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. 

Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953)

Allyn Ann McLerie and Doris Day in Calamity Jane

Cast: Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn Ann McLerie, Philip Carey, Dick Wesson, Paul Harvey, Chubby Johnson, Gale Robbins. Screenplay: James O'Hanlon. Cinematography: Wilfrid M. Cline. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Irene Morra. Songs: Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster.

Doris Day sets some people's teeth on edge, and I have to admit that when she's butching it up in Calamity Jane, she sometimes gets on my nerves a bit. But mostly I'm a fan: She had real cinematic presence, good comedy timing, and one of the sweetest singing voices of any star, with an ability to put a song over. I wish that she had been cast as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950) instead of the bumptious, brassy Betty Hutton, or as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958) instead of the blandly perky Mitzi Gaynor. But instead we have a string of somewhat undistinguished Warner Bros. musicals, culminating in Calamity Jane, which is an almost unabashed rip-off of Annie Get Your Gun, down to the casting of Howard Keel, who was Frank Butler in the 1950 film. Keel as Wild Bill Hickok and Day as Jane even get an insult-trading duet, "I Can Do Without You," that recalls "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" from the Irving Berlin musical. The Sammy Fain-Paul Francis Webster song score for Calamity Jane is of course nowhere near the equal of Berlin's, with only the Oscar-winning "Secret Love" lingering in anyone's memory, and that perhaps mostly because it has been adopted as a kind of LGBTQ anthem. The film itself has attracted a lot of attention because of its supposed queerness: It has a drag number, performed by Dick Wesson as the hapless Easterner who has been hired as a performer because his name, Francis, made the saloon owner think he was a woman, but most of the comment has been about the relationship between Jane and Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie), who set up house together in a montage to the tune of "A Woman's Touch." Subtext aside, the movie is lively and energetic, and Day works her ass off in the role. Still, if you want a taste of what could have been, seek out the recording of Annie Get Your Gun that Day made with Robert Goulet as Hickok.