The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

Cast: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones, Paul Fix, Joan Croydon, Gage Clarke, Jesse White, Frank Cady. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and a novel by William March. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Alex North. 

The Bad Seed stands out today as one of the more muddle-headed products of Production Code censorship. In the play and novel on which the movie was based, Christine Penmark, the unwitting carrier of the gene that turns her daughter, Rhoda, into a serial killer, commits suicide after giving the child an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the shocks of the novel and play is that Rhoda survives to kill again. But suicide as a positive plot resolution and crimes that go unpunished were taboo under the Code, so John Lee Mahin's adaptation blunts the ending for both characters. And then, to add farce to bathos, someone thought it a good idea to add a "curtain call" sequence in which the actress playing Christine, Nancy Kelly, gives the actress playing Rhoda, Patty McCormack, a spanking. Since spanking is hardly a punishment for murder, you have to wonder if Kelly is punishing McCormack for upstaging her. (In any case, McCormack seems to be enjoying it a little too much.) Still, if you take the movie on its own terms, it has its creepy moments, most of them involving McCormack, whom we spot as a bad kid from the moment she shows up with her braids so tight it looks like they hurt and wearing a starchy, spotless outfit that no decent child would have tolerated for a moment. There's some entertaining overplaying by Evelyn Varden as the psychologizing landlady and Henry Jones as the nosy hired man. The production is stagy and the performances often overblown, with the exception of Kelly, who strives to make her character -- and the ridiculous premise that evil is inherited -- credible. It's a role that could easily have tipped over into camp -- as the rest of the film often does -- but Kelly balances right on the edge. 

The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)

John Cusack and Anjelica Huston in The Grifters

Lilly Dillon: Anjelica Huston
Roy Dillon: John Cusack
Myra Langtry: Annette Bening
Bobo Justus: Pat Hingle
Mr. Simms: Henry Jones
Cole: J.T. Walsh
Joe: Gailard Sartain
Gloucester Hebbing: Charles Napier
Jeweler: Stephen Tobolowsky

Director: Stephen Frears
Screenplay: Donald E. Westlake
Based on a novel by Jim Thompson
Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Mick Audsley
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Stephen Frears's ice-cold neo-noir The Grifters works as well as it does because of the trio of top-notch leads, a tough-minded screenplay based on a tough-minded novel, unsentimental direction, and a magnificent score by Elmer Bernstein. In short, it's an easy film to admire, but a harder film to like. If it has a message to convey it's that crime may pay, but at the expense of all humanity, including love and family. The most brutal moment comes not with bloodshed, but with Lilly Dillon's attempt to seduce her own son, a moment that has been foreshadowed earlier when Myra Langtry voices her suspicion that Roy Dillon has been sleeping with his mother. Anything goes, it seems, when you're on the grift. This was the film that made Annette Bening a star -- after a well-reviewed but little-seen performance in Frears's Valmont a year earlier -- and earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations. Adopting a Marilyn Monroe-ish little girl voice as Myra, she makes the character a near-equal to Anjelica Huston's Lilly, both of them trying to manipulate Roy to succeed in their respective grifts. But as good as Bening, Huston, and John Cusack are in their roles, the film also rides smoothly on its supporting actors, especially Pat Hingle as the brutal Bobo, Henry Jones as a kind of Greek-chorus hotelier, and the always marvelous J.T. Walsh as the cunning but ultimately fragile Cole. (Walsh's early death -- he was only 54 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1998 -- deprived us of one of our most watchable supporting actors. Like Bill Paxton, whose death at 61 earlier this year recalls the premature departure of Walsh, he was one of those actors who made any film he appeared in just a little bit better.) 

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Yes, Vertigo is a great movie. No, it's not the greatest movie ever made, and to call it that does the film a disservice, inviting skeptics to investigate and overemphasize its flaws. The central flaw is narrative; Vertigo is at heart a preposterous melodrama, and the film raises questions that probably shouldn't be asked: How, for instance, did Scottie (James Stewart) get down from that gutter he was hanging onto after the cop fell to his death? How did Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) arrange to be at the top of that tower with his dead wife at the exact time when Madeleine (Kim Novak) and Scottie were climbing it? Why is the coroner (Henry Jones) so needlessly hostile to Scottie at the inquest? And so on, until the screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor reveals itself to be a thing of shreds and patches. If it is a great film, it's because it had a great director, and that almost no one will gainsay. Alfred Hitchcock drew a magnificent performance from Novak, an actress everyone else underestimated. (And one that he, initíally, didn't want: He was grooming Vera Miles for the role until she became pregnant.) He helped Stewart to one of the highlight performances of his career. He inspired Bernard Herrmann to compose one of the most powerful and evocative film scores ever written -- one whose expression of erotic longing is surpassed perhaps only by passages in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. He worked with cinematographer Robert Burks to transform San Francisco and environs into one of the great movie sets. And he turned what could have been a routine thriller (which is what many critics thought it was at the time of its release) into one of the most analyzed and commented-upon films ever made. It will never be my favorite Hitchcock film: I place it below Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) in my personal ranking of his greatest films, and I enjoy rewatching The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Strangers on a Train (1951) more than I do Vertigo. Yet I still yield to its portrayal of passionate obsession and its masterly blend of all the elements of cinema technology into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which the whole transcends the sometimes indifferent parts.