happy house
by Douglas Messerli
Roman Polanski (screenwriter, based on the novel by Ira
Levin, and director) Rosemary’s Baby /
1968
I saw Polanski’s horror-genre film, Rosemary’s Baby when it was first
released in 1968, and then again in 1970, I believe, with my husband Howard, in
my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa at the Paramount Theater (no longer in
existence), during which a real bat soared over the screen. Yesterday, seeing
the film on DVD after all these years, Howard and I both concurred that it
seemed to be a different movie from the one of our memories.
Given the hundreds of movies that have made through the years (The Omen [1976] and the more recent The House of the Devil [2009] being just two examples), Howard and I wondered at the fact that, although Christ was born into the human world just once, Satan must apparently be reborn again and again, a product of depraved Satanic worshipers and accidental dates (such as the one in this movie, June 28, 1966 or 666) and lunar eclipses. And that very question, perhaps, forced me to recognize just how formulaic aspects of this movie were.
For, although the plot—closely following the story of Levin’s popular
horror tale—seems to be nearly entirely focused on the evil surrounding
Rosemary as she slowly comes to perceive what is happening to her through her
own suddenly strange dreams (particularly her impregnation in a Satanic
ritual), in her food cravings (Farrow actually ate raw liver to lend credulity
to the part), through the pains of her early pregnancy, and through the
warnings of her friends such as Hutch (Maurice Evans) and several party-going
women acquaintances, the style of Polanski’s work is actually presented more as
a comedy. Two scenes—Rosemary’s phone booth attempt to call her previous Dr.
Hill (Charles Grodin) to make an appointment, and a scene where, completely
disoriented, she walks into incoming mid-town traffic—create tensions worthy of
the horror genre. But the rest of the film puts all of Rosemary’s growing fears
into a kind of loony perspective. For the real stars of this film are not the
somewhat sleazy Guy nor even the utterly terrified Rosemary, but the somewhat
doughty neighbors, Minnie Castevet (the hilarious Ruth Gordon, who won an
Academy Award for this role) and her husband Roman, a.k.a. Steven Marcato
It is their bizarre extravagances, more than anything else, that begin
to unhinge the clearly susceptible Rosemary, and signify her gradual
transformation from her basically realist, slightly religious (she was raised
Catholic) perspective to a slightly absurd inner certainty that her neighbors
and husband are attempting to take her child and sacrifice it to Satan himself.
But we have equal evidence that they her troubles may be delusional.
When she visits her previous doctor, for example, he calls her current doctor,
Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) and Rosemary’s husband, apparently worried about
her mental health. And even though, after the child’s birth, her husband lies
to her about the baby’s survival, it may, after all, be only a way to protect
her and the child. For, even though Rosemary, at first sight of the baby, is
convinced they have done something to it,
Polanski stubbornly keeps the camera out of the cradle (producer William Castle
has insisted they show the possible devil-child) as Rosemary’s maternal
instincts kick in, with the Castevets and their equally ridiculous friends
approvingly looking on.
As in Polanski’s Repulsion, in
the end we are not quite certain whether Rosemary has been justifiably
terrified or simply delusional, having temporarily, at least, gone mad. And we
are never sure whether the film is a kind of dark comedy—somewhat like the 1963
play by Ronald Alexander Nobody Loves an
Albatross (starring Robert Preston as a con man) in which Guy has, we are
told several times, appeared as an actor—or a dense epic, such as the
religious-irreligious (depending upon your point of view) drama such as John
Osborne’s 1961 Luther, in which Guy,
apparently, has also acted.
Each viewer may draw his or her own conclusions about what is the truth,
but there can never be, the way it is filmed, one definitive answer. Although
clearly drawn to such subject matter from the very beginning his career, Polish
director Polanski would soon after suffer evils that were even more
satanically-grounded in the “Helter-Skelter” murders of his wife Sharon Tate
and others by the Manson cult; and the creators of that song, the Beatles,
would lose one of their own members, John Lennon, as a shooting victim outside
the very building, the Dakota, that stood-in in this film for the fictional
Bramford—a building which Hutch, at one point, sarcastically describes as
“Happy House.” The real satanic horrors, one might argue, lay outside the frame
of this film rather than within its more ambivalent boundaries.
Los Angeles, September 16, 2013
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2013).
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