INSIDE DAISY CLOVER 1965

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. It's a strange feeling, indeed, to harbor a fond memory of a film enjoyed in childhood, only to reencounter it as an adult and find yourself at a complete loss as to what captured your imagination in the first place.

Had this post been written in the recollection of the many times I enjoyed Inside Daisy Clover on late-night TV as a kid, I'm certain my comments and observations would reflect my generally positive response to this not-uninteresting-in-concept (but veering towards camp in execution), very '60s look at 1930s Hollywood and the dark underbelly of the film industry. Back when I could only see Inside Daisy Clover in black & white with commercial interruptions, I guess I was just young enough to have found the era-inappropriate music to be rousing, and the strung-together show biz clichés that make up its plot to be a bold inversion of the usual rags-to-riches success story.
So when, after many years, the opportunity arose for me to finally get a look at Inside Daisy Clover in color, digitally restored, and widescreen, I couldn't pass it up. Alas, I should have left things as they were.

Natalie Wood as Daisy Clover

Robert Redford as Wade Lewis

Christopher Plummer as Raymond Swan

Ruth Gordon as Mrs. Clover

Inside Daisy Clover (adapted by Gavin Lambert from his 1963 novel) is about two traumatic years in the life of its titular character, a 15-year-old Santa Monica beach urchin with a big voice ("I open my mouth and a song comes out") who, in 1936 Hollywood, becomes America's Little Valentine virtually overnight. Advertised at the time with the tagline "The story of what they did to a kid...," Inside Daisy Clover is a behind-the-scenes exposé of the Hollywood Dream Machine as assembly-line sweatshop. A hardhearted fantasy factory that systematically exploits its talent, treats them like property, and ultimately (and callously) discards those who are too sensitive to withstand the near-constant demoralization. All in the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. It's a story Hollywood never seems to tire of telling about itself, this time the familiar tinsel-town pathos given a tawdry facelift by having an adolescent as the target of all the abuse. That is, of course, if you can buy 26-year-old Natalie Wood as a 15-year-old. 

Natalie Wood felt her performance was compromised when the heavily edited film (21 minutes were cut prior to release) left much of her character's motivation and voiceover narration on the cutting room floor. I shudder to think what they left out when what they left in are such piquant Daisy-isms as: "My mother says the world's a garbage dump, and we're just the flies it attracts. Maybe she's right. But when I sing, the smell doesn't seem so bad."

Two things struck me on seeing Inside Daisy Clover again after so many years: 1) A common complaint I have about '60s period films, one so pervasive I should by now accept it as a given (yet can't) is that '60s movies are notorious for always looking like the '60s, no matter what era they intend to depict. Inside Daisy Clover goes through all the trouble of changing the novel's 1950s setting to Hollywood in the 1930s, but beyond a few vintage automobiles scattered here and there, there's a notable lack of period authenticity.

I know it's partly a matter of aesthetics… '30s standards of beauty (pencil-thin eyebrows, baggy clothing, severe hairdos) can be unflattering to celebrities who still need to look alluring to their contemporary fans. But in Inside Daisy Clover, a movie I assume wants to be taken seriously, its anachronistic appearance merely comes off as lazy, cheap, and uncommitted. Compare Inside Daisy Clover's studio-bound, overlit artifice to the gritty 1930s authenticity rendered just four years later in Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. Movie fans who mourn the loss of Old Hollywood need a film like Inside Daisy Clover to remind them of what used to pass for gritty realism in movies before foreign films and Bonnie and Clyde came along to shake things up.  

Former child stars Natalie Wood and Roddy McDowall. 
McDowall (a tad overqualified for such a small role) appears as Walter Baines,
producer Raymond Swan's vaguely sinister flunky 

2) Why is it that when Hollywood attempts to be hard on itself and show the world its true face, warts and all, it comes across as being phonier than when it's feeding us platitudes and myths? Based on what's come to light over the years about the lives of countless child actors, the events of Inside Daisy Clover are far from exaggerated (although perhaps over-acted). Yet, so little of what happens onscreen feels particularly true to life. 

Part of it's due to the performances, which seldom move beyond surface indications of emotions. Another part points to the writing. Everything grim in the movie has been unnecessarily pitched to melodrama (Plummer's Swan only lacks a top hat, cape, and a handlebar mustache to twirl), and those aspects that should be emotionally moving or affecting instead feel under-directed and unengaging. 

For example, Daisy's frequent outbursts and eruptions of temper have all the requisite sound and fury, but there's no anguish behind them. I suspect they're supposed to be born of Daisy's inability to articulate complex feelings, but in Natalie Wood's hands, her often one-note performance turns a young girl's pain into a series of shrill tantrums.

Loopy
Daisy Clover's nervous breakdown while looping a song in a sound booth has become a camp touchstone over the years. I found it quite harrowing when I first saw it as a kid. Now, Natalie's histrionics are overshadowed by my taking note of the inspired sound editing, which is quite marvelously done.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

For reasons that make sense only to me, Inside Daisy Clover remains weirdly engrossing and watchable in spite of not being in the least bit good. How is this possible? Well, chiefly due to my certainty that the entire film is haunted by the campy ghost of Patty Duke as Neely O'Hara in Valley of the Dolls. I can't help it. When I watch Inside Daisy Clover—from fade-in to fade-out—I can't stop drawing parallels between Clover's story and that of the pint-sized trainwreck at the center of Jacqueline Susann's iconic soap opera. That and thinking how much better—and more hilarious—this film would be had Patty Duke been cast instead of Natalie Wood. (Even Clover's "The story of what they did to a kid..." tagline recalls Dolls' "Neely...such a nice kid. Until someone put her name in lights and turned her into a lush!")

I consider myself a fan of the immensely appealing Natalie Wood, but at age 19, Patty Duke would have made for a much more persuasive 15-year-old. Not to mention the fact that Duke's less glamorous, tomboyish looks fit the character better than Wood's delicate, inescapably mature countenance. In addition, Duke's natural speaking voice has the low register and rough edge that Natalie Wood works so conspicuously hard to capture in the film's early scenes. 

The Circus is a Wacky World / Give a Little More
As much as I like her in Splendor in the Grass, I truly find Natalie Wood (who campaigned aggressively for this role) terribly miscast in Inside Daisy Clover. I would have much preferred to see Patty Duke or Sally Field in the part. That's Duke pictured above as Neely O'Hara, just minutes before getting her big song cut from Helen Lawson's show. For the uninitiated: the only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson.

In both form and function, Daisy Clover IS Neely O'Hara to me, and Inside Daisy Clover is full of scenes that recall or inadvertently reference Valley of the Dolls and Patty Duke's legendarily comic dramatic performance. 

Both Neely and Daisy are given to striking "little toughie" postures to convey defiance. Their careers are chronicled with climbing-the-ladder-of-success montages. Each marries a gay or rumored-to-be gay husband. Each suffers a nervous breakdown while trying to manage self-destructive behavior patterns.  And, of course, both Neely and Daisy are singing stars with dubbed voices. Perhaps best of all; Daisy's and Neely's songs were penned by the same composers: husband and wife team Dory & Andre Previn—two individuals who never heard a Vegas-style musical cliché they didn't like.

Natalie Wood and Robert Redford doing what they do best in Inside Daisy Clover...looking pretty.
Wood and Redford reteamed in 1966 for This Property is Condemned

PERFORMANCES
I hate to say it, but 26-year-old Natalie Wood plays Daisy Clover as Peck's Bad Boy with bosoms. She doesn't inhabit the character so much as reduce the rather enigmatically-written teen down to a series of broadly drawn attitudes. There's that awful pixie/waif haircut wig (and if it isn't a wig, Ms. Wood should have sued); the freckles; the studied, ungainly gait; and let's not forget the artfully applied smudges of dirt to the requisite nose and chin to convey pugnacious spunk. 

In lieu of characterization, we're given a too-mature actress in '60s false eyelashes and eyeliner, trying too hard to convey spirited adolescence by utilizing cartoonishly rendered explosions of piss and vinegar feistiness. 

Riled-Up Ragamuffin
I half expected her to sound like Edward G. Robinson in this scene

Like Elizabethg Taylor, Natalie Wood is an actress that needs a strong director. And when she has one (Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, Love With the Proper Stranger), she always delivers. It's hard to guess what director Robert Mulligan was going for, but Wood's performance during the first ten minutes of Inside Daisy Clover borders on amateurish. She's so unpersuasive in these scenes that it takes the film a long time to regain its footing. Wood gets better once she drops the butch act, but not by much. I don't know if this is considered one of the worst performances of her career, but I'll wager it's pretty close. 

Ruth Gordon was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Daisy's eccentric (what else?) mother.
To be fair, this was Gordon's return to the screen after a 22-year absence. The Academy had no way of knowing she'd be giving variations on this same performance for the next 20.

My favorite performance in the film is given by Christopher Plummer as the ironfisted producer, Raymond Swan. Plummer plays him in an amusingly reptilian manner—holding himself very still, lizard-like eyes darting about—making his scenes the most compelling in the movie. But, unfortunately, the same can't be said for gorgeous superstar-to-be Robert Redford. His method of conveying ladykiller charm is to precede each line of dialog with a drop of his chin and a purposeful stare upwards into the eyes of whomever he's talking to...like a superannuated member of some boy band.

Daisy gets Schooled

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I do have a weak spot for Inside Daisy Clover's two big production numbers. The songs: You're Gonna Hear from Me, and The Circus is a Wacky World are arranged in a manner that plants them firmly in the mid-1960s, making Daisy's 1930s musical clips look like excerpts from a TV variety special. The numbers are staged by choreographer Herbert Ross (he did the numbers for Funny Girl - 1968), who would later make his film directing debut with Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969) and go on to have a successful, Oscar-nominated career as a film director and producer. 

"Listen, world, you're gonna love me!"
Intergalactic megalomaniac Daisy Clover foists herself on an unsuspecting planet

Like Sammy Davis Jr's I Gotta Be Me, Frank Sinatra's My Way, Anthony Newley's Gonna Build a Mountain, or Helen Lawson's immortal I'll Plant My Own Tree, Daisy Clover's You're Gonna Hear from Me is one of those self-aggrandizing show-biz anthems beloved of aging pop stars and Vegas lounge singers. Though the song failed to nab that Best Song Oscar nomination it was so blatantly seeking, in 2003, Barbra Streisand covered it for her The Movie Album.

The Pepto-Bismol-pink musical extravaganza, The Circus is a Wacky World stands as Inside Daisy Clover's metaphor for the phoniness of Hollywood. It's also a melody so infectious that it takes several days to dislodge it from your brain after seeing the film. 

Character actor and vaudevillian song and dance man Paul Hartman (best known as Emmett the handyman on The Andy Griffith Show) is seen here with Natalie Wood in a deleted scene. Most likely from the film-within-a-film "Dime Store Kid."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

It's difficult to imagine how any well-constructed film can survive the excision of 21 minutes of footage, so perhaps one of my biggest dissatisfactions with Inside Daisy Clover might, in part, be the result of how much had to be left out. As it stands, Daisy's disillusionment with Hollywood is near-instantaneous. We're never given even one scene where she's happy to have her dream come true.

That being said, it's still unlikely that Inside Daisy Clover would ever register with me again as it did when I was young. For one, when I was a kid, EVERYBODY looked older, and it didn't bother me so much how little Natalie Wood looked or acted like a teen. Now, I can't get past it. Similarly, the then-shocking revelations of the film—bisexuality, adultery, family dysfunction, child labor abuses—lack much gravity in a screenplay where the characters are given so little dimension. 

Katharine Bard is really rather good as Raymond Swan's neglected wife, Melora.
There are better screencaps I could have used of her, but the ever-shaggable Robert Redford is just so darn cute here

On a positive note, I must say that Inside Daisy Clover looks rather spectacular in widescreen DVD. 

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Christopher Plummer
I got this autograph back in 1983 when I was taking dance classes in New York. Plummer was walking down the street somewhere in the theater district, and I asked if he would be so kind as to sign this (a schedule from Jo-Jos Dance Studio). Of course, I had one of those cheap pens that made you scratch the paper just to get ink to come out. That accounts for the undecipherable first word preceding "...of best wishes" in the autograph above. As I recall, he was very courteous, very tall, very tan (this was dead of winter, mind you), and VERY handsome!

Inside Daisy Clover opened in Los Angeles on
Wednesday, December 22, 1965 at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Blvd.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

LORD LOVE A DUCK 1966

Amongst the glut of socially satirical black comedies that came out of Hollywood in the post-Kennedy years, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963) has the respect, and Tony Richardson’s The Loved One has the classy pedigree (a screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood adapted from an Evelyn Waugh novel). But the only one I find to be even remotely funny is George Axelrod’s strenuously off-beat (and unrelentingly hilarious) skewering of '60s Southern California culture Lord Love a Duck.

Thier obvious filmic merits aside, I just personally have no taste for Strangelove’s brand of paranoiac political lunacy, nor do I find much that amuses me in The Loved One’s theater of the grotesque lampooning of the Los Angeles funeral industry (although I do adore Anjanette Comer's performance and Rod Steiger’s Mr. Joyboy has to be seen to be believed). In all aspects relating both to my peculiar sense of humor and uniquely twisted world-view, Lord Love a Duck (an expression of surprised bemusement much like, “I’ll be damned!” or Fred Mertz’s exasperated, “For corn’s sake!”) hits me where I live. Choosing for its satirical targets the idiosyncrasies of '60s American pop-culture that are near and dear to my kitsch-loving heart (celebrity worship, youth culture, beach party movies, consumerism, the California school system, pop-psychiatry, religious attitudes about sex…and that's just for starters), Lord Love a Duck is virtually made-to-order for a guy of my retro-centric sensibilities. Of course, what really pays dividends when a satire is as perceptive and acerbically witty as Lord Love a Duck (adapted from a 1961 book I haven't read by Al Kine) is that you can look at it some forty-plus years later and marvel at how the jokes still hit home and maintain their relevance because people (God love 'em) really don't change all that much.

Tuesday Weld as Barbara Ann Greene

Roddy McDowall as Alan Musgrave

Ruth Gordon as Stella Bernard

Lola Albright as Marie Greene

Lord Love a Duck is a sun-baked Faustian farce about Southern California teen Barbara Ann Greene (Weld), one-time Head Cheerleader and most popular girl at Longfellow High School, now facing an uncertain future of dreaded anonymity as a senior at the ultra-modern Consolidated High. The day before school is to start, Barbara meets the mysterious Alan Musgrave (McDowall), a transfer student from Irving High School with a checkered past. Calling himself Mollymauk (the name of an albatross-like bird, a replica of which Alan has hanging from his keychain as a kind of hypnosis charm) Alan professes to have the ability to make all of Barbara’s deepest desires come true…she need only give voice to them.

"Barbara Ann. Whose deepest and most heartfelt yearnings express, with a kind of touching lyricism, the total vulgarity of our time."  
Change the name and this 47-year-old quote could apply to anyone who has ever appeared on American Idol, America's Got Talent, The Bachelor...or any reality TV show today.

As it turns out, there is indeed something awful about Alan, especially in the way he goes about (without benefit of making explicit either motivation or method) seeing to it that each and every one of Barbara Ann’s tinpot dreams come true. Unfortunately, in the grand tradition of fairy tales and aphorisms that warn “Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it,” Barbara Ann’s dreams consistently fail to measure up to her expectations. A lamentable realization for the not-very-bright baton-twirler, one compounded by the fact that the undisclosed “cost” of each wish (a sacrificial disaster or tragedy befalling someone in Barbara Ann's orbit) seems to escalate exponentially.

High school "fast girl" Sally Grace (the marvelous Lynn Carey, right) humiliates Barbara Ann into joining the Cashmere Sweater Club ("All you need are  twelve cashmere sweaters to join!") when she makes mocking reference to Barbara Ann's sweater being made of the moth-proof, rust-proof, fireproof chemical Acrison Silipolatex.

If at the start it looks as though the selfless Alan is but a tool to be used by the self-interested Barbara Ann to achieve her ambitions, toward the end it begins to dawn that perhaps Alan is harboring a secret agenda of his own and it's in fact Barbra Ann who's been the dupe. (Alan, like an asexual Myra Breckinridge, appears to be on some kind of personal crusade to dismantle and subvert the fabric of American culture one myth at a time.)
Lord Love a Duck not only uses its fairy-tale structure as a framework on which to hang a broad array of satirical jokes and sight gags, but as a device to dispense with anything resembling world-as-we-know-it realism. A scathing, surreal, jet-black comedy baked under a smoggy Southern California sun, Lord Love a Duck is a film I only recently discovered (thanks again, TCM!) but has fast become one my favorites.

The Devil You Say?: Mollymauk vs Pazuzu
Above, Barbara Ann signs a Faustian "pact" in cement with Alan (Mollymauk) Musgrave, a possibly Satanic character who represents himself with a drawing of a creature that looks alarmingly like the evil demon Pazuzu, replicated in poster-paint and clay by a pre-possession Linda Blair (below) in The Exorcist (1973)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As I commented upon in an earlier post about Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?, I don’t really understand comedy well enough to know why it sometimes works and why at others, it falls flat on its face. Satire, in particular, seems a peculiarly dicey realm, given how important a role the establishment of tone and balance plays into the comedy payoff. If the world presented is too lunatic, there’s no reality in which to ground the humor and everything just comes off as silly. Lord Love a Duck wins points by giving Los Angeles and '60s pop-culture (and its already built-in absurdities) just enough rope of verisimilitude with which to hang itself. 

Lord Love a Duck's Drive-In Church (presided over by Rev. Phillip Neuhauser and his wife "Butch") spoofs the real-life Garden Grove Community Drive-In Church of former televangelist Robert Schuller (The Crystal Cathedral) which opened in Orange County in 1961.

Alan and Barbara Ann A-Go-Go
The teenage Beach Party movies of the '60s are a major target of Lord Love a Duck's scorn. The fictional titles of which don't sound very different from the real thing: Bikini Vampire, I Was a Teenage Bikini Vampire, I Married a Teenage Bikini Vampire, The Thing That Ate Bikini Beach, Cold War Bikini, Bikini Countdown, and Bikini Widow.

PERFORMANCES

Actors, both comic and dramatic, attest that comedy is infinitely harder than drama, and I’m inclined to agree. I’m guilty as the next person of devaluing good comedic performances (Gene Wilder should have won an Oscar by now), but that can’t be said of my assessment of Lord Love a Duck, a film which succeeds largely due of its very talented and funny cast. While I’m less fond of Roddy McDowall in this (during this time in his career he seemed to be giving the exact same performance from film to film) Lola Albright and especially Tuesday Weld (doing her best work EVER) are pure gold. Albright brings unexpected pathos to her role as Barbara Ann’s promiscuous, cocktail waitress mother (“Honey, you know I never go out with a married man on the first date!”). Her brief yet memorably tragi-comic performance has a heartbreaking poignancy to it.

Under less than favorable circumstances, uptight society matron Stella Bernard (Gordon) meets Marie (Albright), the alcoholic mother of potential daughter-in-law, Barbara Ann.

Long one of Hollywood’s most underrated talents—her career hampered by an I-dare-you-to take-me-seriously name and a baby doll voice—Lord Love a Duck’s happiest surprise is Tuesday Weld (not really a surprise, actually. She’s splendid in the 1974 TV-movie, Reflections ofMurder, and brilliantly ups the ante on playing maladjusted cheerleaders in 1968’s chilling Pretty Poison). Lord Love a Duck showcases Weld’s talents as a truly gifted comedienne and affords her the opportunity to show what a nuanced dramatic actress she can be when given the right material.

It's a pity that Lord Love a Duck was so ignored on release. Weld is remarkable in it. In this scene in which Barbara Ann discloses to Alan her deepest desires, she humanizes and gives depth to a character that in less talented hands would be a one-dimensional cartoon.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Every film that sets out to offend (as most black comedies do) needs at least one setpiece moment of sublime vulgarity. Lord Love A Duck boasts an irresistibly over-the-top shopping spree for cashmere sweaters that erupts into a father/daughter consumer orgy.The screwball/suggestive colors of the sweaters provide as many laughs as the incestuously orgasmic reactions they elicit from Barbara Ann's father: Grape Yum-Yum, Banana Beige, Lemon Meringue, Pink Put-On, Papaya Surprise, Periwinkle Pussycat, Turquoise Trouble, Midnight A-Go-Go, and Peach Put-down. At this point in the film I was aware that I liked Lord Love A Duck, but after this scene, I knew I LOVED it. This sequence is the absolute best in mainstream cinema weirdness!

The inimitably demented Max Showalter (as Howard Greene) is the more than appreciative audience for Barbara Ann's hysterical impromptu fashion show.

I could go about Lord Love a Duck's many other merits, but in the interest of space, let me call attention to the top-notch turns by Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, martin West, and Donald Murphy.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Lord Love a Duck was promoted with the tagline “An act of pure aggression,” but truth in fact; it’s mostly an act of pure cantankerousness. For all its outrageousness, at its core it’s a middle-aged, middle-class diatribe by the older generation (those more amenable to the comedy styles of Alan Sherman, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, or Sid Caesar) against America’s burgeoning youth movement. A movement that was swiftly rendering director/ writer George Alexelrod’s patented brand of "tired businessman" comedy (The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? How to Murder Your Wife) old-fashioned, if not obsolete.

1965 Playboy Playmate of the year, Jo Collins, is really a hoot as Kitten, the bored Beach Party movie starlet whose dialogue consists entirely of variations on the sole retort she has for anything said to her by producer/sugar daddy, T. Harrison Belmont: "Oh, Harry...you're such a drag!" 

Forty three years-old at the time this film was made, Axelrod was well past the age of distrust for the teenybopper set, and one can almost taste his vitriolic annoyance at what had become of his world of martinis, big bosoms, and smirky sex jokes. All of which probably accounts for why I find Lord Love a Duck to be so terribly funny. There's a really pissed-off, old fart sensibility behind it all that gives each satiric barb a particularly acrid sting not possible were the film coming from a place of affection. Or even understanding, for that matter. I guess that's something I can relate to.

If you’re among those who are of the mindset that we currently live in an age of smart phones and increasingly not-so smart  people, then the hedonistic, amoral, anti-intelligence, youth-centric world lampooned in Lord Love a Duck provides irrefutable and entertaining evidence of the fact that we didn't just arrive at this state of affairs overnight. It’s a course we've been headed on for quite some time.

"Talk to me. Just tell Mollywauk."

Copyright © Ken Anderson

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 being elected to the 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 escalating; 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."

The real-life Time Magazine cover, dated April 8, 1966, poses the unasked
question augured by Rosemary's Baby's unsettlingly ambiguous ending 

The seemingly insurmountable hurdle faced by anyone endeavoring to make a horror film in the tumultuous atmosphere of the late-'60s lay in determining what could possibly frighten an audience that, on a nightly basis, had beamed into their homes the violence and real-life terrors of war and protest confrontations escalated by the police and military. Audiences who, via photojournalism periodicals like Life and Look, regularly confronted graphic evidence of a nation growing increasingly chaotic. What fictional creature or imagined narrative could compete with the real-life horror that was modern America?   

Enter, Rosemary's Baby. Ira Levin's cannily-plotted 1967 bestseller was a contemporary horror story about modern-day witchcraft. Classic gothic horror conventions were revitalized by reimagining them through the prism of an emerging new worldview. A world in which drafty castles, thunderstorms, cobwebs, bats, and creaky doorways had long ceased being viable mechanisms of fear. A world of reason and logic that had moved (or so it thought) beyond the primitive influences of superstition and myth. Rosemary's Baby proposed that even in a world where God and religion were deemed obsolete, there remained unexplained (and unimaginable) things that never died. And evil that was impervious to the passage of time. 

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 Ira Levin's narrative one step further by removing the unequivocal (the novel takes the existence of Satan as a reality and presents the coven, its intentions, and Guy's recruitment as elements of fact) and replacing it with ambiguity.  

Polanski threads 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 (it subtly proposes that the dawning of the year "One" [1966] and the birth of the Antichrist on earth are the explanation for 1968's real-life horrors) and a sense that many of Rosemary's anxieties are the product of her imagination. Polanski initially filmed and later deleted several scenes that distinctly confirmed Guy's involvement with the coven and purposely gave all of Rosemary's fantastic fears rational alternatives. An avowed atheist, Polanski wanted to make an occult horror film about witchcraft and Satanism that would play just as well as a psychological thriller about a pregnant woman suffering a severe paranoid breakdown. No matter how the film is viewed, in Polanski's deft hands, Rosemary's Baby is an intense and atmospheric slow-boil horror experience that also works as an overwhelmingly persuasive allegory about the durability of evil. 

Maurice Evans as Edward "Hutch" Hutchins

Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Abraham Sapirstein

Watching Rosemary's Baby, it's difficult not to find yourself succumbing to the darkly-comic overtones of its somewhat audaciously clever plot: The living Devil born in a creepy Manhattan apartment building (the notorious Bramford, portrayed externally by the equally infamous Dakota, site of the tragic 1980 shooting death of John Lennon) to an ordinary woman. Indeed, a lapsed Catholic of wavering, undefined faith, used as a vessel by a coven of septuagenarian Satanists to herald the end of God's hegemony and the beginning of new, Satanic world order. 

Charles Grodin as Dr. C.C. Hill

Sixties audiences responded (perhaps more subliminally than consciously) to what the horror of Rosemary's Baby represented: it offered a timely and relevant "explanation" as to why the world of 1968 was such a hellscape. The son of Satan was born on earth in 1966, ushering in an era that the uncharacteristically impassioned Roman Castevet promised would- "Redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and tortured." 

So, Levin's perverse reversal of Christian myth provided a kind of cathartic release for '60s audiences, for in offering an "explanation" for the chaos of the times...even a horrifically unimaginable one...order felt temporarily restored.

Minnie: "Sometimes I wonder how you're the leader of anything!"
The outwardly ineffectual Roman casts his steely and deadly gaze on Rosemary's friend Hutch, who proves to be too curious about that tannis root charm for his own good

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 are so quick to dismiss. Imagine how this detail played to audiences 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 low-budget, B-movie double-feature fare were disquieted when this major motion picture (which was intentionally shot to look as though 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 genuinely frightening. 

Guy's First Betrayal
Polanski's use of a low camera angle allows Guy to shield his face from Rosemary
(and the audience) the first time he lies to conceal his seduction by the coven

Obfuscation and the barely-seen detail luring around the corner are among the tolls Polanski employs in his depiction of a world morally turned on its axis. In keeping so many of the film's horrors unseen or unsubstantiated, Polanski orchestrates a gradual, nightmarish transformation of all that is perceived as safe and familiar into the potentially dangerous and sinister. As a cleverly constructed parable of '60s unease, Rosemary's Baby captured the country's imagination and became a major boxoffice hit. 

The gradual dismantling of the safe structures of Rosemary's world has a destabilizing effect on the viewer, making us empathize with her isolation and vulnerability. 

Any security or safety Rosemary finds in her marriage is an illusion.

Rosemary responds to father figures. Her friend Hutch is unsuccessful in
protecting her from the superficially paternal Dr. Sapierstein, who betrays her

Rosemary's body is under assault from within and without

PERFORMANCES

Although the consistently underrated Mia Farrow contributed many outstanding performances to the films she made with Woody Allen (Broadway Danny Rose being a particular favorite), no performance of hers has ever got to me like her Rosemary Woodhouse. From the moment she appears onscreen, she exhibits a credible vulnerability and appeal that anchors the film in the kind of emotional reality necessary to make this horror fantasy work. The character from the novel comes to life in Farrow's fully-inhabited personification of a modern woman with a traditional streak (beyond home and family, there's no indication that she has any other ambitions) and a nagging guilt about her backsliding Catholicism. Best of all, her actions propel the plot. Her mistakes, strengths, vulnerabilities, and values determine how the coven's plans for her will play out.

At every turn, the actions and behavior of Farrow's Rosemary are rooted in something psychologically authentic. She's so good that no one else is imaginable in the role despite how well suited they were to Polanski's initial vision (he sought Jane Fonda or Tuesday Weld). I think Mia Farrow's Rosemary 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 demonstrated with his psychosexual thriller Repulsion (1965), Roman Polanski is an adept translator of the strange "reality" of the unreal world of dreams. The dissociated sounds, the dissipated images, the disconnected logic...Polanski captures all of these shifting subconscious impressions to great effect in crafting Rosemary's Baby's centerpiece moment--the dream/nightmare sequence. It's an eerie, atmospheric classic that's so effective that no two people see the events of Rosemary's dream in the same way. Like a real dream, its interpretation is ambiguous as it is subjective.

As you might imagine, this sequence particularly disturbed me as an 11-year-old. As a Catholic School kid, I wasn't aware of having harbored any set thoughts about the possibility of a real Satan or the Devil. This scene kinda forced the issue in a nightmarishly literal way.

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 make an indelible impression on 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 to date and was responsible for innumerable bad dreams and a reluctance to enter dark rooms for months thereafter. Revisiting it over the years in revival theaters and special Anniversary screenings (memorably, one with producer Robert Evans in a Q & A at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences) only solidifies what I intuited back in 1968; Rosemary's Baby was and is a small masterpiece.

The scene that gave me a goosebump chill the first time I saw it

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. During Rosemary's Baby, you never lose the feeling that you are in the hands of a director who knows exactly what he's going for and how to elicit precisely the response he wants from an audience. 

It's a film of solid assurance in every aspect.

BONUS MATERIAL:

D'Urville Martin, who portrayed Diego, the elevator man (who reappears in Rosemary's dream as the gruff sailor on Kennedy's yacht), became a prolific producer, actor, and director in the Black Film explosion of the early '70s. In addition to appearing in films like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Black Ceasar (1973) and being cast as the original Lionel Jefferson in TV's All in the Family, Martin directed and played the villain in the Rudy Ray Moore cult classic Dolemite (1975). 

* 2019 addendum: In the superb Eddie Murphy movie Dolemite is My Name (2019) about Rudy Ray Moore and the making of Dolemite, D'Urville Martin is portrayed by Wesley Snipes.

In 2014 Rosemary's Baby was made into a monumentally misguided TV miniseries starring Zoe Saldana. My thoughts on the matter - The Devil is in the Details: Adapting Rosemary's Baby for the Big and Small Screen.

AUTOGRAPH FILES:

My sister (my siblings are the only folks who still 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.

"It's Vidal Sassoon. It's very in."
The $5000 haircut

On August 14, 1967, a week before production began on Rosemary's Baby, legendary hairstylist Vidal Sassoon was flown to Hollywood to give Mia Farrow's already short haircut a "trim" as a publicity stunt. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Sassoon in 2003. An incredibly nice and gracious man.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 -2011