Who's Afraid of Liz and Dick?

They’re movie legends who have appeared in dozens of classic films, both separately and together as a screen team. But arguably, the crowning cinematic achievement in the careers of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) directed by newcomer Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Postcards from the Edge).

For two larger than life personalities considered more to be “movie stars” than serious actors, the casting of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as George and Martha in the film adaptation of Edward Albee’s searing play was a creative risk. 

Even Burton, who once was poised to inherit the mantle of “world’s greatest actor” from his rival Sir Laurence Olivier, was taken less seriously as an artist due to his preoccupations with partying, publicity and purchasing large diamonds for his movie star wife. The poor Welsh boy’s desire for commercial success often superseded artistic fulfillment. 

Burton’s life and career had changed irrevocably his first day on the set of a fabled big budget sword-and-sandals epic. Immediately he found himself with more fame and notoriety than he had ever imagined when he left his wife Sybil to pluck costar Elizabeth Taylor away from her new husband Eddie Fisher during the filming of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962. 

For her part, Elizabeth Taylor had already been branded a man-trap and an erotic vagrant by the press. Fisher had recently left Debbie Reynolds and his family and destroyed his own reputation to be with Taylor after the death of his best friend, Taylor’s third husband Mike Todd. Now Burton was added to the cast of the ongoing Elizabeth Taylor saga that would play out in the tabloids for decades to come, until the actress’s death in 2011. This chapter of the Liz soap opera would now be dubbed Le Scandale by the Roman tabloids. 

Richard Burton as George

Still, with his deep and resonant voice and studied artistry, Richard Burton reminded the world he was a classical actor with his acclaimed performance in Shakespeare’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1964, just before his marriage to Taylor in Montreal. Burton became Taylor’s fifth husband, and probably her most compatible playmate, on screen and off.

After Cleopatra, the couple appeared together in entertaining cinematic puff pieces including The VIPs and The Sandpiper, cashing in on their fame and notoriety. Burton had also turned in a powerful performance in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana as a semi-retired Liz joined him on the set in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. 

But then came a project that both actors could really sink their teeth into. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is the story of a late-night cocktail party gone terribly wrong. This is the turning point in the lives of an alcoholic middle-aged couple, the “stupid, liquor-ridden night” when George and Martha go too far in “walking the wits” of their “vile, crushing marriage” for a young couple they’ve invited over for a nightcap. This is the night when the slender thread between truth and illusion snaps.

Elizabeth Taylor as Martha

The 1962 Broadway production of Virginia Woolf had starred Uta Hagen (The Other, Reversal of Fortune), George Grizzard, Arthur Hill and Melinda Dillon (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and took place in a single claustrophobic living room set. 

Screenwriter and producer Ernest Lehman, who had just brilliantly adapted the Broadway hit The Sound of Music to the silver screen, exercising his flair for transforming stage plays with his cinematic storytelling techniques, took another risk by hiring young stage director Mike Nichols to helm the film upon on Elizabeth Taylor's recommendation. On Broadway, Nichols had just directed the Neil Simon hit Barefoot in the Park after starting his showbiz career as half of a stand up comedy team opposite the brilliant writer Elaine May. 

Cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s crisp black and white photography, which includes a few moody outdoor scenes to “open up” the stage play, and Alex North’s mournful, downbeat classical scoring set the scene for an unforgettably savage all-night bender. 

Edward Albee’s masterfully poetic use of language is unparalleled here—this is probably the playwright’s masterpiece, though A Delicate Balance and Zoo Story do come close to Virginia Woolf’s perfection. Punctuated by very dark humor, peppered with literary allusions and set off by four-letter words and singsongy baby talk, Albee’s dialogue is rich, dense and often brutal. 

It was said that Albee, a homosexual, had used the drunken verbal brawlings of bitter gay men to bring his characters of George and Martha to life, but Albee never dignified those notions with an answer. His poetic, intricate, searing use of language was universal in its ability to connect with the audience. 

George Segal as Nick

Cast opposite the Burtons as the young Midwestern couple who are invited for an after hours nightcap were George Segal and Sandy Dennis. The chemistry among these four fine actors is truly remarkable as they bring four iconic characters to vivid life: The loud and obnoxious Martha, the ineffectual and embittered George, the ambitious and socially correct Nick, and the high-strung and tightly wound Honey. 

George is Richard Burton’s most difficult and rewarding role. The handsome and heroic Burton, who had played King Arthur and Marc Antony, is transformed into a beleaguered, henpecked milquetoast in a frayed sweater, whose sonorous voice quavers at first and then finds strength as he becomes angrier and surlier and more empowered as the evening wears on. Burton is masterful in all his pas de deux with the other actors—he has unforgettable moments with Segal and Dennis as well as Taylor. 

As good-looking, well-built new associate professor Nick, George Segal is less flamboyant than harridan Martha, poetic George and high-strung Honey, but it is his attempt to remain calm in the face of a storm that holds the story together. It is Segal’s most subtle and effective performance. 

Sandy Dennis is a revelation as the young wife who reveals layers of complexity as she becomes more and more soddenly drunk on sip after ladylike sip of brandy, until she’s literally foaming at the mouth and nose. Her skilled performance made Dennis the go-to actor for any female character labeled as “neurotic” in a script. Nobody ever played it better. 

Sandy Dennis as Honey

Elizabeth Taylor was one of Hollywood’s most underrated actresses, uniformly giving wonderful performances in film after classic film, from Father of the Bride to A Place in the Sun to Giant. The Academy finally began to recognize and acknowledge her talents in the late 1950s, when she was nominated as Best Actress four years in a row from 1957-60. Ironically, Taylor had won her first Best Actress Oscar for a role that she felt didn't deserve the honor, as a call girl in the tawdry melodrama Butterfield 8. (Taylor had been near death with pneumonia during the Academy voting process and won the sympathy vote.)

Here, Elizabeth has a field day as the domineering, foul-mouthed Martha. Making the film in 1966, Taylor was only 34 and in lush, full womanhood, still the greatest beauty the silver screen had ever known.  Costume designer Irene Sharaff (who won an Oscar for this film), hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff and makeup wiz Gordon Bau transformed Liz’s look to make her appear 15 years older and 20 pounds heavier with with makeup and padding. (And for the first time, Elizabeth stopped watching her weight and packed on some real pounds as well, the beginning of a lifelong battle of the bulge that would last the rest of her life.)

How did Ernest Lehman get the controversial script past the censors? It was said he substituted phonetic spellings of the swear words (gah-dam or g’dam for goddamn, for example) in the script he submitted for approval, but this film marked the the beginning of a new era in film frankness. Producers and studios basically began to thumb their noses at their own self-imposed censorship and tell adult stories they felt needed to be told. Though Virginia Woolf was not rated at the time of its release, the film was one of the main reasons that the Motion Picture Association of America came up with its (constantly evolving) ratings system that is still used to this day. 

One of the greatest film foursomes ever!

Nominated for 10 Oscars, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won a total of five. Elizabeth Taylor was pleased to have won her richly deserved second Best Actress Oscar for playing Martha but then cursed the Academy for passing over her husband. Burton did win the BAFTA for his role of George, but lost the Oscar to Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons. Richard Burton was never to win an Academy Award, despite a total of seven nominations, the last two for his roles in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Equus (1977). 

Sandy Dennis (The Out of Towners, Come Back To the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) won for Best Supporting Actress as the high-strung Honey, while Segal (The Owl and the Pussycat, It’s My Party) lost the Best Supporting Actor statuette to Walter Matthau in the Billy Wilder comedy The Fortune Cookie. (Haskell Wexler, Richard Sylbert and Irene Sharaff were the other Oscar winners.)

Together, Taylor and Burton would never experience a critical and artistic triumph on the scale of Virginia Woolf, though they were lauded for their fine performances in Zeffirelli’s production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew a year later. Resounding flops like Boom, Doctor Faustus and Hammersmith Is Out made the screen team box office poison, though they both found some success working separately. All told, Elizabeth and Richard would make a total of 10 films together. But Virginia Woolf was the zenith of their screen partnership.

Both alcoholics themselves, the Burtons’ hard-drinking jetset lifestyle led to constant bickering and battling, and in the end they became very much like the Albee characters they had inhabited so skillfully. The were never quite able to shed those personas, offstage or on.

Did the Burtons use their own volatile relationship as subtext?

In particular, Elizabeth added a new earth mother dimension to her sex goddess image, providing a perfect transition into character roles that ensured her career longevity. Most of Taylor’s more showy roles to come, including Michael Caine’s scorned wife in X, Y and Zee and the gaslighted heiress in the suspenseful horror flick Night Watch, featured shades of Martha. 

Off the screen, Burton and Taylor tired of playing sparring partners and divorced in 1974 after 10 years of marriage, then briefly remarried and quickly divorced again in 1976. As actors they would team up just one more time after their final breakup, for a brief Broadway run of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in 1983. 

In her later years, Taylor rhapsodized about both Burton and Virginia Woolf, calling him the love of her life and this film her all-time favorite acting experience. It is indeed a masterpiece in filmmaking; everyone involved was truly at the top of their game.

This is an entry in RealWeegieMidget’s Regaling About Richard Burton blogathon. I look forward to reading all the entries about one of the silver screen’s greatest leading men!

Wash This Man Right Outta Your Hair

With a screenplay co-written by Robert Towne (Chinatown) and star/producer Warren Beatty, direction by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude), production design by Richard Sylbert (Rosemary’s Baby), original music by Paul Simon and featuring a glittering cast of Hollywood acting heavyweights, Shampoo is a satiric sex farce with an impressive cinematic pedigree.

Made in 1975, just months after the Watergate scandal resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon—a time of cynicism, escapism and hedonism in America—Shampoo takes place in Los Angeles (chiefly in the neighborhoods of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood) on election night in November 1968, as Nixon is poised to win his first term as President.

Warren Beatty as George

The sexual revolution sparked by the tumultuous 1960s was still going strong in Hollywood well into the 1970s, which makes this film’s 1968/1975 time warp plausible—the specter of AIDS was almost a decade into the future. It was an era where trashy novels like Joyce Haber’s The Users and Judith Krantz’s Scruples delved deeply into the (supposedly) secretly perverse lifestyles of Hollywood’s rich and famous. Shampoo reflects and exploits that mid-70s sexual obsession to satiric and titillating comic effect.

Julie Christie as Jackie

Goldie Hawn as Jill

Reportedly Warren Beatty and screenwriter Robert Towne became BFFs while collaborating on the script for Shampoo, apparently finding they had quite a bit in common. Their rumored kinky sexual predilections included making love to their respective female dates on double beds in the same hotel room, thereby satisfying both their shared voyeuristic and exhibitionistic tendencies. (Later, Beatty and Towne would also share a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for Shampoo.)

Jack Warden as Lester

The film covers a day and night in the complicated life of a free-spirited Beverly Hills hairdresser and Lothario, played of course by Warren Beatty. Warren’s portrayal of the womanizing yet guileless George Roundy is spot on—and why wouldn’t it be?  The subject of Carly Simon’s iconic song “You’re So Vain” (You had one eye in the mirror/as you watched yourself gavotte”), Beatty is cashing in on his own legendary offscreen image as playboy of the western world. Back in the day, the stories of Warren Beatty’s prowess with the ladies was mythic and epic in its proportions, and there were few famous women of the era—from Natalie Wood to Barbra Streisand—who had reportedly not succumbed to his charms.

Far from a cold and calculating Machievellian Casanova, George is a vague, foggy airhead (Beatty is an Aquarius, by the way), a not-very-bright “himbo” who’s a pushover for a pretty woman and seems to fall into his constant sexual conquests almost entirely by default.

Tony Bill as Johnny

Beatty’s George is a peacock, hot stuff indeed as dressed by costume designer Anthea Sylbert.  In his tight blue jeans (often found down around his ankles), white pirate and tuxedo shirts unbuttoned almost to the navel, chunky silver belt and turquoise jewelry, with a few gold chains thrown in for good measure, George is an establishment hippie rebel, riding his motorcycle through the Hollywood Hills with nonchalant cool, brandishing his holstered hairdryer like a gun, his overgrown, tousled “bed hair” blowing in the breeze.

But Beatty imbues his insouciant womanizing protagonist with his own brand of sweet masculine vulnerability, the kind women find irresistible. Inarticulate, unable to describe his feelings or his life with any other word than “great,” George nevertheless has his troubles, experiencing guilt and regret and feeling like a failure in life, not proud of his obsessive promiscuous behavior. “Let’s face it,” George finally admits to Goldie Hawn’s character with weary resignation, “I f*cked them all.”

Carrie Fisher as Lorna

Goldie Hawn, Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actress for 1968’s Cactus Flower, parlays the zany, kooky persona she perfected on TV’s Laugh-In (“Sock it to me!”) into a brilliant tragicomic performance. As Jill, George’s current main squeeze, pretending not to notice that her boyfriend is a notoriously promiscuous cocksman, Goldie is simultaneously hilarious and touching. She scores in scenes that include a hyperventilating panic attack, vain attempts to get a straight answer about George’s whereabouts, and displaying dumb blond naivete as she undergoes a modeling interview with Tony Bill (who later directed the charming My Bodyguard).

Veteran character actor Jack Warden scores in his role as middle aged Beverly Hills businessman Lester Karpf, who keeps a younger woman in a love nest off Mulholland and tortures his hair forward to cover his balding pate. Beatty and Warden have marvelous chemistry in their scenes together in which hairdresser George (with a a few subtly mincing gestures and breathy tone of voice) allows Lester to believe that he’s gay to cover up the fact that he’s sleeping with both Karpf’s wife (Lee Grant) and his mistress (Julie Christie). Warden would cop an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor, and the pair would work together again in Beatty’s next picture Heaven Can Wait.

Lee Grant as Felicia 

Julie Christie is memorable as Jackie, Lester’s mistress and ex-lover of George, a glamorous but tense gal with a drinking problem, still holding the torch for her former boyfriend. The beautiful and versatile Christie, who had achieved iconic superstardom as Lara in Doctor Zhivago and won the 1965 Best Actress Oscar for Darling, was Beatty’s costar in McCabe and Mrs. Miller and had recently been his longtime paramour and domestic partner. (Long before Annette Bening came on the scene, Christie had been the odds-on favorite to get the notoriously marriage-shy Warren to the altar.)

Two years before she shot to stardom as Princess Leia in Star Wars, Carrie Fisher gives a sardonic portrayal of the Karpfs’ nubile teenage daughter Lorna, who taunts George into proving he isn’t homosexual, just to make her mother crazy. In the scene with Beatty, Fisher vehemently protesting “I’m nothing like my mother” has added dimension when you know that Fisher is the daughter of establishment, G-rated movie star Debbie Reynolds. (Lee Grant’s real-life daughter, of course, is the talented Dinah Manoff of Grease and Ordinary People fame. And incidentally, another movie star progeny,  Andrew Stevens—son of Stella—has a bit role with plenty of exposure in the grotto skinny dipping sequence with Jack Warden.)

George and Felicia

Practically stealing the film out from under her very talented costars is Lee Grant as Felicia Karpf, a horny Beverly Hills housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Whether straddling and humping George (to the campy strains of Herb Alpert’s “Tijuana Taxi” on the radio) still wearing her mink coat and curlers in her hair; addressing her maid in ludicrous baby talk (“Mona, Mona, Mona”); or looking daggers and baring her teeth and claws at her husband’s drunken mistress, Lee Grant’s Felicia is a thing of comic beauty, and the quintessential blueprint of the “desperate housewife” archetype.

Grant’s long and storied career, which has spanned seven decades, included the dark period in which the young actress, and many other artists were summarily blacklisted from the Hollywood film industry, branded as un-American subversives in the shameful McCarthy Communist witch hunt of the 1950s. A determined Grant would come back with a vengeance in the 1960s, no longer an ingenue, but now a skilled character actor in dozens of memorable roles, on television (Peyton Place), and in film (Valley of the Dolls, In the Heat of the Night) over the next half century.

The prolific Ms. Grant, who had been nominated for Oscar in 1951 for Detective Story and in 1971 for The Landlord, finally won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her brilliant performance here. She would receive an additional Supporting Actress nod for Voyage of the Damned the next year. In the 1980s, Grant expanded her resumé, becoming an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, garnering praise for directing the groundbreaking transgender documentary What Sex Am I? before winning her second Academy Award for Down and Out in America, while continuing to take occasional acting roles.

George does Jackie

"Let's face it...I f***ked them all."

Shampoo is a delicious romp for its talented ensemble cast, set against the backdrop of 1968 Southern California. The hippie chic, psychedelic Hollywood party sequence is replete with skinny dipping and LSD-spiked punch and a cameo appearance by Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, as the newest Beatles album (Sgt. Pepper, of course!) blares in the background. George’s hairdos for both Lee Grant and Julie Christie resemble Barbra Streisand’s 1968 Funny Girl bob— and in the Bistro black tie sequence, Lee Grant even wears a sailor suit, in another Streisand homage from costume designer Sylbert.

Punctuated by mournful Paul Simon music (a few years later, Carrie Fisher would become Mrs. Paul Simon), the soundtrack also includes hits that topped the charts in 1968, including “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys and “Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” by the Beatles.

The Criterion Collection has recently added Shampoo to its roster of digitally restored and beautifully presented blu-ray films, so we can enjoy it in all its lush, remastered 4k glory when it is released in October 2018.

For even more on this marvelous movie, visit the fabulous Le Cinema Dreams blog here.

Thanks so much for reading this entry in the Lovely Lee Grant Blogathon, cohosted by my friend Gill at ReelWeegieMidget Reviews. Can’t wait to delve into our sizable blogroll and read everyone’s posts! 

Roman's Baby

I was an avid reader from an early age, always raiding my parents’ bookshelf for material that was usually a bit above my head. My favorites, though, were my dad’s horror and suspense titles—Harvest Home by Tom Tryon, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty and, best of all, the amazing Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, a novel that was so cleverly and cinematically written that it played like a film in my head as I read it.

When, several years later, I got the chance to see the movie, I was amazed and delighted that the film followed the book faithfully, scene by scene, beat by beat, practically even line by line of dialogue. Director Roman Polanski had wisely followed Levin’s tightly written book to the letter; Rosemary’s Baby (1968) remains the most faithful film adaptation of a popular novel.

It’s also one of my all-time favorite movies, one that I can watch over and over and find new things to admire about it. (The beautiful Criterion Collection blu-ray edition I own allows me to do just that.) Best of all, Rosemary turned me on to the talents of one of the cinema’s most groundbreaking and controversial directors.

The best-selling novel by Ira Levin was not the author’s first to be adapted into a film--A Kiss Before Dying was first. (The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, Deathtrap and Sliver were to follow, with varying degrees of success, but none approached the cache of the Polanski film.) Levin’s themes, delving into urban paranoia, conspiracy and the nature of evil in contemporary society, were perfect in a post-JFK-assassination America. (The Time magazine  asking “Is God Dead?” that Rosemary reads in the doctor’s office says it all.)

When wunderkind producer Robert Evans, newly minted head of Paramount Pictures (a former actor far handsomer than many of his stars) green-lighted the project, the novel had been optioned by horror schlockmeister William Castle (The Tingler, Strait-Jacket, I Saw What You Did), but Evans was determined not to allow Castle to direct. (Castle would receive a producer credit and a cameo appearance as the menacing man outside the phone booth in Rosemary’s claustrophobic telephone scene.) Instead, Evans chose an exciting new talent to helm the project.

Star Farrow confers with producer Evans and director Polanski

Rosemary is the perfect introduction to the artistry of director Roman Polanski—it may in fact be the auteur’s masterwork. It was Polanski’s first American production, after wowing European audiences with his innovative thrillers Knife in the Water (produced in his native Poland and Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film of 1964) and Repulsion (made in France in 1965). Polanski was fast garnering a reputation for bold, raw realism, taking the “New Wave” cinema of the 1960s to the next level.

Together, Evans and Polanski assembled a talented creative team to tell this absorbing story of a young woman expecting her first child, and the strange circumstances surrounding her pregnancy. 

This may be the ultimate “victim movie;” the character of Rosemary is duped, drugged, raped, lied to and controlled by a sinister devil-worshiping cabal that includes her own husband. (Ambitious actor Guy Woodhouse treats his young wife like chattel, a bargaining chip to put on the table, selling his soul—and his wife’s—to achieve stardom.) It’s also the ultimate conspiracy film as well, because not until the final scene do we know for sure that Rosemary’s worries and concerns are not mere paranoid delusions. Oh, yes, and evil seems to triumph in the end.

The character of Rosemary offers a conflicted view of womanhood. On one hand, she embodies weakness, pain and suffering. On the other, she listens to her own intuition and  relentlessly pursues the truth about her situation. Ultimately, although she is confronted with the ultimate evil, her maternal instincts kick in and she finds herself adapting to a “new normal.”

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse

Polanski seriously considered his wife Sharon Tate for the role of Rosemary; indeed, she did have a quality very similar to Catherine Deneuve, the beleaguered heroine of his previous psychological thriller Repulsion; but Paramount wanted at least one bankable name in the cast. Mia Farrow starred on the wildly popular nighttime soap opera Peyton Place, and won the role after Tuesday Weld reportedly turned it down.

As Rosemary Woodhouse, Mia Farrow is delicate, waif-like and reed-thin, and the famous Vidal Sassoon pixie cut makes her appear even more vulnerable, a sharp contrast from her Sydney Guilaroff wigs (favored by Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day and Kim Novak) in the early sequences. Mia Farrow iconically embodies the title character, imbuing her with warmth and humanity. Farrow deserved a Best Actress Oscar for creating one of the most iconic damsels in distress in cinema history, but incredibly, she was not even nominated. She did win Italy’s David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress and was nominated for Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards for her luminous and fragile—yet determined—Rosemary.

Farrow sacrificed her marriage to Frank Sinatra to finish filming Rosemary. Sinatra had signed his young wife to costar opposite him in The Detective, but by the film’s appointed start date, the Polanski film was far from finished. Polanski’s painstaking attention to detail and elaborate setups slowed the creative process and put the picture weeks behind schedule, which infuriated Sinatra. He served his wife of nine months divorce papers right on the Rosemary set.

John Cassavetes as Guy Woodhouse

Polanski was inspired in his against-type casting of John Cassavetes in the role of Guy Woodhouse; an auteur himself, Cassavetes epitomizes the hungry ambition of the New York “actor type.” Originally the role was planned for Robert Redford...but if he had gone through with it, Polanski would have run the risk of turning his suspense thriller into Barefoot at the Bramford…with Mia in her sunny Doris Day-like outfits with golden boy Redford by her side. (Later Redford would star opposite Farrow in the unfortunate 1974 version of The Great Gatsby.) Instead, the dark, inscrutable Cassavetes (sexy without being handsome) with his curious Method delivery and his shifty eyes, adds a menacing air right from the start.

Making the villanous Satan-worshiping cabal a seemingly kindly group of senior citizens was an Ira Levin stroke of genius, and those supporting roles were cast just as brilliantly by Polanski, with old-time character actors like Patsy Kelly (Pigskin Parade), Ralph Bellamy (His Girl Friday) and Elisha Cook (The Maltese Falcon). Sidney Blackmer (who played Grace Kelly’s dad in High Society) is eccentric and bombastic as Roman Castevet, martyr to his father’s old religion.

Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet

As Roman’s dotty wife Minnie, showbiz veteran Ruth Gordon all but steals the show, earning her a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the age of 71. A multitalented actress and writer, Gordon was the wife of Garson Kanin, with whom she coauthored such classic films as A Double Life, Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike.

Gordon’s quirky character role as Natalie Wood’s demented mother in Inside Daisy Clover had reignited her acting career, and thanks to Rosemary’s Baby, she went on to enjoy the most successful third act in all of show business (save perhaps for Betty White), working steadily through the 1970s in classics including Harold and Maude, Where’s Poppa? and My Bodyguard. Her last film was Maxie with Glenn Close in 1985, the year she died. In 1977, Gordon briefly reprised her role as Minnie Castevet in the poor TV movie sequel Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby. Perhaps it would have been more palatable had Minnie’s role been bigger!

Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet

Director Polanski begins his storytelling at a leisurely pace, letting the tension build slowly but surely with a heightened form of naturalism, as newlyweds Guy and Rosemary rent a four-room apartment in a grand and charming old apartment house with a sinister history, as they are warned by their elderly friend Hutch. The film is punctuated with a strain of black humor throughout, mostly in the character of Minnie Castevet but also through Guy (“I think I hear the Trench Sisters chewing”) and Maurice Evans’s Hutch (“I see you had another suicide over there at Happy House”), among others.

The Woodhouses tour the Bramford apartment with Mr. Miklas (Elisha Cook, Jr.)

An important character in the film is the gothic apartment house itself, the “Black Bramford.” The filming location, of course, is the infamous Dakota on Central Park West, scene of tragedy a dozen years later when John Lennon was shot and killed in front of the building where he lived.

Production designer Paul Sylbert, aided by his talented daughter costume designer (and later producer) Anthea Sylbert, creates a palette of bright Technicolor to contrast with the darkness of the tale—lemon yellows, rose reds and wild prints. Rosemary’s penchant for yellow-and-white wallpaper described in the book is brought to life here and used as a backdrop for the weird dreams and goings-on in the bedroom scenes. Anthea Sylbert captures the late 1960s zeitgeist in Rosemary’s breezy dresses (including some very chic maternity ensembles), the avant garde outfits of the young friends at Rosemary’s party.  and even the colorfully zany pinks-and-reds of the Castevets, oldies trying to seem hip and vibrant and “with it.”

A scuffed-up Rosemary in her lemon yellow bedroom

Polanski seemed galvanized by every aspect of the story, both grandiose and mundane, and his obsessively detailed and choreographed camera compositions make this a cinema experience like no other. Some of my favorite Polanski moments here include seeing a distorted Rosemary’s bloody lips and fingers reflected in the toaster as she gnaws on raw chicken livers (her kid will not grow up a vegan); and Rosemary using her butcher knife to stop the baby’s bassinet from rocking and give her away as she readies herself for a climactic confrontation with evil.

"Oh, no, don't change the program on my account..."

The director excels in conceptualizing the novel’s unusual dream sequences, which when reading seem impossible to convey on film. These include Minnie Castevet’s voiceover on a scene with nuns in a Catholic school, and the drug-induced yacht sequence replete with weird cameo appearances by lookalikes for Pope Paul, Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, which segues into the nude ritual in which Rosemary is impregnated by “someone inhuman.” “This is no dream, this is really happening!”

Polanski’s choice of composer is another feather in his cap as a master of suspense. Christopher Komeda’s innovative use of music conveys the underlying tension and anxiety, from the repetitive piano tinklings of “Fur Elise” to the atonal cacophony of jazz as Rosemary flees from Guy and Sapirstein upstairs to her apartment. Komeda even composed a memorable theme for Rosemary’s mysterious pregnancy pain, described by Levin in the book as “a wire around me getting tighter and tighter.”

Mrs. Gilmore (Hope Summers) and Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy)

 Is this a horror film? In some ways, yes, but far from a conventional one. Though the supernatural element is downplayed in favor of gnawing tension and paranoia—is Rosemary imagining it all?—we must remember that the Castevets’ satanic magic actually works. Guy wins the star-making stage role he had previously lost to Donald Baumgart after his enlightening after-dinner conversation with Roman—Baumgart suddenly goes blind. (The tense telephone scene between Rosemary and an unseen Baumgurt later in the film is chilling—thanks partially to the inimitable voiceover performance of Tony Curtis, who just happened to be a visitor to the set that day!)  And Hutch goes into a coma before he has time to warn Rosemary about all of those witches, directly after meeting Castevet. And of course, in the iconic final scene when Rosemary sees her baby open its eyes for the first time, she knows that Guy Woodhouse is definitely not the father.

Dark humor alert: Rosemary, Roman and Laura-Louise (Patsy Kelly)

Rosemary’s Baby made Roman Polanski an international filmmaking superstar. Though not nominated for Best Director by the Academy that year (he should have been!), Polanski did earn a well-deserved Oscar nod for Best Adapted Screenplay of the Levin novel. 

The controversial Polanski has manifested even more drama in his life than in his work. Less than a year after Rosemary’s success, he endured a horrific real-life tragedy when wife Sharon Tate, pregnant with their child, was brutally murdered in their L.A. home, becoming the most famous victim of the gruesome “Manson family” murders.

Roman Polanski

Several years later, Polanski was convicted of raping a teenage girl at the home of Jack Nicholson. The director fled the U.S. to avoid a prison sentence, and has not been permitted to set foot in the United States since. He has been married to French actress Emmanuelle Seigneur since 1989.

The prolific Polanski has enjoyed many career high points since Rosemary’s Baby, most notably 1974’s Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway and 2002’s The Pianist, which finally earned him the Best Director Academy Award. My personal favorite Polanski films include Frantic with Harrison Ford and soon-to-be-wife Seigneur, The Ghost Writer with Ewan McGregor, and the auteur’s return to the occult devil-worship oeuvre with 1999’s The Ninth Gate starring Johnny Depp, with Seigneur as a seductive female Satan.

My all-time-favorite blogpost about this all-time-favorite film can be found over at the divine Le Cinema Dreams movie-lover's mecca.

Thanks so much to my friend Quiggy at the Midnite Drive-In and Phyllis Loves Classic Movies for hosting the Favorite Director Blogathon!