UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE 1967

“Now, as then, teachers are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.”

 Up the Down Staircase author Bel Kaufman. 2012

Although I lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco at the time, my strongest memory of June and July of 1967 isn’t related to the human “Be-In” that was The Summer of Love (as I was only 10 years old at the time, in contrast to the timbre of the times, my entire existence actually depended on trusting people over 30). Instead, it relates to the fact that it was the summer vacation that I spent almost entirely in school. Not actual summer school, mind you, but as a visitor to the classes of Mr. Mark Thackeray and Miss Sylvia Barrett.

Vaguely evoking the "dueling Harlows" of 1965, in the summer of 1967, two films starring Academy Award-winners cast as idealistic high school teachers facing hoards of unruly teens in “problem area” inner-city high schools were released within weeks of one another. To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase came out in June and July, respectively, and I spent many hours in dark theaters that summer. An honorary high-schooler in a virtual classroom, receiving a first-rate education in life lessons and human compassion from two of the most inspiring fictional teachers ever culled from best-selling, semi-autobiographical sources. 

Sandy Dennis as Sylvia Barrett

Patrick Bedford as Paul Barringer

Ellen O'Mara as Alice Blake

Jeff Howard as Joe Ferone 

In an earlier essay on Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), I  commented on the psychological soundness of De Palma limiting the scope of Carrie’s destruction exclusively to that of her school (as opposed to the entire town, as it is in the novel), for the simple reason that to the average adolescent and teenager, school IS their world. 

This was certainly true for me. Back when school comprised the totality of my outside-the-home activity and influenced whatever social perceptions a ten-year-old child can claim, this narrow scope of experience led to my favoring television shows in which schools and classrooms played a regular part. The television programs I grew up watching were Leave it to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, The Andy Griffith Show, Father Knows Best, Our Miss Brooks, Dobie Gillis, and Room 222. The Saturday afternoon movies and Late Show movies I enjoyed most were those reactionary 1950s “high school juvenile delinquency” movies like High School Confidential, High School Caesar, The Cool & the Crazy, and High School Hellcats.

Ruth White as Beatrice Schacter

And even if these all-white, staunchly middle-class, sanitized exemplars of Eisenhower-era values were more social propaganda than any kind of recognizable reality to me, in their classroom archetypes (teacher’s pet, class clown, bully, tattletale) and basic school-system templates (teachers, principal, classrooms, assembly halls); just enough discernible truth was able to seep through in these movies and TV shows for me to feel as though the world I occupied--seven hours a day, five days a week--was validated through representation.
Having attended primarily Catholic schools with nuns as teachers, one of my all-time favorite high-school movies is 1966s The Trouble with Angels. But, alas, none of the nuns I came into contact with were quite as even-tempered as Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior.

Both To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase were mainstream reboots of the somewhat dormant high school juvenile delinquency film (which, during the early '60s, had been mainly supplanted by the motorcycle gang/beach party genre), their near-simultaneous release in the summer of 1967 coinciding with Hollywood's reawakened interest in the boxoffice clout of the young. No longer a strictly Drive-In exploitation market, youth-centric movies were now served with a healthy dose of social relevancy.

To Sir, with Love (a cross between that 1961 British rarity, Spare the Rod, and 1955s Blackboard Jungle) benefited from the heavy radio airplay of its ubiquitous title song; its simplified, feel-good, Civil Rights Movement topicality; and the above-the-title participation of megastar Sidney Poitier (Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? came out later that year). In this film, Poitier was essentially taking on a role similar to that of Glenn Ford's in Blackboard Jungle– the great-granddaddy of all high school juvenile delinquency films in which Poitier was cast (for the first and last time) as a disagreeable tough. 
Up the Down Staircase, on the other hand, promoted itself mainly on the strength and popularity of Bel Kaufman's terrific bestselling book—an epistolary novel consisting of notes, directives, and letters (not unlike Bob Randall's novel for the Lauren Bacall film, The Fan)—and in the casting of Sandy Dennis, the Oscar-winning breakout star of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in her first starring role.

When I, at last, got the opportunity to see both films, I was surprised and relieved to find that each, while covering roughly the same territory (teacher idealism vs. public school reality), did so from very different perspectives: To Sir, with Love taking the more socially-conscious angle of students learning life lessons about accountability and human interdependence; Up the Down Staircase satirically pitting the personal and professional challenges of being a teacher against the obstacles of administrative boondoggling and student apathy. 

Both films get a big gold star from me and rate high on my list of all-time favorite movies about teachers and teaching - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie occupying the top spot. But over time To Sir, With Love, a film I'd initially favored, has begun to feel more quaint and sweetly naive (in spite of the warm, fuzzy feelings these movies invoke in me, I’m not one to disavow claims that neither film fully succeeds in sidestepping the clichéd racial tropes of the well-intentioned Hollywood movie: the black saint/the white savior.), while Up the Down Staircase, a film that once felt too easygoing, has grown in emotional richness for me.

Mean Streets

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve neglected going into the plot of Up the Down Staircase because, as an example of the idealistic inner-city schoolteacher genre, it’s one of those films (like the manic pixie dream girl rom-com or renegade cop drama) whose genre classification serves as a roadmap for its narrative. In Up the Down Staircase, the seriocomic adventures of neophyte English teacher Sylvia Barrett (Dennis) as she grapples with the undisciplined, underserved students and battle-fatigued, red-tape deluged staff of New York’s fictional Calvin Coolidge High, follows a preset, genre-standardized dramatic arc of idealism/disillusionment/renewal - as inexorably and unwaveringly as a NY subway train speeding along the tracks.
What saves Up the Down Staircase from being just another high-minded lecture on “What’s wrong with our schools” is its light touch and sense of realism. It’s most definitely a film with points to make. But thanks to a zippy pace, a great deal of authentic school atmosphere (captured frequently with a hand-held camera,) and the compelling performances director Robert Mulligan (Inside Daisy Clover) elicits from his sizable cast of young unknowns, the film makes its points gently and with a great deal of sensitivity.

Jose Rodriguez as Jose Rodriguez 
If there's any one character in this movie that comes closest
to capturing what I was like as an adolescent, it's this guy

During the self-serious '60s, Up the Down Staircase’s cutesy score, pat characters (Dennis has at least one of each standard-issue troubled youth “types” in her class), and then-uncommon mix of comedy and drama, had the effect of making the film appear insubstantial and mawkish. However, what perhaps looked facile to me in 1967 comes across as measured and delicate today.

Up the Down Staircase benefits from a documentarian's eye for detail (this scene brings back to me the unforgettable smell of mimeograph ink and the oily texture of the paper). It also has a good eye for capturing the absurdist contradictions typical to the day-to-day operation of a school: the incessant bells, the garbled intercom announcements, the endless forms, and the mindless rules 

Instead of a socially naïve, politically heavy-handed drama trapped eternally in the time-warp of the issues of the late 1960s, Up the Down Staircase in focusing on a dedicated teacher’s frustration at being hindered from doing her job by distractions, both disciplinary and administrative, achieves a kind of timeless poignancy as a character drama. In some of the most economical filmmaking outside of an Altman movie, we come to know and care a great deal about both the kids and the teaching staff. Without really knowing how, you find yourself becoming involved in what is happening with a particular student, and, come the film's conclusion, you're likely to wonder if the story arc of your specific favorite will have a happy ending or be (realistically) left unresolved. 

The always-welcome Eileen Heckart as Henrietta Pastorfield

What's undoubtedly surprising is that the problems facing these '60s teens are really no different from what you'd hear kids talking (texting?) about today. The same goes for the complaints of the teaching staff and the burdens placed on the school system. And, true to the era (in the New Hollywood, happy endings were out), Up the Down Staircase doesn’t neatly solve or wrap up all of its dilemmas; it ends fittingly and without much fanfare…a few heartbreaking failures, a few quiet victories.


PERFORMANCES

It's always puzzled me why critics have always singled Sandy Dennis out for her acting mannerisms. I'm not saying she doesn't have them, but next to the twitchy gimmicks and facial contortions of Marlon Brando and James Dean, Dennis is practically a Sphinx. In a film like Up the Down Staircase, one with a large cast of characters required to establish their personalities quickly, a director does well to cast actors capable of exuding a distinctive, idiosyncratic individuality: something Ms. Dennis possesses in abundance. Portraying perhaps the least-neurotic character of her screen career, Dennis displays a great deal of sympathetic charm, allowing her trademark hesitancy and fragility to give overqualified first-year teacher, Sylvia Barrett, a vulnerable “otherness” that appropriately sets her apart and makes believable her soft-hearted compassion for her students. She's one of my favorite actresses, and here she gives a nicely understated performance.

Theater legend Vinette Carroll as Mrs. Lewes
Actress, playwright, and Tony-nominated director (she was the first black woman to direct a play on Broadway) Vinette Carroll's brief scene is one of the film's highlights. A genuine Oscar-nomination-worthy turn by a great actress with too few screen credits 

At the time of its release, Up the Down Staircase garnered a lot of publicity for casting real New York high school students in significant roles and as extras (who, by the way, in their low-income modes of dress, still look positively dapper compared to kid's styles today). And indeed, the youthful, diverse faces in Up the Down Staircase are a welcome improvement on the callow blandness of those teens one sees on Disney Channel, the AARP-adjacent adolescents in movies like Grease. Director Mulligan uses the inexperience of his cast members to get raw, suitably awkward performances that are not only a boon to the realistic feel of the film, but are surprisingly moving in their naturalness. Newcomer Ellen O'Mara is especially good (the scene where her lovesick character is politely excoriated by the object of her affections is more brutal than most horror films), as is the terminally shy Jose Rodriguez, and the brooding, hard-to-reach Jeff Howard.

Special mention must be made of Dennis' very teacher-like wardrobe for the film. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Films shot on location in New York usually benefit from the wealth of theater-trained actors at their disposal, and Up the Down Staircase is no exception. From Frances Sternhagen as the librarian who cares a bit too deeply about her books, to Jean Stapleton as the over-efficient office secretary who practically runs the school single-handedly, Up the Down Staircase boasts an impressive and colorful supporting cast. In addition, the film is chock-full of the early-career appearances by many actors who went on to become familiar TV faces in the '70s.  

All in The Family's Jean Stapleton as Sadie Finch

The Dukes of Hazzard's Sorrell Booke (l.) as Dr. Samuel Bester, Roy Poole as J.J. McHabe

Florence Stanley as Ellen Friedenberg (played Abe Vigoda's wife on the 70s TV series Fish)

Good Times' Esther Rolle appears as an unnamed teacher

Although rarely cited in film sources, that's Liz Torres
(The John Larroquette Show) making her film debut

Harold and Maude's Bud Cort, also making his film debut

That's Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase, making a well-placed cameo

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

They don’t call Hollywood the dream machine for nothing. Only Hollywood could make us all believe we really value teachers. Up the Down Staircase is a veritable valentine to the teaching profession. It dramatizes the state of intellectual crisis so many kids find themselves in, and it sheds light on the potential of dedicated, caring teachers to guide and shape young lives.

It certainly must be an idea we like, because Hollywood hands us the same fable every few years under a different title. Call it Dangerous Minds, Conrack, Dead Poets Society, or Stand and Deliver; the message is always the same: our young people are the answers to a better tomorrow, and our teachers hold the keys to unlocking their minds and spirits.

Sandy Dennis plays the kind of schoolteacher we all wish we had
(and perhaps a lucky few did!)

Sounds good in theory, and it certainly makes for lovely, weepy movies that make us proud of our teachers, proud of our education system, and proud of ourselves. 

But what do we do in real life? We pay teachers next to nothing, refuse to pay taxes for school funding, and actively support cutting programs and services devoted to helping “our” children develop into well-rounded, functioning individuals. And because we love our guns so much, we also contribute to helping to make our schools about as safe as a war zone. Of late, we've adopted a political culture of staunch anti-intellectualism that is frightening as it is disturbing. It’s embarrassing to contemplate and makes little sense until one stops to consider we’re also a culture that loves movies about brotherhood and racial harmony.

Lucky for us, movies like Up the Down Staircase are there to also remind and reassure us that good teachers are so dedicated, they'll continue to be devoted to educating our nation's youth...whether they actively get our support or not.

Bucking the System

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: Adapting "Rosemary's Baby" to the Big & Small Screen

Guy and Rosemary: Happy Parents-to-Be
John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow / Patrick J. Adams and Zoe Saldana

Now that the green haze of tannis root has lifted and the public’s memory of NBC’s four-hour Miniseries Event “reimagining” of Rosemary’s Baby (May 11th and 15th, 2014) is as murky and nebulous as Rosemary’s own chocolate mousse-induced dream; the votes are all in (not very good), the results have been tallied (Rosemary en France a ratings disaster), and the line for I-Told-You-Sos starts to the right.

The idea of adapting Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby and its much-reviled 1997 sequel Son of Rosemary into a TV miniseries has been bouncing around Hollywood for years. In 2005, ABC Television acquired the rights and announced a Rosemary’s Baby miniseries for its Fall 2006 schedule. When that project failed to materialize, the network made a similar announcement (to a similar result) in 2008. In each instance, fans of Polanski's classic film breathed a collective sigh of relief, attributing the abandonment of each project to an 11th-hour attack of common sense on the part of the producers. Or, at the very least, a dawning awareness of the fool’s journey involved in remaking a film widely regarded as a modern classic and one of Hollywood’s few faithfully rendered adaptations of a popular bestseller.

Your Worst Fears Realized
In the "reimagined" Rosemary's Baby, Satanism trailblazer Steven Marcato - seen here exuding more sleaze than menace - is envisioned as a Eurotrash runway model with blue contacts. We're asked to believe that this guy has managed to keep his evil past a secret for decades, in spite of the fact that he looks pretty much exactly like your standard issue, garden-variety, Sunday School image of The Devil. 

Having been taken down this road several times before, when I learned that NBC had actually made good on its lingering threat…I mean, promise…to turn Rosemary’s Baby into a four-hour telefilm, my natural curiosity overrode my innate skepticism. I knew I was going to watch the TV remake, even if only to satisfy my curiosity over what degree of hubris could possibly inspire the kind of delusional, presumptuous, thick-headed arrogance necessary for one to think they should try their hand at Levin’s modern gothic masterpiece. Especially when, in 1968, a young, pre-felony Roman Polanski fairly batted that particular Satanic ball well out of the park.

And that was just my curious side.

In 1976, Ruth Gordon reprised her Oscar-winning screen role in this almost startlingly awful made-for-TV sequel, which cast Patty Duke in the Mia Farrow role and Stephen McHattie as the grown-up Satan-child (played like James Dean on Quaaludes). The director of this opus is Sam O'Steen, editor of the original Rosemary's Baby, and director of the 1976 film Sparkle. 

My cynical side suggested that the producers, in lieu of coming up with a fresh approach to justify retelling a story already quite expertly told the first time around, merely went in search of a marketing hook. One such hook was the simple updating of the story. A lazy but valid pandering to those viewer factions devoted to never watching anything older than the age of their cellphones. The other hook was the tried-and-true "Strike while the iron is hot!" angle. 

At the time, the horror genre was experiencing something of a renaissance on TV. The popularity of the FX Network’s anthology series American Horror Story: Coven temporarily made witches relevant again, and NBC’s own blood-soaked Hannibal has shown there to be a viable market for network-suitable screams. With these two ratings hits on the charts, Rosemary’s Baby: the redux had at last surmounted its most significant remake obstacle: the ascertaining of a distinct ratings demographic to which to pitch its advertising.

Rosemary's Baby - 1968
Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Stanley Blackmer
Directed by Roman Polanski

Rosemary's Baby - 2014
Zoe Saldana, Patrick J. Adams, Carole Bouquet, Jason Isaacs
Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Well, after much ballyhoo and yo-yoing anticipation on my part, Rosemary’s Baby: The Miniseries Event finally premiered. Two evenings, four hours and countless commercials later, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't the unmitigated disaster it could have been (à la, the dreadful theatrical remakes of Carrie and Sparkle), but annoyed that the filmmakers hadn't been able to seize upon anything pertinent enough to the times we live in to either jwarrant a remake or discourage comparisons to Roman Polanski’s incontestably masterful 1968 original. (Two excellent examples of “remakes” successfully distinguishing themselves from their originals are Kate Winslet’s HBO miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce [2011] and Martin Scorsese's brilliantly intense revisit to Cape Fear [1991].)

The original Rosemary’s Baby is more than just an ingeniously realized thriller; it’s a deceptively subtle commentary on the banality of evil, the vulnerability of innocence, and the uncertain relevance of religion in the modern world. It's a film that concludes on a note of moral and psychological ambiguity, leaving you to contemplate issues that extend far beyond the parameters of Levin's story. By way of contrast, NBC’s version, with roughly 30 more minutes at its disposal, was so plot-driven and devoid of subtext, I found myself not even thinking about the broader “Is God Dead?” ramifications of what it means for the living son of Satan to be born into the world today (neither does the film), merely wondering about plot points that led nowhere (the whole Roman Castevet/Steven Marcato, eternal youth thing) and scratching my head over how a longer version of Rosemary's Baby managed to have less character development. The miniseries left me with nothing, not even a chalky undertaste.

Minnie & Roman

Roman & Margaux

In the original film, there's a perverse, contemporary wit in having the orchestrators of Satan's plan to overthrow 2000 years of Christian hegemony all look like harmless residents of the nearest nursing home. As much as I adore Carole Bouquet in the remake, the vision of evil this Roman and Minnie (Margaux) represent is as superficial and obvious as a 90s erotic thriller. 

Rosemary’s Baby: The feature film, is a seminal horror classic, integral in moving the horror film from the B-movie bargain basement into the mainstream. Rosemary’s Baby: The miniseries, while respectful, ultimately proved itself only as an innocuous work of professional competency. By any qualitative standard that makes a movie resonate with me (character development, physiological sensitivity, narrative cohesion, use of cinema vocabulary, subtlety) there really is no comparing the two.

However, what does intrigue me is how these two films — so vastly different in approach, yet adapted from the same book — illuminate the intricacies involved in adapting a novel to film. Forty-six years have passed since these disparate book-to-screen adaptations of Levin’s 1967 bestseller, and the artistic choices made by the filmmakers reveal as much about how significantly movies have evolved over the years as they do about our culture.

The Tannis Racket

NOTES ON AN ADAPTATION

First off, let me address the word “reimagined.”  There is no such thing. Like the Devil, reimagined is a corporate invention. “Reimagined” is “remake” with its negative connotations surgically removed after first passing through the obfuscating, verbal camouflage of legalese and marketing. Rosemary’s Baby on Ice?: now we're talking reimagined. Rosemary's Baby as Kabuki theater performed by The Muppets?: that's reimagined. Merely updating it, moving it to Paris, and throwing superfluous characters and elements from The Omen and 666 Park Avenue into the mix...that's a remake. A desperate, starved-for-ideas remake, but a remake, nonetheless. If you doubt it, imagine what would happen if every year they gave an Oscar or Emmy for Best Remake; the word "reimagined" would go the way of the word "rerun" (which we all know has transmogrified into "encore presentation").

Hearth and Hell

(In the interest of brevity, Rosemary’s Baby and its remake 

will hereafter be referred to as RB1 and RB2, respectively.)

A curious factoid is that both adaptations of Ira Levin's novel have been
adapted for the screen by Polish directors. Polanski, of course, and for the 2014 reboot, 
compatriot Agnieszka Holland (Oscar nominee for Europa Europa - 1990)  

The Setting

New York's Dakota Apartments became The Bramford for Rosemary's Baby

The Manhattan setting of RB1 is a purposeful upending of traditional horror genre conventions. In lieu of a gothic tale of ancient evil set in a dark, abandoned castle somewhere in Europe, RB1 stages its horrors in broad daylight, in the middle of a crowded city, framed against the steel and glass backdrop of New York City, circa: 1966. A Western Age of Enlightenment where reason and logic have replaced fear and superstition. A world where science rules -“I want vitamins in pills, like everybody else.”; our welfare is entrusted to populist authority figures -“He’s very good. He was ‘Open End.’”; and religious faith has grown irrelevant -“I was brought up a Catholic. Now I don’t know.”

Contemporary culture’s disavowal of all things spiritual -“There are no witches, not really,” coupled with the credence granted surface appearances -“Honey, they’re old people, and they have a bunch of old friends….” is precisely how it is possible for an unimaginable evil to flourish, undetected, right under everyone’s noses. RB1 challenges our notions of safety by illustrating how easily evil can hide in plain sight.

Standing in for The Bramford, La Chimere: an exclusive Paris apartment building

If RB1 is a departure from gothic tradition, RB2 is more a reversion to type. It’s set in Paris, a city more than 10,000 years old, crammed with gargoyles and Gothic structures. In short, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find witches. Roman Castevet, cast as perhaps the least disarming person you've ever seen in your life, looks about as trustworthy as a Bond villain, and this Rosemary is required to ignore one blatant red flag after another while a virtual torrent of dead bodies piles up around her. Why? For no logical or character-based reason beyond that the story demands it. And therein lies the problem with this remake. Superficial changes to location and character description are no substitute for understanding that Rosemary's Baby has always been more than just a "scary movie." Which is why it has endured. Without making this version "about" anything other than the mindless retracing of its predecessor's footsteps, character identification suffers, narrative coherence is lost, and RB2 becomes just another forgettable, plot-driven horror film with nothing to say about anything except "Boo!"

The Time
RB1 was released during a time when the Catholic Church was undergoing a period of reform. Pope Paul VI (his 1965 New York visit is referenced in the film) took strides to modernize the church’s image, while, simultaneously, Christian theologian Paul van Buren was making headlines with his “God is Dead” theories. Into this atmosphere came a horror film whose premise was viewed by many to be a bastardization of the allegory of the Christ child. A reversal of the New Testament Christian myth complete with a divine father figure, a chosen vessel, and a birth–signifying the dawning of a new era–attended by adoring followers.
In Levin's fantasy, Satan, Rosemary (significantly, a lapsed Catholic), and the birth of the anti-Christ all signaled the dawning of a new Dark Age for the world. A bleak period all too imaginable given the climate of the times (gun violence, political assassinations, urban riots, the Vietnam War). In the socially conscious world of the 60s, Rosemary's Baby, as a quasi-religious horror parable, had an eerie urgency that struck a chord with the public.

No such social urgency occurs in RB2. To an almost hermetic degree, the real-life horrors of today fail to intrude upon the clichéd horrors on display in RB2. Just going from my own idea of what a contemporary embodiment of Satan on earth would be like, I envision him as one of those conservative, ultra-right-wing billionaires using his vast fortune to convince middle-class people that the problems of the world are the fault of the poor. He would use his money to help perpetuate fear, oppress the powerless, accelerate global warming, and subtly promote war, gun violence, and international terrorism. That sounds evil to me. A story proposing Rosemary's pregnancy unleashing this kind of evil into the world, I would find compelling, to say the least.

How is ultimate evil embodied in RB2? The best this movie can come up with is that Satan is like Charlie Sheen crossed with Jack the Ripper. He’s a wealthy whoremonger who hangs around in sex clubs. That’s the entirety of this movie’s idea of evil, folks. 

Polanski knew that the only way RB1 would work was to root its fantastic narrative in a recognizable reality. RB2 goes ludicrously in the opposite direction and situates itself within a reality known only to television. The world inhabited by the Parisian Castevets is of the elite rich (are we supposed to be impressed, or repulsed?); racism is non-existent (the film is either unaware or purposely ignores the implications of what it means to present a solitary Black woman at the center of a horror narrative in which she is ceaselessly exploited by a league of white people); and Catholicism plays no part (can't risk offending anyone, for ratings sake). It's a world so artificially realized that some viewers actually thought this Rosemary’s Baby had a happy ending (!!).

The Characters

Had Roman Polanski been as enamored of Levin’s spawn-of-Satan plotline as those who’ve unofficially cribbed from it over the years (The Stranger Within, The Devil Within Her, It’s Alive, The Devil’s Advocate, The Astronaut’s Wife), Rosemary’s Baby might have turned out as undistinguished a thriller as the above-listed. But Polanski, a self-avowed agnostic, could never take the literalness of the story seriously. Thus, he emphasized the psychological aspects of the story, including its paranoia and characters. Polanski utilized the supernatural, genre-dictated aspects of the plot to serve the motivations, interactions, and relationships of the story's principals. This approach perhaps produces a horror film too slow and bloodless for today’s ADHD audiences, but mercifully spares us the sort of leaps in logic and character inconsistencies that plague RB2’s more action-driven adaptation. 

I've never seen Zoe Saldana in a film before, yet without actually becoming Rosemary for me (or any human being I've ever known, the script has her behaving so erratically), I think she is very good. She's written and portrayed in such a blank manner (so little is provided in the way of narrative thrust for her character) that when things start to go horribly wrong, there's no risk placed on any of her goals because she has none.

Saldana is not given much assistance with the epically inexpressive Patrick J. Adams, whose sole, all-purpose expression (noodly wimp) supports a Guy Woodhouse that makes absolutely no psychological sense. He's not ambitious enough to be convincingly evil, and seems too slow-witted to be wily. On the plus side, Adams is so unrelentingly awful, his work has the potential of making folks look more kindly upon the subtleties of John Cassavetes' underappreciated performance.

RB2's saving grace and sole element of inspired casting and character is Carole Bouquet's Margaux Castevet. I absolutely love the changes in the character, how she's written, and how she's played. Mysterious, maternal, malevolent, VERY sexy...it's the only part of RB2 to which I'd give an unqualified thumbs up.

Mrs. Castevet, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?

I've been crazy about Rosemary's Baby since it scared the crap out of me as a child in 1968. It has always seemed to me such an ideal, perfectly realized film...I never seriously thought anyone would really attempt remaking it. Well, they finally did, and after seeing it, I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a slight sense of vindication in my belief that Polanski's film is precisely Levin's novel, ingeniously adapted, and should be left alone. Hollywood is so hooked on the safety-valve factor of no-risk moviemaking that every time a reboot, remake, or sequel fails, some filmmaking angel gets their wings. Producing one less sequel opens the potential for something original to be made. 

Had NBC's Rosemary Baby proved a ratings hit, I'm almost positive it would have spawned a series. But who really ever needed to know what happened after Rosemary's child was born? I know some folks hate ambiguous or open-ended conclusions, but in the case of Rosemary's Baby, I've always felt it more rewarding to imagine what happens after the birth of the Anti-Christ than to have it dully spelled out for me in some unimaginative, literal-minded way.  

A genuine, bona fide classic motion picture is a rare thing. When it occurs, perhaps we should just let it be and simply enjoy it as is. Dated material and all. It still has value.

Even if that value is only to remind ourselves that excellence, not imitation, is something we should all strive for.

BONUS MATERIAL
Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby, the ill-advised 1976 TV-movie sequel to Rosemary's Baby, is available on YouTube. 

"You're trying to get me to be his mother."

"Aren't you his mother?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014