Rosemary: “This isn’t a dream! This is really happening!”
“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) is one amazing film. It’s so sturdily constructed. It can be taken at face value – and you can get creeped out by the possibility of a coven of witches impregnating poor Rosemary with the devil’s child. The beauty of it is that you can also interpret the whole journey as a woman’s descent into madness and that everything that you’re envisioning is a paranoid fever dream. Regardless, the loss of identity – the loss of control – the feelings that no one is on your side, the existential state in which Rosemary finds herself — is something we can all relate to during this infamous year. Polanski is one of the directors I teach in my class consistently. I refer to his techniques and craftmanship as often as I do Hitchcock. “Rosemary’s Baby” is masterful – and this is the perfect week – the season of the witch – to visit one of the best psychological thrillers / horror films ever made. One thing I can guarantee you is that the chills you will experience will be owed to subtlety and restraint – and not gore nor cheap scares. It’s impeccable.
Paramount head of production Robert Evans acquired the rights for Ira Levin’s galleys of his upcoming thriller “Rosemary’s Baby” and hired international sensation Roman Polanski to make his American debut. It went on to become one of the best-selling novels of the 1960s.
The movie starts with a haunting lullaby and a panning across the New York city landscape. The camera moves from right to left which fells unnatural to us since our brain processes movement from left to right. It settles on a young unsuspecting couple – Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse – who are entering a very Gothic like building (the Dakota in real life). The apartment they’re looking at just recently came on the market for its dweller recently died. Rosemary notices an unfinished note left behind “I can no longer associate myself with…” Guy is a struggling actor who’s only made a couple of commercials, but they decide to take on the lease hoping for good luck to come their way. Their good friend, Hutch, warns them “this house has a high incident of unpleasant happenings.” The next door neighbors are an elderly nosy couple. One evening while doing laundry in a common area Rosemary meets a recovering addict – Terry Gionoffrio – who has been taken in by Minnie and Roman Castevets. Soon after, she is found on the street having leapt to her death. The Castevets invite Rosemary and Guy for dinner. Rosemary cannot stand them. “She’s the nosiest person I’ve ever met,” she comments. Guy is fond of them.
Subsequently, Guy gets cast on an important production after the actor who was originally chosen goes unnacountably blind. He’s feeling hopeful about their future and wants them to have a baby right away. Minnie brings Rosemary a mousse to eat that has an odd chalky taste. She feels woozy after eating and has a very strange dream. She wakes up to realize Guy and her have had sex. She gets pregnant and the neighbors give her strange potions, insist that she goes to their favorite doctor and present her with Terry’s pendant that contains “tannis root.” From that point on Rosemary doesn’t feel like herself.
Roman Polanski starts his autobiography saying, “for as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred. I have taken most of a lifetime to grasp that this is the key to my very existence.” I bring that up for it is established early in the film that Rosemary has very vivid dreams in which her fears and early childhood are explored. Pay attention how he articulates that first sequence. The camera will tilt up from Rosemary lying on her bed to wallpaper above her – and then the camera will become handheld – and the landscape of her subconscious will begin. I point this out because this same vocabulary will be repeated on the evening that she envisions the satanic cult taking over her body – and the scene in which she believes she goes next door to see her baby. This is all very determined.
As is the color scheme. There is a palette of pale yellows (Rosemary) and baby blues (Roman and the other male figures). Red is introduced with the neighbors and any vision of the devil. It’s also worth singling out the lighting. For a horror film, it’s unexpectedly bright – which adds to the feeling of paranoia and that evil is lurking everywhere. There’s an extraordinary scene where out of desperation – and the feeling that nothing is trustworthy — Rosemary encloses herself in a telephone booth. The camera remains on her tightly framed. The lines of the booth creating a frame within a frame impose a sense of entrapment, as she appeals to Dr. Hill to help her out. “There are plots against people, aren’t there?” she implores.
Every time I see this film, I read a different interpretation. I saw it for a while as a big feminist statement, a woman railing against the role and rules that society was imposing on her. In our current paranoid uncertainty, it keeps echoing. It’s a classic.
Rosemary: “What have you done to it?! What have you done to its eyes?!”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on ShowTime Anytime, ShowTime via subscription or Prime Video, DIRECTV, fuboTV and rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, Microsoft, FandangoNOW, Apple TV, Redbox and AMC Theatres on Demand.
Screenplay by Roman Polanski. Based on the novel by Ira Levin.
Directed by Roman Polanski
Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans and Ralph Bellamy
137 minutes
Bringing “Rosemary’s Baby” to the Screen
“Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears,” Levin wrote in the 2003 New American Library edition of ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ “I was struck one day by the thought…that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!” William Castle, the genial producer and director of low-budget movies, wanted to prove that he was up to an A-list film, and here was his opportunity to do it. According to the new book ‘This Is No Dream: Making Rosemary’s Baby,’ an insightful study of the film written by James Munn (with photographs by Bob Willoughby), Castle, as well as suspense master Alfred Hitchcock, was given the chance to option the screen rights to ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ When Hitchcock passed on the project, Castle mortgaged his house and bought the rights for $100,000, plus another $50,000 if the novel hit the best-seller lists. (It did, with readers snapping up 2.5 million copies before the movie’s release.) Meanwhile, the young Robert Evans, a former actor who was new to producing, had teamed up with Paramount and was “looking for the unexpected,” he has said, “something that sounded new.” Hearing of Castle’s purchase, he swooped in. They negotiated a deal to make the film together, and though Castle was gunning to direct, Evans and Paramount chief Charlie Bluhdorn pushed for Polanski, an emerging talent whose success with the tensile Repulsion and the bizarre Cul-de-Sac suggested he could handle the sustained uncertainty, the atmospheric layers, of Levin’s book. Polanski started reading ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ and at first it looked to him, he said, like “a kitchen melodrama, you know, for television.” But he kept going, couldn’t stop, finished in hours, hooked. He could see the cinematic potential. And as Munn points out in his book, ‘Castle’ was soon swayed by the director’s potential, telling Bluhdorn, “Charlie, you were right, Roman Polanski is the only one who can direct Rosemary’s Baby.” (vanityfair.com)
Casting “Rosemary’s Baby”
“When it came to casting, Polanski needed guidance. The character Rosemary Woodhouse is a lapsed Catholic from Omaha, and Polanski saw her as a corn-fed all-American girl—specifically, Tuesday Weld. Evans, Castle, and Levin all wanted Mia Farrow. Introduced to American audiences in 1964—as virginal Allison MacKenzie in the prime-time television soap ‘Peyton Place’—Farrow saw her profile rise in 1966 when she married Frank Sinatra, who was 29 years older. They were a puzzling pair—the beatific waif and the Vegas big shot. Sinatra was dubious about Farrow’s taking the role. Polanski feared she’d be too “ethereal.” But Evans, as Munn reports, was right on the money when he said that Farrow’s fragility would give the picture “real magic.” Her milkmaid gentleness, her Twiggy body, her large unblinking blue eyes—Mia is the movie’s soul. She’s like a filament, the incandescent Everygirl in a Black Sabbath situation.” (vanityfair.com)
The Cinematography of “Rosemary’s Baby”
“Roman is one of the greatest storytellers I’ve worked with, and he really knew how to control and lead the audience — to make them squirm in their seats,” Fraker told American Cinematographer. “And he used suggestion to do a lot of it. His earlier films, Repulsion and Cul-De-Sac, had very little actual violence in them, but they were horrifying. That’s part of the trip, and Roman knew how to do that dramatically through the acting and the dialogue. When you’re a cinematographer, you have to do it visually, with the lighting and the camera.” Speaking to AC about his collaboration with Fraker, Polanski recalled that the cinematographer was recommended to him by Robert Evans, then the head of Paramount Pictures, and production designer Richard Sylbert. “Dick knew that Billy was someone to watch,” said Polanski, adding that Fraker “very much enjoyed the freedom Robert Evans gave us.” Polanski recalled that Fraker had just finished a stint at Universal Studios that had been very restrictive, and as a result of that experience, the cinematographer fretted quite a bit at the beginning of the ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ shoot. Polanski said he teased Fraker about his white hair, telling him, “Don’t worry.” Fraker cites this collaboration with Polanski as a formative experience. He remembers staging a scene in the Woodhouse apartment set in which duplicitous Satanic mastermind Minnie Castevet (played by the diminutive Ruth Gordon) is told that Rosemary is pregnant. Gordon leaves the living room and enters a bedroom where she telephones another coven members with the good news. To represent Rosemary’s POV, Fraker initially framed the shot on Gordon through a doorway, seated on the edge of the bed in full view, but Polanski insisted on a different approach. He only wanted the audience to see a portion of Gordon, and not see the phone at all: Fraker remembered, “I didn’t get it until we were in dailies and I saw everyone leaning in their seats, trying to look around the edge of the door frame to see what was happening.”
…Polanski recalled that one of the objectives on ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ was to create “depth, not just a flat field” via composition and camera placement. He explained, “If you use composition in such a way that things are hidden from your camera, you can discover something that was hidden when you move sideways, particularly if you use wider lenses, where you come close to the object in the foreground. That was the sort of thing that I was trying to do on Rosemary’s Baby, more so than on my previous films. Since then I have learned a lot, but these things were relatively new for me then.” With the exception of this opening shot, the entire film was photographed with either a 18mm or 25mm lens, which adds a subtle level of consistency to the imagery, as well as gave Fraker the opportunity to fully capture Sylbert’s impressive sets depicting the Woodhouse’s apartment. “Dick Sylbert’s sets were amazing,” Fraker said. “They were completely wild, so we could shoot from anywhere, and the walls were held together with these metal catches so they could be taken apart and put back together without damage.” He adds that because of the wide lenses, lighting could not be done from the floor, and that the 20’ walls prohibited anything but toplight from the overhead grid, so a system of extendible lamp supports (dubbed “trombones”) was created, allowing Fraker to attach lamps to the walls themselves and raise and lower his sources so they would be just off camera. Operator David Walsh later told AC, “Roman had come out of making films in Europe, which was considerably different from how Hollywood films were made. One of our first days shooting was a handheld shot walking Mia down the corridor of the apartment. On a woman, especially a star, you typically don’t want to use a wide-angle because it makes her face look bulbous. So we put on a 40mm lens and some diffusion and walked the stand-in up and down. Billy showed Roman, and Roman said, ‘No, no, no, Billy, I don’t want those lenses. I want a very wide-angle lens.’ Billy said, ‘But we’re shooting the star here. Why do you want wide-angle?’ Roman said, ‘Because I want the apartment to be another character in the story. I want it to always be overwhelming Rosemary, to have it even curve, if we can do that, so the walls are enveloping her.’ Billy and I looked at each other, and we were both thinking, ‘That’s really smart. Why didn’t we think of that?’ (ascmag.com)
Author Ira Levin on “Rosemary’s Baby”
“Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck one day by the thought (while not listening to a lecture) that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine! Several years later, the thought came back to me when, in the wake of a Broadway flop, I was fishing for an idea for a suspense novel. I tried to figure out exactly what that fetus was growing into. Genuine medical horrors were out; hardly the stuff of popular fiction. I could imagine only two possibilities: my unfortunate heroine had to be impregnated either by an extraterrestrial or the devil. ETs had already fathered children in ‘The Midwich Cuckoos,’ a novel by John Wyndham, and though that book had dealt with several children growing up rather than their mothers bearing them, I nonetheless felt I was stuck with Satan. In whom I believed not at all. But I had no other intriguing ideas and a family to support. I read up on witchcraft and, late in 1965, set to work. I anchored my unbelievable story in the reality of Manhattan in that season—as much to make myself believe it as to win the belief of readers. I saved the daily newspapers, checking back through them on the transit strike, the incoming shows, the mayoral election, writing always a few months ahead of Rosemary and Guy’s calendar. I wasn’t at all sure how the book would be received. I was well aware that what I was doing was standing the story of Mary and Jesus on its head, and I feared that editors and publishers might run me out of town on a rail. But I could see nowhere else to go with the idea. When I checked back through the newspapers for the events of the optimal date for the baby’s conception—so he would arrive exactly half the year round from Christmas—I found, on October 4, 1965, Pope Paul’s visit to New York City and the Mass he celebrated at Yankee Stadium that night. I took it as a sign—though I don’t, of course, believe in signs—and kept writing.
Sure enough, I wasn’t run out of town on a rail. Lee Wright, the editor of my earlier novel A Kiss Before Dying, loved the new Baby, and so did Random House’s genial maestro Bennett Cerf. He suggested that Rosemary might be hit by a taxi on the way to a hospital and the baby disappear somehow, but I said I didn’t think that was a good idea, and he didn’t mention it again. (Publishers deferred to authors in those days.) The book was favorably reviewed and became a best seller, thanks in large part to a generous quote from Truman Capote which Random House cannily printed on the front of the jacket. The movie rights had been sold before publication to William Castle, an amiable schlock producer-director best known for wiring theater seats to jolt patrons of The Tingler. I wasn’t thrilled, but no other offers had come in. Fortunately, Castle turned to Paramount for financing, whereupon Robert Evans took charge and brought in a much-talked-about young European filmmaker to direct and write the screenplay—Roman Polanski. The result was possibly the most faithful film adaptation ever made. It incorporates whole pages of the book’s dialogue and even uses specific colors mentioned. It was not only Polanski’s first Hollywood film but also the first one he made based on someone else’s material; I’m not sure he realized he had the right to make changes. His understated directorial style perfectly complemented the style of the book, and the casting couldn’t have been better. I’m one of several people who claim credit for first suggesting Mia Farrow for the leading role. The movie of Rosemary’s Baby attracted some of the hostility I had worried about while writing the book. A woman screamed “Blasphemy!” in the lobby after the first New York preview, and I subsequently received scores of reprimanding letters from Catholic schoolgirls, all worded almost identically. The Legion of Decency condemned the film, but the film turned around and condemned the Legion; when the film became a major hit despite, or because of, its C rating, the Legion, already on its last legs, was disbanded. Lately, I’ve had a new worry. The success of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ inspired Exorcists and Omens and lots of et ceteras. Two generations of youngsters have grown to adulthood watching depictions of Satan as a living reality. Here’s what I worry about now: if I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?” (criterion.com)