Few great directors choose to work within the horror genre. Fewer still manage to create meaningful art within the genre. With 1968's “Rosemary’s Baby,” Roman Polanksi joins this elite company.
The movie’s plot is spare, so that the emphasis can remain on the title character and her growing terror. In the first act, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) Woodhouse tour a seventh floor apartment in the fictional Bramford, a gothic apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side. Soon after they move in, they are befriended by an elderly couple on the same floor, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) Castevet.
Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the kindly Castevets look in on her. They help her find a top obstetrician and provide her with herbal drinks to support her baby’s health. Meanwhile Guy, whose aspirations to become a great actor have stalled, suddenly lands a career-making role.
Acts two and three track Rosemary’s pregnancy as she navigates a litany of primal horrors. She has severe stomach pains after becoming pregnant. Accidents happen to her friends. Rosemary suspects her neighbors of spying on her, she suspects her doctor of drugging her, and she suspects nearly everybody of wanting to harm her baby. Suspense is well built and sustained by the dual possibilities that Rosemary truly is being persecuted and that she is merely overly sensitive.
The film is not perfect. The soundtrack begins and ends with a silly, creepy song performed by Rosemary, the complete lyrics of which are “La la la la-la, la la la la.” A performance of the same tune on organ is flat-out annoying. A dream sequence featuring a coven of chanting witches, all of them over 60 – and all of them nude – would make great fodder for “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” And the character of Minnie becomes tiresome about the third or fourth time she shouts “Whaddaya say?” in her boozy, nasal voice and thick New York accent.
But the film jells in every meaningful way. Polanski directs from his own Oscar-nominated script, based on the novel by Ira Levin, and the cohesion between character, plot and dialog gives the film a thoroughly realistic feel. The sets within the apartment building are wide and claustrophobic at the same time, and the shots around Manhattan give a firm sense of time and place.
Polanski elicits top performances from his cast. Gordon deservedly won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress; few performers have ever been so sweet, so diabolical, and so annoying at the same time. And the movie catapulted Farrow to leading lady status. Rosemary reaches a point in the film where every incident, positive and negative, produces an outsize reaction. Farrow delivers the full range of emotions with perfect pitch.
Horror movies can build terror through scary monsters or cheap in-your-face tricks: Freddie Krueger and Michael Myers both deliver the goods. But the most creative horror films build terror by exhibiting their characters’ fright without explicitly showing its cause. “Rosemary’s Baby” succeeds as art – and not just as a scare-inducing popcorn flick – because Rosemary’s terror is understandable and believable, and because neither she nor the audience totally realizes its origin.
DIRECTOR: Roman Polanski SCREENWRITER: Roman Polanski PRODUCERS: William Castle, Dona Holloway CAST: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer
