"What have you done to its eyes?" --- ROSEMARY'S B

[joequinn]

Tonight I read ROSEMARY'S BABY for the first time in almost forty years. It's a short read (just 200 pages or so), and I think that it was very well written. We are all familiar with the great film, but the novel was first rate.

Have you seen the film, and if so what do you think of it?

[HB3]

It's one of my favorites, but it's not something I can watch over and over. I think John Cassavettes' performance is particularly good. There's possibly real evil in that film -- a bouillibaise of late hippy ideology as it reached its limits and turned dark. I sense the presence of all those San Franciscan characters of the period -- not just Anton LaVey, but Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, etc...

[HB3]

My favorite Polanski is still "The Tenant," though.

[Lord Moon]

I couldn't Stand Mia farrow in the movie, as I can't stand victims.

My other problem was that I don't believe in the devil.

[Shirleypal]

I did see the movie, wasn't Mia Farrow the mother. Don't remember a whole lot about it and did not read the book, I couldn't get through the Exorcists which scared the hell out of me, but did see the movie. I do remember not liking it, just not my thing, anything satanic or of the devil is not for me.

[Bellisima]

I loved Ira Levin's book and also the subsequent film. Any movie that showcases NYC and Ruth Gordon can't be bad.

[HB3]

I couldn't Stand Mia farrow in the movie, as I can't stand victims.

You mean she didn't arm herself in rocket launchers, chainsaws, and holy water to kick some Satanic butt?

[HB3]

My other problem was that I don't believe in the devil.

To turn a familiar trope around -- But he believes in you....

[joequinn]

I remember reading Rosemary’s Baby sometime in the spring of 1968, when I knew that the movie was going to appear that coming summer and when I needed some escapist fiction to idle my time during spring break from school. Even then I was in the habit of trying to read “the book” before I went to see “the film” so that I could compare the two --- generally, to the disadvantage of the film. I remember that I liked the novel well enough to want to see the film, but in those days, I did not understand --- as I very clearly understand now --- that there is no fundamental difference between serious highbrow literature (like Shakespeare) and popular lowbrow literature (like Rosemary’s Baby): the only real difference is between good art and bad art, period. But my mind was immature in those days --- it did not center itself until my mid-twenties --- and so I did not realize that profound truth then and did not take the novel seriously as a result.

Yes, I did like the book when I read it the first time in 1968, but I really appreciated its excellence as a well-constructed thriller when I read it again last night. Ira Levin, who first reached public attention in 1955 when he successfully turned the novel No Time for Sergeants into a television play for the U.S. Steel Hour (and later, in 1958, into an equally successful film, starring a very young Andy Griffith), certainly knew how to write dialogue and how to pace the suspense. His close-focus narration --- which permits us to learn only a little bit more than his protagonist Rosemary Woodhouse knows --- was absolutely on-target; Levin tried to keep the novel as everyday-detail-oriented as possible for as long as possible; and the novel is filled with ironies that just cry out for a second reading to appreciate them. I must say that I was very impressed by Levin’s technical mastery and artistic vision.

A vision which has never left him. Levin does not publish often, but when he does, the result is almost always significant. Eight years after Rosemary’s Baby Levin published The Stepford Wives (1975), which became a very popular film during the 1970s and which was recently refilmed with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick in the starring roles. And three years after that novel, Levin scored a double triumph: his chilling novel, The Boys from Brazil (1978), and the superb Broadway mystery Deathtrap (1978). Both of these works of art later were turned into memorable films: the former with Laurence Olivier and a totally out-of-control Gregory Peck as the evil Dr. Mengele, and the latter with Michael Caine and a post-Superman Christopher Reeve. Ira Levin is a serious, experienced dramatist and novelist. He has the gift. I could tell that, very clearly, last night.

Both the novel (1967) and the film (1968) appeared during the high tide of the Counterculture, when the fascists had yet to begin their conquest of the Federal Government, when the occult still was considered to be merely a gateway to higher consciousness, and when the Christian fundamentalists still were hiding deep under their rocks. Which makes Rosemary’s Baby so interesting a work --- because it completely negates all the blithe metaphysical optimism of the period with a vision of invincible evil! Now I have no reason to believe that Ira Levin himself had any particular interest in the occult: I suspect that he just had a superb intuitive sense for a “gimmick” upon which to hang a nail-biting thriller. But something inspired him, and I think I know what it was. At several points in the course of the novel, Levin draws attention to a very famous issue of Time magazine, which appeared on 8 April 1966 and which I remember vividly. The cover was a somber black and red with the words “Is God Dead?” centered right across its face. The article that the cover referenced was an excellent one on the “God is death” theology of some advanced Protestant theologians of the time, but the cover itself made that particular issue of Time one of the most controversial ever published. I can just imagine Levin, a Jew in a post-holocaust world, looking at that cover and saying to himself, “Well, God may or may not be dead --- but the devil sure is not, because there is appalling evil in the word!” And the rest, as they say, is history…

The novel itself has a pessimism that makes The Exorcist (which, may I remind you, does have a happy ending!) look like an exercise in positive thinking. We do not know when Rosemary’s husband Guy makes his deal with the Castavet coven of witches in the Bramford (actually, the haunted Dakota, where John Lennon would be shot eleven years later), but it is quite possible that Rosemary is doomed even before the novel begins. The entire novel is a relentless process wherein Rosemary progressively discovers her ever-intensifying alienation from literally everyone and everything around her, a process in which Levin’s close-focus narration really pays off, big-time, for suspense effect. At the climactic end we sympathize with Rosemary as she grabs a butcher knife and goes over to the Castevets’ apartment to save what she knows is her newborn son from what she fears are the coven’s plans to butcher him at their Lammastide Sabbat. But the full horror of Rosemary’s situation appears only to her --- and to us --- when she learns the real purpose for which she had been used as she gazes into that cradle. For a moment, just a moment, she considers grabbing the baby and hurling them both out the window to their deaths, but the final crushing denouement of the novel occurs when her maternal instincts (the most natural instincts in the world) take over and she begins, almost involuntarily, to rock the cradle of her most unnatural child. As I say, the conclusion of The Exorcist is quite a step up from this. Don’t you agree? What novel! And what an ending!

Maybe I have watched too many movies on Turner Classic Movies, but nowadays I like to find out all sorts of trivia about the movies that I watch. I did some poking around last night, and I have uncovered some interesting tid-bits about the film. Nothing earth-shaking, of course, but interesting just the same. And in one case, absolutely terrifyingly. Maybe, if you would like, I will share some of these tid-bits in a latter post.

[Bellisima]

Maybe I have watched too many movies on Turner Classic Movies, but nowadays I like to find out all sorts of trivia about the movies that I watch. I did some poking around last night, and I have uncovered some interesting tid-bits about the film. Nothing earth-shaking, of course, but interesting just the same. And in one case, absolutely terrifyingly. Maybe, if you would like, I will share some of these tid-bits in a latter post.

Very perceptive and fascinating post, Joe. And YES, I would definitely like the tid-bits.

[joequinn]

Bellisima, I will be happy to gratify your off-duty taste for trivial movie gossip shortly, but first I must attend to serious business. Lord Moon says that he could not stand the film version of Rosemary’s Baby because he cannot stand film protagonists as victims (like Rosemary Woodhouse in this film) and because he does not believe in the existence of the devil. Lord Moon needs an aesthetic crisis intervention here…

Let us assume, Lord Moon, (a) that it is impossible for a victimized person to be heroic and (b) that the devil does not exist. Let us assume that you are perfectly correct on both points as far as the real world is concerned. What of it? The reason why Plato chased the artists out of his Utopia is because they did not share his --- and your --- obsessive interest in “the real world.” As Freud (another person who feared artists greatly) tells us, the power of art springs from its ability to go beneath “the primary process” (which regards victimized persons as bad subjects for thrillers and which knows that the devil is a myth) to “the primary process” of the subconscious mind (where victimized persons exist by the millions and where the devil is quite alive and well). Art, even popular art, even bad art, knows what Plato and Freud do not like to acknowledge, viz. that we are sick, or at least unbalanced, whenever we function exclusively through “the primary process.” (Yes, of course, I will admit that we are equally sick, or at least unbalanced, when we function exclusively through “the secondary process.”) Art allows us to balance the objective of “the primary process” with the subjective of “the secondary process” for our ultimate betterment.

Now, if I were a psychotherapist and you were my patient on the couch --- or, perhaps more accurately, if I were the Grand Inquisitor and you were a suspected heretic chained to the rack in the castle dungeon --- I could have a most interesting time in learning why you don’t believe that victimized people can be heroic and why you don’t believe in the existence of the devil. (The second belief, by the way, would guarantee a fiery end for you in my medieval scenario! ) Now you can spend thousands of dollars finding out why you feel the way that you feel while you lie on the analyst’s couch, or you can read a book like Rosemary’s Baby with an open heart and an open mind to get a purely aesthetic (i.e. non-objective) experience of life under different principles of reality. Art tells you that it is OK to check out of “objective reality,” to sink into the depths of the subconscious mind, to see the world through rose-colored --- or painted black --- glasses. It’s not only pleasurable (even pleasurable in a frightening sort of way), but it’s also healthy, psychologically healthy, spiritually healthy.

Of course, I am pulling your leg a little here, Lord Moon. But you cannot come to works of art with a list of convictions about the nature of reality: that list has to be checked in at the door as you enter. This is the entire point of Coleridge’s crucial doctrine of “the willing suspension of disbelief,” which is the cornerstone of aesthetic experience. Who knows? Perhaps Rosemary’s Baby is crapola, and perhaps I ain’t got no taste. But Lord Moon, if you do not check that list of reality points at the door whenever you enter the house of art, if you don’t don that “willing suspension of disbelief” as the very first order of business when you sit down in your seat, then you are cheating yourself and you not giving art --- any art, not just Rosemary’s Baby --- a chance to work its magic on you in order to make you whole --- if not better, than at least whole. For that is art’s purpose. And that is why Freud feared art. And that is why Plato hated it.

You be smarter than Plato and Freud, Lord Moon, my brother. Let yourself go with art and allow yourself to be changed by it. Objective reality will always be waiting for you whenever you decide to come back to it…

[spaceprophet]

the Castavet coven of witches in the Bramford (actually, the haunted Dakota, where John Lennon would be shot eleven years later)

Here are some terrifying tidbits to consider.

As you well know this film was directed by Roman Polanski. He was married to Sharon Tate who at the time of her murder was pregnant (like Rosemary) with their first child. One year after filming Tate was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his cult followers, who titled their death spree "Helter Skelter" after the 1968 song by The Beatles, whose leader, 'John Lennon', who would one day live (and in 1980 be murdered) in the Manhattan apartment building called The Dakota - where Rosemary's Baby had been filmed.

Sharon Tate appears unbilled at the party Rosemary gives for her "young" friends in the film.

Originally posted by HB3
My favorite Polanski is still "The Tenant," though.

Just as The Tenant, a great film I might add, Rosemary's Baby is one of many by Polanski that deal with the intrinsic horrors of apartment/city dwelling. Repulsion (1965) and Locataire, Le (1976) deal with this similar subject as well.

[joequinn]

The director Roman Polañski is well known to us as the Academy Award winning director of The Pianist (2002), but he has actually had a forty-year-long career as both a director and actor since he first came to world attention in 1962 with Knife in the Water. With the success of Repulsion (1965), Hollywood wanted him to come the America and to make a studio film, but Polañski bided his time, waiting for the right film and the right script. Of course, Polañski ultimately did come to America --- with tragic consequences --- and the story of how he arrived is your typical Hollywood dirty-dealings scenario.

As soon as Rosemary’s Baby was published in 1967, the canny low-budget horror film director William Castle secured the production rights. Castle’s task, then, was to find a producer. In the end, it came down to Paramount Studios. But the new Head of Production at Paramount, Bob Evans, knew that he had to hit a home run out of the park during his first time at bat and that Rosemary’s Baby could be the film that would do it for him --- with the right director. Evans respected Castle’s work, but he figured that Castle was too lightweight to do the job properly, so Evans told him that he could produce the film (which Castle did), but that Paramount would not green-light the project if Castle decided to direct it (which he did not). (Castle, by the way, has a cameo in the film as a man standing by the street telephone on which Rosemary is making a call.) One of the myths about Rosemary’s Baby is that Alfred Hitchcock was approached originally to direct the film --- could you imagine what the results would have been if he had? --- but Evans has denied this rumor decisively. Evans wanted no other than Roman Polañski to direct the film, right from the start. Polañski was willing to come to Hollywood, but what he really wanted to do was to direct another Paramount film, Downhill Racer (1969). So Evans played him along in order to get Polañski to America, at which point he pressured Polañski to direct Rosemary’s Baby. The negotiations took a while, of course, but Polañski finally agreed after getting a considerable say over casting and after getting total control over the script (i.e. which Polañski did by writing it himself).

I have said in a previous post that I generally prefer “the book” to “the film,” but Rosemary’s Baby is one of those films where the film script is every bit as good as the book. And there’s a good reason for it. Rosemary’s Baby was not only Polañski’s first American film, but it was also the first film in which Polañski had to adapt the material from another source. Because this was his first time out of the gate in this field, Polañski was very faithful to the book in his adaptation. In fact, Polañski was so faithful that, at one point, he even called up Ira Levin to learn the date of the issue of The New Yorker where Guy Woodhouse sees a shirt that he would like to get, only to be told by Levin that he had made that particular detail up! Considering the fact that the book is as tightly plotted as a tale could be, this faithfulness of adaptation turned out to be a real smart decision, and Polañski’s screen adaptation --- not his direction --- was nominated for an Oscar, specifically Best Adapted Screenplay.

The history of the casting is also fascinating. Roman Polañski’s first choice to play Rosemary was none other than Jane Fonda, but she turned the role down so that she could do the utterly forgettable Barbarella (1968) in Europe for her director husband Roger Vadim. (Boy, Fonda must wince when she reflects on that decision: to this day even her fans laugh at the movie for which she turned down Rosemary’s Baby!) The actress Tuesday Weld was Polañski’s second choice for the role, but Weld was so uncomfortable with the role that she would not even bother to show up to audition for the part. At this point, Peter Evans pressured Polañski to take a chance with then-minor actress Mia Farrow, the daughter of the Australian film director John Ford and the actress Maureen O’Sullivan. Up to this point, Farrow’s major claim to fame was her July 1966 marriage (at the age of 21) to Frank Sinatra (then aged 50). Farrow was pretty much unknown --- and therefore cheap to hire --- and Evans thought (quite correctly, as things turned out) that she could handle the role. Polañski agreed to Evans’s suggestion, and Mia Farrow would became a star with her portrayal of Rosemary Woodhouse.

The great director John Cassavetes was actually Polañski’s fourth choice to play the role of Guy Woodhouse. I agree with HB3 that Cassavetes gave a great performance as the weak, and treacherous, husband, but he was actually the default choice for the role. Warren Beatty was Polañski’s first choice for the role --- could you imagine Rosemary’s Baby with Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty? --- but Beatty, who was an egomaniac even then, turned the role down because it was not big enough for him. Polañski’s second choice was Robert Redford. But Redford was having problems with Paramount at the time, and besides, he had just signed to play the lead role in the film that Polañski had come to America to direct, Downhill Racer. So Redford was out.

Polañski’s third choice --- which almost panned out --- was Jack Nicholson! Here again, it was Robert Evans who made the original casting suggestion, and Polañski agreed to meet with Nicholson to check him out. But after the meeting was over, Polañski rejected Nicholson, on the grounds that “his sinister appearance” worked against him, “for all his talent.” John Cassavetes was excellent in Rosemary’s Baby, but could you imagine what the film would have been like if Nicholson had had the part? I fear that Polañski made a mistake here, selecting the very good when he could have had the best. And Polañski probably felt so too. His next blockbuster, the incredible Chinatown (1974), was the start of a great personal friendship with Nicholson. But here too, as everywhere else in Polañski’s American experience, the results were ultimately tragic. It was at Nicholson’s empty house in March of 1977 that Polañski did his notorious camera shoot with 13-year-old Samantha Geimar, which led to charges of child rape, a plea bargain and Polañski’s flight to Europe in February of 1978 when it became clear that, even under the plea bargain, he could serve up to 50 years in an American jail. Out of fear of extradition, Polañski has been confined mainly to his home lands of Poland and France since then, and he was not present in Hollywood in the spring of 2003 to receive the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist. A decision by Hollywood that outraged fascist Amerika to no end, even though Polañski’s direction was superb, as those who have seen the film will admit.

Ruth Gordon, who ended up playing Minnie Castavets and who won the most awards among all of those who worked on the film, was an easy casting decision. She was “hot” from a previous performance in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and for which she won the Golden Globe in the same category. Gordon ended up winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1968, in an often quirky film category, for her performance as the Bramford witch --- as well as a second Golden Globe. And as many people know, her luck held out a couple of years longer. She was seventy-five years old when she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the cult favorite Harold and Maude (1971). A great actress who became a great popular success at a time when many other actresses are doing a Norma Desmond. And a great performance too! Tannis root, anyone?

Maybe some more gossip a little later… Happy, Bellisima?

[HurricaneJoanie]

And it isn't it so, Joe, that Ruth Gordon also lived in The Dakota?

[joequinn]

Joanie, I have not been able to discover that Ruth Gordon herself lived at the Dakota. If she did, especially if she did at the time when Rosemary's Baby was filmed, I might have heard something about it in the course of my research. But so far, at least, no confirmation of that fact. If you can cite a source, Joanie, it would be most interesting...

The fictional location of the action in the novel is the Bramford, but it is obvious that Ira Levin is talking about the Dakota which --- at least to me --- always did have a somewhat sinister air about it, even before John Lennon's assassination. Levin makes it clear that the Bramford has a highly unsavory past, a past that plays a great role in the events of the novel, and I myself vaguely remember hearing that the Dakota has had a history of paranormal experiences. If anybody could supply some information on this point, it would be greatly appreciated.

The film, of course, was shot at the Dakota, and many of the building's residents, most especially the actress Lauren Bacall, used to wander downstairs to watch the action. And Roman Castevets' father, Adrian Marcato, is said to have been assaulted by a mob in front of the building in 1896, right at the place where John Lennon later was assassinated. I bet that Levin had heard a thing or two about the Dakota: I just wish that I could have learned what he knew about it...