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.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| "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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
