Hold onto your tits guys, but until this viewing, I'd only seen Rosemary's Baby once before - and that was twenty-eight years ago. I persuaded my dad to let me watch it when it was shown on BBC2 when I was a kid. I thought it was part of Moviedrome, but a quick glance on BBC Genome tells me that it was actually part of Moving Pictures, which dates it to a Saturday in 1991. I would have been eleven years old. Not exactly the right age for the film.
All I can actually remember from that viewing though is Elisha Cook (wonderful as ever) showing them around the apartment, Ralph Bellamy and that scene. Not surprising that a '40s cinema obsessed kid would recall those two performers, whilst the conception is bound to stick in anyone's head. But everything else I know of Rosemary's Baby has come from popular culture I think, which makes me wonder now if I even stuck around until the end as a boy.
Why has it taken me this long to properly view it though? Well, as I say, it's a film that is so entrenched in popular culture, you don't really feel like you need to see it. It will hold no surprises after all. But the fact that I love the cast and the director does make it odd that I've waited almost thirty years to watch it again/properly. I've no excuses. I've had the DVD for years. But, this being Halloween and, on Letterboxd, Hooptober (something I don't really engage with), I thought I'd make the effort.
What I said there about it being a film that holds no surprises is absolutely correct. Not just in terms of it being so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness and referenced elsewhere, but because Polanski lays all his cards on the table almost immediately. With that in mind, I can see why some people find Rosemary's Baby something of a disappointment when they finally come to it. The fact that it lacks in mystery or ambiguity puts me in mind of an episode of Columbo, where we, the audience, were always privy to the murderer and their crimes. Just like with Peter Falk's detective, we are invited to watch as Mia Farrow pieces together the jigsaw and confirms her suspicions and her worst fears.
However, to dismiss Rosemary's Baby as lacking in suspense because of this is to do it a great disservice. Suspense is deeply atmospheric, and you cannot deny that Polanski's film is that, with some of the most unsettling vibes and trippy dream sequences imaginable. Granted there's the familiar coldness that one always finds in Polanski's films, the sense of a filmmaker who refuses to afford his audiences a happy ending, but to dismiss Rosemary's Baby as a cold film would be similarly unfair. As with all Polanski films, there's a delicious irony, offbeat comedy and mordant wit to the proceedings. I love for example Rosemary's dialogue; "Shut up. You're in Dubrovnik, I can't hear you" cracks me up, as does the rote, trip-off-the-tongue way she routinely affords a summary of her husband's career to strangers; "He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and he does a lot of television". I also love that the phrase "It's alive!" so unanimous with Universal's Frankenstein series of the 1940s, is ironically, playfully employed here in a very new kind of horror with a similar striking effect, and so subtly that audiences may not necessarily pick up on it. Eleven year old me certainly wouldn't have done, that's for sure.
I love Polanski's casting too. He doesn't go for the obvious, populating his coven with the likes of Bette Davis, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. Instead he opts for the far more believable, seemingly innocuous and avuncular Ralph Bellamy, Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. Perhaps best of all, there is Patsy Kelly; pure comic relief found in the most intense and evil of threats. You could compare the coven to the famous description of Eichmann on trial, 'the banality of evil'. But there's a banality to the daily New York life, the dreams and aspirations of its residents that Polanski plays with here. For example, John Cassavetes is memorably bought so cheaply, with the dream of making it big in showbusiness (hadn't he heard of Scientology?) but look too at Rosemary's materialistic dreamscapes of the Kennedy yacht and you'll see Polanski poking fun at venal suburban ambition.
Lastly, perhaps the greatest irony of all can be found in how the story puts the reality of witchcraft on its head. History tells us that those suspected of witchcraft were often the unfortunates of society, cast out on the fringes because of a variety of misfortune, mental illness, poverty or something that the wider society simply could not tolerate. As a result, they became persecuted by the Church, the local townsfolk and witchfinders to maintain some kind of security for the wider community. In Rosemary's Baby however, it is the titular healthy-minded, good-looking character who is targeted and persecuted for the coven's sake.
Happy Halloween readers.
