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Okay, SPOILER ALERT. (Or maybe I should say, slightly more specific spoiler alert.) I don't know about the original novel, but in the climax of the play, Nancy Kelly's mom does not survive, but little Rhoda does. I have a hunch that Evelyn Varden's line, attempting to console the husband, "But you still have Rhoda!" brought the curtain down. (Next time you see the movie, you can freeze the frame after she says the line.)
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Alex North is a composer whom I need to try to force myself to like more.
I don't know, I don't think you have to force yourself. I think this scores just doesn't connect with as many people as his popular works. About fifteen minutes into the Youtube video of the score, I gave up and cut it off.
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Too bad. It always connected with me, from first to last, and I'm very happy to be looking forward to La La's CD. (Judging by Onya's post, he doesn't even care for North's more "popular" scores.)
For what it's worth, (which I think is considerable), music from THE BAD SEED was included in that classy re-recorded compilation conducted by Eric Stern and released on Nonesuch.
http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/alex-north
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"To its credit, the film does preserve the cast's Broadway curtain call, a classic bit of showmanship."
'According to a 20 May 1956 Los Angeles Times article, the epilogue was added to “remove some of the bad taste… left by this horrific shocker.” '
That's as may be, but the Broadway production originated the curtain call spanking, (perhaps for similar reasoning). From Frank Miller's TCM program notes:
Warner Bros. gave producer-director Mervyn LeRoy the chance to bring The Bad Seed to the screen. Initially, they objected to his plan to cast the play's leading players -- including Kelly, McCormack, Eileen Heckart and Henry Jones -- in place of established box-office names like Bette Davis, who had expressed an interest in the film's leading role. He also decided to stick closely to Anderson's original screenplay, working with cinematographer Harold Rosson to open the film up primarily by moving the camera around. The choice paid off by visually isolating and trapping Rhoda's mother as she discovered her little girl was a cold-hearted killer. LeRoy also decided to use a theatrical curtain call at the film's end. He recorded a voiceover introducing the film's cast and, as had been the case when the play was performed, followed the bows by having Kelly take McCormack over her knee for a good spanking. After the horror of the film's subject matter, this served to let '50s audiences off-the-hook, while adding to the film's word-of-mouth appeal.
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"The absurd Warner Bros. climax was sheer folly, made even more so by the studio's publicity, implicitly touting the great new shocker ending as an improvement on the play, and claiming that the climax was kept secret from the actors."
"Warner Bros. production notes for the film reported that three endings were shot. But according to a 6 November 1955 Los Angeles Times article, the end of the film was kept secret and the last five pages of the script were not distributed until ready to shoot."
"Those two sources are contradictory. Why keep the ending secret from the actors if you are going to shoot three different ones? No one will actually know the ending until the film is shown. And if it's true that three endings were shot, what happened to the footage for other two?"
I don't think this is necessarily a "contradictory" Rashomon situation. Keeping the pages missing from the actors' s scripts may have been, at least in part, for purposes of ballyhoo. Especially since, as stated above, the secret was only a secret before the scenes were shot, after which the cat was out of the bag as far as the players were concerned. And the fact that the other two versions remain unseen by the public is not evidence that they never were shot.
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/67988/The-Bad-Seed/notes.html
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Yes, John, a lot of that is covered in the TCM piece to which I just linked. I'm in your debt, (not for the first time in my life), for referencing that book by Mr. Paul, which I had never known about and which I now very much look forward to reading.
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Two pieces are lifted from other North scores.
Another (can't remember which one) was cut from Ill Cry Tomorrow
I think the beginning of the two cues "Confession" and "The Medal" on the BAD SEED album was cut from parts of track 12 ("String Chord/Real Hell" on the FSM CD) of I´LL CRY TOMORROW.
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