ROSEMARY'S BABY 1968

“Cinematically speaking, if stressful social times trigger in our culture the need for escapism as a coping mechanism, then such conditions must equally inspire the necessity of what can be best described as a shrouded emotional outlet: an avenue, concealed to the psyche, through which the fears and uncertainties of the times can be safely vented. In this manner the horror film has always been socially revealing.”  

Rosemary's Baby: Child of the 60s:

Rosemary’s Baby was released in June of 1968. And as social climates go, one couldn't find a year more defined by stress, fear, and uncertainty than America in 1968. This was the year that saw Richard Nixon elected into office of President; the assassination of two American symbols of hope (Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy); U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam escalate; and big cities and college campuses across the nation wracked by violent civil rights protests and heated anti-war demonstrations. Observed Los Angeles Times journalist Bettuane Levine: “It was a very bad year. Strikes, sit - ins and bloody riots dotted the land, as various groups sought their share of the pie. The result was a country in crisis, our cities in tatters, our dislocated lives punctuated by assassination, Cold War threats, nuclear terrors, and a general feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.”

Real-life Time Magazine cover, dated April 1, 1966, poses the unasked question that Rosemary's Baby's powerfully ambiguous ending  inspires.

For anyone endeavoring to make a horror film in the 60s, a seemingly insurmountable hurdle lie in determining what could possibly frighten an audience who had beamed into their homes, on a nightly basis via television, the real-life terrors of war; and who, through photo magazines like Life and Look, regularly confronted graphic evidence of a nation growing increasingly chaotic. What fictional monster could compete with the real-life horror that was modern America?   

Enter, Rosemary's Baby. Ira Levin's cannily plotted modern horror story about present-day witchcraft took classic gothic conventions and re-imagined them through the prism of an emerging new world view. A world in which castles, bats, cobwebs, and creaky doorways were no longer considered viable mechanisms of fear. A world that had moved beyond superstition and myth to worship at the altar of science and logic. Rosemary's Baby proposed that even in a world in which God and religion are deemed obsolete, there remain things that never die and primitive evils that no amount of civilization and modernization can eradicate.

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse

John Cassavetes as Guy Woodhouse

Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet

Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet

Roman Polanski's uncommonly faithful film adaptation took Levin's narrative one step further. He  threaded the tale of a young bride's mounting certainty that a coven of witches has evil designs on her unborn child with both cultural subtext (is the dawning of the year "One" [1966] and the birth of the Antichrist on earth the true explanation for the world's escalating terrors?), and ambiguity (Polanski initially filmed, and later deleted, several scenes that distinctly confirmed Guy's involvement with the coven. An avowed atheist, Polanski wanted to make a film about witchcraft and Satanism that would play just as well as a psychological thriller about a pregnant woman suffering a paranoid breakdown). No matter how it's viewed, in Polanski's deft hands, Rosemary’s Baby proves to be an overwhelmingly persuasive allegory of social apprehension and the durability of evil.

What a diabolically clever plot: The living Devil born in a Manhattan apartment building (The notorious Bramford, portrayed externally in the film by the notorious Dakota, site of the tragic 1980 shooting death of John Lennon) to a lapsed Catholic, a woman of wavering faith, used merely as a vessel. This act signaling the end of God's hegemony and the beginning of a new, Satanic world order. Historically, this would place the birth of Satan on earth as occuring in 1966, the very year when things began to go violently "wrong" with society on a global scale. No wonder sixties audiences responded to the imaginary "order" this fantasy imposed on the chaos surrounding them.

Under the piercing scrutiny of Roman Castevet, Rosemary's friend, Hutch (Maurice Evans) grows suspicious when shown Rosemary's Tannis Root charm. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Rosemary's Baby truly excels in its dramatization of the banality of evil. Though played for darkly comic effect, it's really rather jarring that the monsters in this contemporary horror film are harmless-looking little old ladies and men. Just the kind of colorless, ordinary people we as a society are so quick to dismiss. Imagine this film playing out in the "Don't trust anyone over 30" climate of the 60s, and you get a taste of just how subversively eerie Rosemary's Baby seemed when it hit the screens. Audiences accustomed to horror films as B-movie double-feature fare were disquieted when this major motion picture (which was intentionally shot to look as if it were a Doris Day comedy) with an art-house director and an A-list cast dared to make a horror film that took itself seriously enough to be truly frightening. 

 First Betrayal: Polanski has Cassavetes shield his face from the audience the first time Guy lies to Rosemary

In Rosemary's Baby Polanski depicts a world morally turned on its axis, and in keeping so much of its horrors unseen or unsubstantiated, orchestrates a slow, nightmarish transformation of all that is perceived as safe and familiar in our culture into that which is dangerous and sinister. As a cleverly constructed parable of 60s unease, Rosemary's Baby captured the imagination of the country (It was one of the top money-makers of the year) by providing some much-needed cathartic release.

The security and sanctity of marriage as an illusion.

Expectant mothers, in their vulnerability, make for deeply unsettling targets of danger.

Can patriarchal figures of authority (Ralph Bellamy as Dr.Sapirstein) betray us?

PERFORMANCES:

When trying to come up with words to adequately express my admiration for Mia Farrow's performance as Rosemary, my vocabulary proves grossly inadequate. From the moment she appears onscreen she exhibits a vulnerable credibility that anchors the film in an emotional reality necessary to make the horror fantasy work. She's no genre heroine moved about like a chess piece for the sake of furthering the plot. At every instant the actions of Farrow's Rosemary are rooted in something psychologically authentic. It ranks with Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde and Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? as one of the best performances by an American actress in the 60s.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

As he proved with his psychosexual thriller, Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski is expert at conveying, in cinematic terms, the fluid, distorted quality of dreams and the reality-altering effects of paranoia. He handles Rosemary's Baby's pivotal "nightmare" sequence with virtuoso skill.

They didn't refer to this as the "nightmare sequence" for nothing. At age 11, this scene nearly traumatized me.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Rosemary's Baby wasn't the first film I ever saw, it just feels that way. At 11 years old, it was the first film to ever make an indelible impression upon me. I never forgot it. Part of this was due to the fact that it was absolutely THE most frightening film I had ever seen and was responsible for innumerable bad dreams and a reluctance to enter dark rooms for months thereafter;  but mostly it was because Rosemary's Baby was, and is, a small masterpiece.

The scene that made me jump the first time I saw the film (and still makes my blood run cold!)

A horror film that plays fast and loose with the conventions of the genre, blending elements of the psychological thriller and paranoid social drama. Beautifully shot, well-written, superbly acted, and above all, smart as a whip. At no time during Rosemary's Baby do you ever lose the feeling that you are in the hands of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and eliciting from you precisely the response he wants you to have.

It is a film of solid assurance in every aspect.

Rosemary's Baby is the Citizen Kane of horror films. To this day, some 40-plus years after its release, I find it one of the most remarkable and consistently satisfying films I've ever seen.

AUTOGRAPH FILES:

My sister (my family are the only ones to call me Kenny) got John Cassavetes to autograph this receipt when she saw him at a restaurant on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles in 1979. She knew I would get a kick out of it and I did, indeed.

Copyright © Ken Anderson