ROSEMARY'S BABY
Go Adrian go!
I've been promising for just about forever, it seems, that I'd watch this movie (which bored me damn near to death the first time I saw it) again and give it another shake. And I've been putting it off because, well, if it remains as uninteresting upon the second viewing as it did on the first, I can think of a lot more rewarding ways I can spend 140 minutes. Bun's cage needs cleaning, for example.

On one hand, I don't want to disrespect an obviously exquisitely-crafted film that has had an enormous impact upon the genre and is remembered, by most horror fans, as one of the true greats. But I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you - if it bores the crap out of me, it bores the crap out of me. Film history is choked with exquisitely crafted coma-inducers. Don't you ever find yourself sitting there watching a classic, important movie and you find yourself thinking, "Jesus fucking Christ, will it ever end?"

So, giving this one a second viewing had me of two minds. I remember all too well the hysterics of many otherwise sensible alt.horror regulars when my previous "review" - really just a jumble of first-impression thoughts written long before I even wrote reviews - was posted by a shit-disturbing third party. I'm not exactly kept up at nights worrying about what everybody here thinks of me - were that the case, for the sake of what's left of my sanity I'd have given up writing reviews long, long ago - but I do nonetheless find it to be a bit of a downer to find all these people with whom I'm otherwise friendly suddenly pounce with comments like...well, I'd quote them but I can't find the goddamn things because of the mess Google has made of Deja's archives (and I'm not looking any further because the damn place crashes Windows on my 'puter whenever I try poking around in there). But some were quite rude, and puzzling, considering that any cursory look at the post would make clear that I didn't even post it. So I hoped that after a second viewing, I'd have some more positive things to say. But on the other hand, nothing's more boring than towing the company line, and yeah, no small part of me salivated at the chance to send a sacred cow off to my slaughterhouse.

All this having been said, I've got to admit - Rosemary's Baby is a lot rewarding on the second viewing. But, I cannot blame myself (or anyone else) for finding it as tedious as I did when I first saw it; this strikes me as a movie about which the viewer, going in, must know either nothing or (most) everything about. I envy those who got to see it upon its original release, years before I was born. The reputation it's accumulated over the decades has, in part, worked against it; to see this movie knowing as much as but only its general ideas and storyline is sure to result in one hell of a lot of frustrated fidgeting.

So. Fall, 1965. Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse (John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow) move into a posh New York apartment, a pretty swanky setup considering that they're living on a semi-employed actor's wages. They befriend a young, reformed street girl and the elderly couple who took them in (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer). The girl commits suicide for reasons never revealed (by movie's end, while it's never addressed again, it becomes fairly clear), and just as Guy's career prospects are starting to improve, they agree to have a baby, in which the elderly couple takes quite an interest. Already, I've told you too much; if you know nothing more than this, then you're at the same level I was going in to my first viewing, and this is probably going to be a butt-numbing 140 minutes for you if this review is what convinces you to see it. The rest of this review will have spoilers aplenty, so consider yourself warned.

Rosemary's the kind of meek soul who'll hold a beer can at arm's length when opening it to avoid the remote chance of getting nailed in the eye with a squirt. Her most courageous act is the haircut she gets about halfway through, which the rest of the cast spends the rest of the film mocking, and rightfully so, it's terrible! By the end of the movie we've seen no small evidence to suggest that she's afraid of men, and once she starts getting protective of that fetus in her she starts automatically referring to it as a "she".

Like I said earlier, after all these decades, Rosemary's Baby only really works if it's approached in certain ways. If the viewer has had the good fortune to somehow remain ignorant of the film's reputation, he can go in with a fresh slate and enjoy it as a wonderfully ambiguous paranoid chiller which never lets you know until the end whether or not its heroine is merely imagining things. And if the viewer already knows the ending and just what's involved leading up to it, it's a lot of fun to watch the film while figuring out just what's going on in rooms where the camera doesn't happen to be. There are two stories here, and the film only explicitly shows us one of them. (Unfortunately, I did not, despite my best efforts, find the cleverly-placed plume of cigar smoke once alluded to on this newsgroup)

Problem is, these days, most people seeing this for the first time know the ending and that's it. Such was the case with myself, seeing this for the first time a couple of years ago. And what a bloody tiresome exercise it is to watch this thing, unable to enjoy the first-timer's ambiguity or the repeat viewer's inference of scenes unseen. (throws up hands in defeat) I know better than to bother explaining that further.

One level at which I found this quite interesting is how Anton LaVey, founder of the Church Of Satan and all-around cranky misanthrope, served in an official capacity as an advisor on this film. LaVey can apparently be seen in one scene; I couldn't see him, but damn if I don't remember seeing him on my first viewing, years back. Anyway, his involvement makes a number of aspects of the film quite amusing; for example, Rosemary comes to the conclusion over time that there is a coven of witches conspiring against her. LaVey in fact saw practitioners of witchcraft as being even more pathetic than he saw Christians; viewers who see no distinction between witches and Satanists (and that would be most people) wouldn't really "get" that part of the punch line of the movie.

LaVey's church was fairly new at the time, and was in danger of becoming, dare I say, "hip". That never REALLY happened, but this movie is a good example of LaVey's attempts to, uh, "advertise". When we finally see the Satanists revealed for what they are, they're all pretty much they kind of people LaVey was very much hoping to attract: doctors, other professionals, well-educated people, at any rate. Considering how much he loathed rock music, it must have pissed him off to no end that by the end of the century, about 98% of the people who ever took him halfways seriously was a segment of the heavy metal crowd.

Rosemary's Baby was produced by gimmick king William Castle, who wisely managed to assign the task of direction and screenplay adaptation to Roman Polanski. I mean, could you imagine this movie written and directed by Castle? I love Castle, but there's just such a huge disconnect there in styles. Polanski's direction is thoughtful but slooow; in a word, Kubrickian, so again I find it hard to blame anybody whose attention wanders. More of those gorgeous zips over New York apartment buildings would've been appreciated. But he gets to squeeze in some pretty nifty dream sequences, the most relevant of which gets a razor-sharp punch line with Rosemary's realization that it probably isn't just a dream.

As for the cast, well, as much as I was prepared to hate Mia Farrow again, I liked her just fine. Not much more, but just fine. John Cassavetes is excellent, never showing that he's feeling guilt, always showing (ever so slightly, like a good actor would) that he's struggling against it. Ruth Gordon as the grotesquely made-up neighbor (think Mimi from Drew Carey's show), I found rather annoying - I know, she's supposed to be (and she won an Oscar for it), but the charisma gap between her and her far more likeable husband (Sidney Blackmer) is so great that I was disappointed that the more welcoming husband wasn't emphasized more.

In a lot of ways, Rosemary's Baby is very much a product of the 60's, and maybe it'll probably never be possible for anybody to swallow it so much as people did when it came out. The cliché that you shouldn't trust anyone over 30 is given outrageous creedence for the purposes of this story. People don't buy that one nearly as much as they apparently once did, I mean c'mon, Clapton is still recording, isn't he? Old men with earring-holes are considered unusual enough to be creepy in this film. Again: Clapton. (Clapton desperately needs to retire.)

A lot of the movie's power upon its release depended upon the state of the society around it; this LaVey guy was actually in the media from time to time, and his church was not the snickership that most people would ultimately decide it was. (today, for sure, we still get the occasional "Satanic cult scares", but generally nothing associated with LaVeyan Satanism) IS GOD DEAD? Was a prominent front page (featured in the film!) of Time magazine; could Time get away with printing that now? I don't know. The late sixties saw, of course, more changes in society than I could possibly hope to list, but that many changes are inevitably going to result in a lot of people who think they're in the End Times. Yeah, there's something of a resurgence of that in recent years (lots of Christian apocalyptic fiction floating around out there), but I can't imagine it matching the panicked fright of those in the late 60's who wanted society to stay static. The concept of an Antichrist was not, at the time, particularly hard to swallow for a lot of people. (though these days...who was it, Jerry Falwell who said that the Antichrist is alive and he's a Jew? Ah well, I don't know what kind of idiot takes Falwell seriously anyway.)

I admit, I noticed no suggestion of the young couple's increased prosperity when Guy's career starts taking off other than the switch from a black-and-white television set to a color one (both of which are always viewed by the couple from a distance of about eighteen inches). If this is intentional or not, I have no idea. There is also no shortage of self-conscious "hints" as to what's going on (candle holders look like inverted crosses, the baby's due in June of 1966 - 6/66, heh heh heh).

The prominent (nay, incessant) figuring of Beethoven's "Fur Elise" gets pretty damn annoying by the end of the film. Anybody's who's been playing piano for more than ten minutes plays that song, and invariably, it's the one that gets played when you're at a family gathering in a house with a piano and somebody says "Hey, you, play something for us!" "Fur Elise" is to the piano what "Stairway To Heaven" is to the electric guitar. I mean, it's a very nice song, but I don't think my life would be any less rich if I never heard it again for the rest of my life.

Still, I'd say that the biggest problem with this movie has to be the physical appearance of that baby. We never actually see the baby (phew!), but we're told that he has his father's eyes and feet, and we see his father's eyes and feet (well, arms) all right. I think either Eric or Criswell once said of this, something to the effect of, "What's he gonna do, run amuck in the subway?". And I'd have to agree; unless he develops spooky powers or starts looking, well, normal, this kid's never going to have aspirations higher than a pretty limiting career as a circus freak.

Other than that, Rosemary's Baby gives us one of the more delightful climaxes I've seen. As I said before in the previous "review", that one lady's rapturous "Hail Satan!" has so much life in it that it damn near makes the film right there. C'mon, by the time this scene finishes, you'll probably be cheering for Satan too.

I guess all I can really say about this movie in terms of recommending it or not is that if you've gotten this far in the review and you haven't seen it yet, you're probably not going to get nearly as much out of it on your first viewing as you are likely to on your second.

Based on the book by Ira Levin (never read it), Rosemary's Baby spawned two sequels, of sorts: an awful TV movie called Look What Happened To Rosemary's Baby (only Ruth Gordon returned, obviously in the thrall of the post-Oscar curse that afflicts supporting actresses), and a written sequel by Levin himself called Son Of Rosemary, about which I've yet to hear anything good.

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