How the kid from The Bad Seed felt about playing a girl who kills people
Rhoda Penmark was so unsettling, but what was it like for the actress?
Any movie is a miracle. There are at least a million things that could go wrong on the way to the cinema, and any single one of them would keep a film from reaching its audience. That's why there are so many movies that languish in development hell for years, stuck in limbo until the problems can be resolved. Or, even worse, sometimes some movies enter production, and hundreds of jobs are put on the line when a studio second-guesses itself and cancels the whole thing outright.
Nowadays, at least, movies aren't so frequently disrupted by chairpeople on some censorship board. For decades, that was a genuine concern for anyone making American movies. The Hays Code was a rulebook by which any new movie was measured, with all sorts of guidelines for what filmmakers couldn't do. Specifically, there were tons of stringent moral regulations. The good guy had to win, the bad guy had to get his comeuppance.
So, when director Mervyn LeRoy sought to bring Broadway's The Bad Seed to the big screen, he was suddenly under MPAA president Eric Johnston's microscope. Long before the rating system, movies weren't graded by whether they'd be appropriate with parental guidance or whether they were for restricted adult viewing. Instead, they either were or were not approved for release. And LeRoy was struggling to get Johnston's office to allow The Bad Seed to keep its child murderer plot.
To prove that the movie wouldn't upset its viewing public, LeRoy interviewed its youngest star. Surely if the youngest actress on set could explain away the movie's shocking subject matter, then it should follow that adult viewers wouldn't be scandalized. So, hoping to explain that the movie was meant to entertain, LeRoy asked her how she felt about playing a girl who kills people. In his 1974 autobiography, LeRoy recalled her response.
"Oh, Mr. Leroy," said Little Patty McCormack. "I'm having so much fun."
While the ratings board deliberated whether The Bad Seed was appropriate for public consumption, the movie's cast and crew knew exactly what the movie actually was.
"It was fun to her, and I felt it would be fun— scary fun, but fun— to the public," said LeRoy."
The Johnston Office refused to relent, and instead, LeRoy was forced to change the movie's ending. The board granted The Bad Seed its seal of approval after the revised script was submitted.
