Roman Polanksi's adaptation of Ira Levin's novel cast a shadow of deep influence over mainstream horror cinema thereafter. The trope of the poisoned familiar already existed but Polanski's genius for pushing both sides just enough to create dread in his audiences by appealing to their imagination. While we easily follow Rosemary through this course of industrial strength gaslighting there are moments in which we ourselves cannot easily tell if she is a genuine victim of conspiracy or her own paranoia.
We have already seen how easily we can enter a dream state in this film by the time when we wonder if we're just seeing another. It's milder than what's happening to Rosemary on screen but we in the audience are also being gaslighted by the film. Anyone who had followed his career to that point would bear witness to a frightening readiness (from at least Repulsion on) by the director to delve into the point of view of someone suffering from a chaotic vision of reality. Add a genuine destructive collusion and you have a world that looks as good as a retail catalogue but will kill you if you look too long.
Take the casting. An early suggestion when the film was in development was to have the treacherous Guy played by America's sweetheart Robert Redford. This works a treat for the poisoned familiar effect until you see what John Cassavetes does with the role, showing us all the unctuous charm of the seducer that barely covers the narcissism beneath. Redford would have started acceptable and then just turned. Cassavetes shows us someone who doesn't need to turn but keep others from noticing. A film maker himself, Cassavetes knew how far his own practice took him from the Hollywood artifice and appreciated what he could bring to a conventional narrative like this one; his performance is twice menacing, by character as written and by practitioner as skilled.
Mia Farrow, fresh from years of Peyton Place brings an American aristocratic lightness which, when tested as fundamentally as it is here, rises to a survivalist fury. That transition from her shoulder length sunlit shampoo ad hair to the close cropped severity she has it cut to which makes one of her friends describe her as Mis Concentration Camp 1966, is a deceptively simple one, led by physical appearance but fleshed through a subtly graded performance. Even in the walk; from the effortless grace of the high born young society girl to the awkward balancing act of a spindly, middle heavy pregnant woman, Farrow's performance for her first starring role on the cinema screen is committed.
Roman Castavet is an aging alpha sophisticate who can insinuate his way anywhere with a piercing stare and the kind of charm that leaves enough words out for the glamoured victim to fill them in for him. Sidney Blackmer embodies this effortlessly. But it's Mrs Castavet, Minnie, who steals the couple's show with her constant manipulation delivered through the guise of a gaudily fashionable harmless old busybody. Ruth Gordon presents the evil version of the great earth mother Maude to come. She injects a constant edgy comedy as when, removing the knife that might have been used to kill the baby, she quickly wipes the floor finish around the mark left by the blade.
One concordance of performance that always thrills me in this film is gestural. Early on, Roman Castavets flatters Guy the actor with a cold reading suggestion that Guy's performance in a small stage role impressed him. Guy fills him in, as intended, elaborating on a move he made on stage. Later, Rosemary rejoices in the baby's movement and asks Guy to feel her belly. He tries but tears his hand away with a wince, knowing what's in there. After we get over being creeped out by it we might recall that, diegetically, this moment was the actor playing the actor not acting.
Polanski at his best shows his understanding of the similarity of horror and comedy which is why the two forces often share the screen. Rosemary locks herself in her apartment believes she is temporarily safe but fails to see the people who will soon swarm in on her through the open door behind her, tiptoeing cartoonishly. Minnie Castavet's appearance as seen through the spyhole in Rosemary's apartment door looks gross and threatening long before she proves to be both. This both brings horror to real life and real life to horror. "Oh, God, it's the neighbours again," turns into, "my neighbours are going to eat my baby!" and they are the same neighbours.
1968 was a bumper year for innovation at the cinema. Night of the Living Dead showed how much could be made with how little and, removing the magic from a normally supernatural story, changed the genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey, changed science fiction by expanding the conceptual range and adding a kind of epic documentary realism to it that felt like real time. The Boston Strangler gave us the serial killer procedural. And Rosemary's Baby showed us how close our dread can be to us, how day by day, even masked by the glamour of Manhattan uptown life, how thin the veil of life that looks like a home beautiful catalogue, how vicious the monster under the skin of worldliness.
I had a conversation once with someone who liked to encapsulate his cultural experiences, form them into tiny cameos to be brought out for display when in company. Of Rosemary's Baby he reported that it was not credible because of how quickly she turns in the end. This person was (probably still is) a medical professional yet had no concept that a mother might want to take care of a child she has been defending for the entire term. If you are as incapable of seeing beyond the surface of actions, take all statements you hear as admissions of fact without motivation, then you might want to choose a profession other than medicine for starters but you need definitely to stay well clear of things that model real life like fiction. Fiction is what Rosemary's Baby is crucially about, the relaying of circumstances through invention, daily life through imagination, human experience not as falsehood but as acceptably exaggerated truth.
Is it wrong to defend Roman Polanski and his works? Is the second the same as the first? This issue keeps arising and needs to. I have never known an easy answer to it. I understand anyone's objection to consuming the works of people who have acted criminally. Do the works extend the person or is it that the person might continue to benefit from the works in the marketplace? The conception of Rosemary's baby in the story is a result of rape. She has experienced it in delirium but calls it what it is to her husband the next morning. He deflects it with a boyish swagger, laddishly bringing up the scratches on his back. It's a question she can't shake, though, however much the manipulative assuagement of the others proves effective. This is in Ira Levin's novel and made it through to Polanski's film where it is clearly stated. The worst that Guy has to endure is Rosemary spitting in his face. If it was the Devil, who let him in? The suggestion is clear that he is headed for the life of a future movie star. When Polanski won the Oscar for the best movie he'd made in decades (The Pianist) he didn't front up for it, fearing arrest, but didn't reject it either. This has gone well beyond the scope of this review for a film released about a decade before the offence. It does need stating, though, even if my conclusion is so far short of comfort.
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