then, coming awake quickly, in possession once more of her usual energy, she bathed and dressed and went to her kitchen to begin breakfast.
Later she went to her daughter’s room to waken her. The room was empty, and it was so tidy that it gave the impression not having been used for a long time. The bed was nearly remade, the dressing-table immaculate, with each object in its accustomed place, turned at its usual angle. On a table near the window was one of the jigsaw puzzles that her daughter delighted in, a puzzle only half completed. Mrs. Penmark smiled to herself and went into the child’s bathroom. The bathroom was as orderly as the bedroom had been, with the bath towel spread out precisely to dry; and Christine, seeing these things laughed softly, thinking: I never deserved such a capable child. When I was eight years old, I doubt if I could do anything. She went into the wide, elaborate hall with its elegant, old-fashioned parquetry floors of contrasting woods, and called gaily, “Rhoda! Rhoda! . . . Where are you, darling? Are you up and dressed so soon?”
The child answered in her slow, cautions voice, as though the speaking of words were a perilous thing to be debated. “Here I am,” she said. “Here, in the living-room.”
When speaking of her daughter, the adjectives that others most often used were “quaint,” or “modest,” or “old-fashioned”; and Mrs. Penmark, standing in the doorway, smiled in agreement and wondered from what source the child had inherited her repose, her neatness, her cool self-sufficiency. She said, coming into the room, “Were you really able to comb and plait your hair without my helping you?”
The child half turned, so that her mother could inspect her hair, which was straight, finespun, and of a dark, dull brown: her hair was plaited precisely in two narrow braids which were looped back into two thin hangman-nooses, and were secured, in turn, with two small bows of ribbon. Mrs. Penmark examined the bows, but seeing they were compact and firmly tied, she brushed her lips over the child’s brown bangs, and said, “Breakfast will be ready in a moment. I think you’d better eat a good breakfast today as there’s nothing more uncertain about a picnic than the arrival of lunch.”
Rhoda sat down at the table, her face fixed in an expression of solemn innocence; then she smiled at some secret thought of her own, and at once there was a shallow dimple in her left cheek. She lowered her chin and raised it thoughtfully; she smiled again, but very softly, an odd, hesitant smile that parted her lips this time and showed the small, natural gap between her front teeth.
Most helpful customer reviews
95 of 99 people found the following review helpful.
A Gem of a Horror Story
By JLind555
It's a shame this book has become all but unknown behind the enormously successful movie with its God-awful copout ending (although Patty McCormick's deliciously chilling perfomance of its anti-heroine is a gem in itself), because the book is infinitely better than the movie (I can't speak for the Broadway production because I never saw it). In fact, most people who saw or heard of 'The Bad Seed' as a play or a movie never knew it was derived from William March's terrific book.
March tells the story of Rhoda Penmark, eight years old, a devil lurking inside an angel's facade. To her adult neighbors, she's every parent's dream: obedient, unassuming, compliant, always neat and well-groomed, quiet, polite to her elders. She does her homework without being prodded and she gets all the answers correct on her Sunday school quiz. Those who know her more intimately suspect there's something ugly underneath all the surface charm; her peers can't stand her, her teachers see a disturbing lack of feeling or sensitivity in her, and her parents, who dote on her, wonder if she is capable of love, affection, remorse, or any of the characteristics that make us human. For Rhoda goes after what she wants with a single-minded purposefulness and anybody who gets in her way better watch out.
Rhoda's father is absent throughout all but the last few pages of the book (he's away on a business trip that is important to his career advancement), so Christine, her mother, is left to deal with Rhoda on her own. Christine is a fascinating character, one of the most tragic in contemporary fiction, a decent, compliant, earnest woman, whose identity is totally bound up in being a good wife and a devoted mother; what she learns about her own history shatters her world, especially when she realizes that her daughter is the 'bad seed' she unwittingly transmitted from her own diabolical mother. And as Christine cannot accept that she is blameless in this transmission, that she did not cause her daughter's criminal behavior any more than she caused her own mother's, so she feels she must not drag anyone else, even her husband, into her private hell; she created it, so she must deal with it alone, and it undoes her.
How else could Christine have acted, is left to the reader to speculate. I'm not going to tell how the book ended, except to say that it's a much more satisfying (because more realistic) ending than in the movie. But it's a spooky little gem of a horror story that deserves a much wider readership. It's well written, well plotted, and a great read. I loved it!
Judy Lind
49 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Social Soirees and Sociopathic children
By Schtinky
Although first written in 1954, March's The Bad Seed has lost none of its vibrancy through the passage of time, and holds itself in the lead of creeping, stealthy horror that will curl your toes and straighten your hair.
Christine Penmark is a beautiful young wife, recently moved with her husband Kenneth and daughter Rhoda to a languid town, finding appropriate lodging, and enrolling their precocious little girl into the Fern Grammar School. With her husband away all summer on business, Christine's social life centers around Rhoda, her effervescent neighbor Mrs. Monica Breedlove, Monica's brother Emory, and the shifty groundskeeper Leroy Jessup.
Christine is a gentle and well-bred lady, and often looks upon her daughter's fastidious dress and immaculate room and wonders how she deserved such a beautiful, normal child. On the morning of the Fern Grammar School annual picnic, Rhoda is already up and dressed, her hair neatly braided, and eager to go. Christine and Mrs. Breedlove drop Rhoda off with the three aging Fern sisters, Miss Octavia, Miss Burgess, and Miss Claudia, who take the children to their old home at Pelican Bay.
When a little boy mysteriously drowns at the picnic, the same little boy who won the penmanship medal that Rhoda had wanted so badly, Christine's world begins to fall apart with doubts. Memories flood back to her of Rhoda's strange friendship with an old woman back in Baltimore who had promised Rhoda her opal necklace when she died, the same necklace that hangs in Rhoda's room. Memories of the school Rhoda was expelled from for telling lies and being "a cold, self-sufficient child who plays by her own rules".
Christine turns to Emory's friend Reginald Tasker, who is writing a novel about females who have committed atrocious murders, and in his research she finds something terribly familiar. In the meantime, the Fern Sisters have informed Christine that Rhoda will not be welcomed back next year to the Fern Grammar School, stating that "they can do nothing for her in their environment."
Christine begins to wonder, when she looks upon her daughter, whether she is gazing at the angel or the beast. As the summer unfolds, Christine digs deeper into Reginald's research, fearful of what she will find and terrified not to learn more of her and Rhoda's past, until Rhoda takes a bold step and openly shows her mother where the real truth lies.
The well-bred gentility of the characters, their languid and imperturbable lifestyles, is what gives The Bad Seed such creepiness. Looking for a black spot in a picture filled with pretty flowers is harder than looking for one in a dreary landscape, but when you find it, it seems to grow until it mars the entire painting.
That is the feeling I got reading The Bad Seed, the creeping sensation of low terror that shudders like a soft vibration down your spine, leaving you uneasy and often short of breath. The Bad Seed is a must-read for any horror fan, simply because the soft touch of death will kill as certainly as the bludgeon. Enjoy!
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Chilling tale of an eight-year-old murderer.
By E. Bukowsky
The term "bad seed" has become a much used phrase to describe a person who is thoroughly evil from birth. William March wrote "The Bad Seed" in the 1950's and it was later adapted for the stage and screen. After reading this compelling story, I can well understand its popularity.
Rhoda Penmark is an eight-year-old girl who is so self-contained, aloof and uncaring that her peers shun her. Rhoda's gentle parents, Kenneth and Christine, know that Rhoda is not exactly like other little girls. When she plays, she never gets dirty. She has trouble expressing genuine affection. On two occasions, a mysterious death has occurred (one involving an elderly lady and the other a pet dog), and Rhoda was the only witness. It turns out that Rhoda had a motive for wanting both the old lady and the dog dead. Is it possible that this innocent looking girl could be a murderess?
Things come to a head when the Penmark family moves to Alabama to start fresh. Kenneth is away on business while Christine tries to cope alone. Rhoda is a student at the Fern grammar school. She covets a gold medal that is given for penmanship at school, but the prize goes to a mamma's boy named Claude Daigle. Rhoda is incredulous and she refuses to accept her defeat. She hounds the boy to give her the medal that she feels is rightfully hers, until at an outing one day, Claude mysteriously drowns. You guessed it. Rhoda is the last person to have seen the boy alive.
The book focuses not so much on Rhoda as it does on her mother, Christine. March lets us observe through Christine's eyes her growing horror, as she realizes that her daughter may very well be a monster. When Christine finds the penmanship medal hidden among Rhoda's things, she is sure that Rhoda must have killed Claude Daigle to get the medal for herself.
March masterfully builds Christine's psychological horror as the book progresses. She learns that there is a secret in her own past that may explain her daughter's warped personality and she cannot bear the burden of guilt which this secret imposes on her.
In the skilled way of good suspense writers, March does not just pile on the horror. "The Bad Seed" has a great deal of humor, much of it centered on the character of Monica Breedlove. She is an insufferable and interfering busybody who talks incessantly and who thinks that she is an expert on psychological analysis. Another memorable character is Leroy, a caretaker who himself is evil and who is obsessed with Rhoda. Leroy recognizes too late that he is no match for the little girl, and that teasing Rhoda can be dangerous to his health.
A few passages, in which some characters discuss the age of violence and anxiety in which we live, are a bit heavy-handed. March seems to be conveying a message about the potential for evil that lurks within all of us. These remarks are superfluous, since Rhoda's story is so filled with horror, dark irony, and psychological suspense that it speaks for itself.
See all 103 customer reviews...
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March PDF
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March EPub
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Doc
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March iBooks
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March rtf
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Mobipocket
The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Kindle
~ Get Free Ebook The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Doc
~ Get Free Ebook The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Doc
~ Get Free Ebook The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Doc
~ Get Free Ebook The Bad Seed: A Vintage Movie Classic, by William March Doc
