Roman Polanski (1968)
This highly entertaining horror story is hard to enjoy because of the resonant coincidences between Ira Levin’s fiction and real life. What may have been in-jokes at the time the film was made seemed horribly bad jokes a year or so later. Roman Castevet, the leader of the New York coven at the heart of the tale, shares his first name with the picture’s director. The full name is an anagram of Steven Marcato, the son of a martyr to the Satanist cause, who lived in the same New York apartment building where the main action of Polanski’s film is based. Castevet is anagrammatically only a letter or two away from the surname of the movie’s male lead, John Cassavetes. Released in the US in June 1968, Rosemary’s Baby has as its protagonist a woman raped and impregnated by the Devil. In August 1969 Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was one of five people murdered in California by followers of Charles Manson, members of ‘The Family’.
The movie is a reminder that Polanski’s blackly pessimistic sensibility predated his wife’s murder yet he seems to have had fun making the film, which makes what happened after the event all the more uncomfortable to think about. This was his first picture in Hollywood and you sense that he felt the Levin book, which Polanski adapted for the screen, was dramatically enticing but superficial stuff. His light-cum-cold-hearted approach and outsider’s treatment of the American settings and humour are largely why the film works so well – its stylishness has the odd effect of both intensifying and alleviating the nastiness of the material. Polanksi’s direction keeps you absorbed and uneasy: you’re never certain where the protagonist Rosemary Woodhouse’s hallucinations and paranoia end (if they do end) and the reality begins. The speed of movement of much of William Fraker’s camerawork, the unpredictable cuts, the dream sequences (and the crucial scene that you assume is one such sequence until Rosemary cries out, ‘This isn’t a dream – this is really happening!’ then wakes, assuming it was a dream) – the combination of these elements keeps Polanski in control and the audience off balance.
The story is beguiling too because it’s propelled by a singular mixture of biology-psychology and showbiz satire. Rosemary’s anxieties and terror are an extreme illustration of what we understand to be the potentially traumatic aspects of pregnancy – a woman’s fears about what’s happening to her physically, about why she’s eating strange things, of being alone and/or at the mercy of doctors, of her partner finding her changing body no longer attractive, of what she might eventually give birth to. Yet Rosemary’s predicament is thanks to her actor husband Guy selling his soul so that the black magicians next door can help him get a lead in a Broadway play. (The rival originally cast goes suddenly and unaccountably blind.)
As Rosemary, Mia Farrow is so touching, such a perfect embodiment of emaciated fragility that it can be hard to watch her distress. She looks almost too young for child-bearing (reminding you that Dean Martin is alleged to have said to Frank Sinatra, when he married Farrow, ‘I’ve got Scotch older than she is’). She’s also, retrospectively, an iconic late-sixties image in this film – the clothes, which she looks great in, as well as the Peter Pan haircut. John Cassavetes is very convincing as Guy: from the word go, you perceive a man who fancies himself and is selfish enough to betray his wife for his career – when he does so it both makes sense and makes you laugh because the betrayal takes such an outlandish form. Sidney Blackmer is arresting as Roman Castevet and although Maurice Evans, as the Woodhouses’ friend Hutch, isn’t part of the coven, his weirdly deliberate Englishness makes him not much less sinister than Roman. Ralph Bellamy is the genially sinister Dr Sapirstein, Rosemary’s obstetrician, but – in an amusing echo of Roman and Hutch – it’s Charles Grodin as the dull, conventional younger man that Sapirstein usurps who is creepier (thanks especially to his unimpressive, fungal moustache).
The star turn is Ruth Gordon as Roman’s wife Minnie. Her determined scene-stealing is pretty outrageous but very funny. Gordon’s caricature of New York Jewish nosy neighbour is familiar – but familiar from such a different type of film that it makes Minnie’s supernatural proclivities vivid and startling. The haunting, sinister lullaby music is by Polanski’s compatriot Krzysztof Komeda. I’d never heard of Komeda until I looked him up on Wikipedia just now. He died at the age of 37 in April 1969 as the result of brain injuries sustained in an unexplained accident in Los Angeles in the autumn of the previous year. I better stop before I start looking for more believe-it-or-not fatalities that followed the making of this variously memorable film …
18 October 2010
