Rosemarys’ Baby (1968), the first of Polanski’s ‘trilogy of evil’ that continued with Macbeth (1971), and Chinatown (1975) is, despite its comedy, one of the most misanthropic films ever made. Ambitious actor Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) and his wife Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who is desperate for a child, take an apartment in the exclusive Bramford Building in New York (Polanski used New York’s exclusive German Renaissance Revival Dakota Building). They’re befriended by their eccentric elderly neighbours, Roman and Minne Castavet (Sidney Blackmur, Ruth Gordon), leaders of a coven of Satanists, first meeting them on the street outside the Bramford in the crowd gathered around the broken body of Terry (Angela Dorian) a runaway and junky the Castavets had taken in, who had leapt from their seventh-floor window after learning that they had lined her up to be impregnated by Satan. Guy, in exchange for his acting career being furthered, agrees to Satan raping and impregnating Rosemary. Drugged on a spiked chocolate Mousse given to her by Minnie, she becomes pregnant following the rape at a black mass held in the Castavets’ apartment.
Guy’s career takes off, his first break coming as he replaces an actor who is blinded by the Castavets via sympathetic magic after Guy steals his tie. Rosemary’s friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) alerts Rosemary to the true identity of the Castavets, giving her a book on satanism that reveals that Roman is the descendant of a notorious Satanist. Hutch too is later murdered by sympathetic magic, after Guy steals his glove. Rosemary meanwhile has been put in the care of Dr Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), a famous obstetrician recommended by the Castavets, but a member of the coven, who puts her on a diet that makes her cadaverous and unhealthy looking. Rosemary flees the apartment and seeks sanctuary with her previous obstetrician, Dr Hill (Charles Grodin), who betrays her out of professional fealty to Sapirstein. She’s taken back to the apartment, where she gives birth. She’s told that her baby has died, but hears a baby crying from the Castavets’ apartment through the wall. She walks in on the coven, and finds her baby. Lifting the curtain on the crib, she’s horrified at what she sees. But she softens as he cries, and rocks the cradle, accepting Satan’s spawn as her child.
Rosemary’s Baby is, a schizoid paranoid delusion which turns out to be true: everyone around Rosemary really is evil and conspiring against her, and nobody can be trusted, even, in the end, herself. The film has been seen as eerily prescient of Roman Polanski’s own encounter with evil when members of the Manson Family murdered his wife and unborn child one year later, but Polanski had already known horror and evil, and the film looked not forward but back, to his experience of Nazi Germany that had been formative for the director. Rosemary’s Baby may be about misogyny, domestic violence, the body-horror of pregnancy, female bodily autonomy, ambition, betrayal, and the terrifying unknowability of others and so on, but it also about the evil of the collective, of conformism, of joining in. Just as the ‘banality of evil’ can be revealingly reversed to the ‘evil of banality’ so ‘collective madness’ can be reversed to the ‘madness of the collective’, and this is the underlying theme of the film.
Ira Levin’s 1966 source novel had been a huge bestseller. Most of its dialogue was retained unchanged by Polanksi, and the film’s plot cleaves closely to the book’s, too. The late 60s and early 70s was a golden age for high quality popular literature by such as Levin and Stepehen King, providing rich food for filmmakers. Levin was one of its most successful practitioners (Truman Capote likened him, somewhat hyperbolically, to Henry James, but his novels are nevertheless excellent and unputdownably gripping). The film is a much richer experience, as the story is also told visually and aurally. Legendary production designer Richard Sylbert and costume designer Anthea Sylbert (his sister-in-law) were as notoriously perfectionist as Polanski. Nothing in Rosemary’s Baby was left to chance: not a colour, costume, hem length, fall of light, or camera position is arbitrary or without signification, psychological effect or emotional impact.
Guy and Rosemary are invariably dressed in blue and yellow and Rosemary has the flat decorated and furnished in yellow, even down to the crockery. Some have seen this as representing sunny hope, soon to be brutally dashed. Perhaps; but yellow is also the colour of madness, and it may be a nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the canonical psychological horror story of a woman being gaslighted by her scheming husband. Polanski commented, “If you don’t attach extreme importance to every tiny detail, you’re just being lazy”, and “…the only way you can seduce people into believing you, whether they want to or not, is to take painstaking care with the details of your film, to make it accurate. Sloppiness destroys emotional impact.”
Polanski wanted the two apartments to be ‘characters’ in the movie and insisted on interiors being shot on wide angle lenses so that the walls were “always overwhelming Rosemary”, and cinematographer Willaim Fraker flashed the filmstock to soften the colours to create a sense of irreality and dissociation to reflect Rosemary’s paranoia. Composer Krzysztof Komeda’s music is used sparingly but effectively and is, too, a kind of character, functioning as an abstract chorus on events. The lullaby that we hear over the opening credits is repeated throughout the movie but is at times barely recognisable, echoed in the chanting of a black mass, and at certain points it seems as if this chorus is jeering at and mocking Rosemary.
Polanksi’s complex, formalist patterning of visual and aural motifs achieves a richness of signification that is entirely without artificiality, pure cinema in the service of compelling, popular entertainment. This is why his films so handsomely repay repeated viewings. On my last viewing, I noticed for the first time the way Cassavetes’s face reddens exaggeratedly as he sits by the fire with Rosemary as they plan her conception later that night: Guy is in reality waiting for Minnie to drop around the drugged chocolate Mousse to ready Rosemary for the attentions of Satan. Rosemary however has surreptitiously thrown away some of her Mousse and there follows a scene that mixes her dream with the reality of the black mass, as she drifts in and out of consciousness. Polanski intended there to be a constant feeling of discomfiting ambiguity regarding Rosemary’s sanity (which is why he didn’t show the baby’s eyes). It's probably the most effective and convincing dream sequence in cinema (he discusses why it was filmed the way it was in this interview with Mark Cousins), though Francesco Barelli’s extraordinary and too-little-known 1974 giallo The Perfume of the Lady in Black goes one further technically, seamlessly and without demarcation mixing hallucination, memory, dream, and reality.
Macbeth and Chinatown, both dour and nihilistic, were made after and informed by the unimaginably brutal murder of Polanski’s wife, her friends, and their unborn child at their house on Los Angeles’s Cielo Drive by Manson Family cult members, the event that was, according to Joan Didion, the official end of the 1960s. But Polish Jew Polanski knew Chinatown well before Chinatown: the Krakow Ghetto, and Nazi-occupied Poland. Random murders on the street, children used by the SS for target practice, betrayals and denunciations – the child Polanski witnessed all of this. One of Polanski’s most vivid memories from the ghetto was of women being rounded up to be taken to Auschwitz, bewildered, terrified, suitcases in hand. How could this have not influenced the scene where a panic-stricken Rosemary runs away from Sapirstein’s office with her suitcase, dodging the traffic. Polanski’s pregnant mother was gassed in Auschwitz, and he had been close enough to murder on the Krakow streets to hear the gurgling of blood from bullet wounds. He escaped – and escaped denunciation and betrayal - by going on the run using false, non-Jewish names, in constant fear of being given away, trusting nobody other than the Polish peasant family that hid him, at great personal risk (in 2020 the Buchalas were posthumously awarded the Yad Vashem title of Righteous Among the Nations, which Polanski gave to their grandson, Stanislaw).
Levin was also Jewish, and his 1976 novel The Boys from Brazil was about Nazis holed up in South America attempting to resurrect the Third Reich. Seven of his novels were adapted into films, the most successful being Rosemary’s Baby, the superior noir A Kiss Before Dying (1956), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and The Stepford Wives (1975), another satirical horror, like Rosemary’s Baby, but more explicitly, dealing with conformity and misogyny. Levin had his finger on the pulse: by 1968 in the US there was an epidemic of drug addiction and thousands of middle-class teenage runaways like Terry, there was Vietnam and the Mail Lai massacre, an attempt to finish the Holocaust in the Middle East with the Six Day War, a wave of political assassinations including that of John F Kennedy, and a huge, unprecedented rise in the number of homicides. White bourgeois domestic terrorism was sweeping across the US and Western Europe, and hard-core porn was going mainstream. In short, evil was in the air. As the film is set in 1966, there’s the droll suggestion that this period of violence and chaos, that became only more frenzied as the world moved in to the seventies, was due to the birth of the anti-Christ two years earlier: “the year is one” declaims Roman, but it has an unmistakable echo of the Maoist ‘Year Zero’ coming from the anti-communist Polanski.
White, bourgeois liberals in the US had also begun to embrace gurus, pseudo-science, satanic and other cults, fringe religions, communes – often loci for male sexual opportunism - irrational beliefs, and totalitarian ideologies. The mumbo jumbo that has reached its dangerous apotheosis in our own era was taking off. Despite its nihilism the film is funny, not least because of the comic turns of Minne Castavet and Patsy Kelly as coven-member Lara Louise, the simple-minded witch living on the floor above. Like the other cranks of the coven, Minnie and Roman are both obviously mad. But the borders between madness, evil stupidity and the closely related credulity are porous, shifting, variable. What’s for sure is that there is never one without at least some portion of the others: who is to say what are the proportions of each are for your average urban satanist, terrorist, cult leader, cult member, dictator, serial killer, or fanatical activist? In Guy, calculating evil predominates, in Roman, madness, in Lara Louise, stupidity. Evil is often grimly comedic as is manifests itself visually, and the grotesque humour of horror and of evil-doers has been explored and visualised by many directors.
The final scene, where the coven members, ranting maniacs gathered to pay homage to Rosemary’s baby, with their chant of “hail Satan” will, depending on what mood you’re in, either chill your blood or make you laugh out loud, like the footage of a gesticulating Hitler. Polanski chose some of the actors for their odd-looking, comical physiognomies, and Minnie and Roman are deliberately cartoonish, something which only serves to make them more sinister. However bloody and destructive they are, totalitarian regimes, cults, communes and collectives are funny, often a haven for cranks and the half-mad, the desperatlely lonely, and all slogans are inherently idiotic, all placards preposterous. I think this is why that after the fact (the seventeenth century witch craze is a good example) they offer themselves so readily for kitsch representations.
Often it takes less than a generation for an ideology or cult to seem like a mockable collective madness. All cult leaders and cults, prophets and demagogues have something comic about them, often perceived as such by outsiders at the time. Putin topless astride a horse, Mussolini’s jutting chin. Hitler was many things, and a clown was one of them. Charles Manson was also a pathetic, odd-looking clown, and the Manson trial a grotesque burlesque – those shaven heads, the absurd swastika tattooed on the forehead.
There really were nude gatherings of middle-class Satanists intoning black masses in the 60 and 70s across America and the UK. Satanism and in particular Aleister Crowley had been made hip across these two decades by celebrity dabblers such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, and there was a slew of books, films (many of them great), magazines and TV shows dealing with the occult. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in California attracted celebrity members such as Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jnr., but it was only one of many cults, there was The Children of God, Hare Krishnas, Esalen, Jim Jones’s Peoples’ Temple, and the Rajneesh movement amongst others, and the period’s New Ageism has never really gone away. Eventually all this led to the Satanic Panic and Recovered Memory Syndrome debacle of the 1980s. Ironically, this involved very cultish behaviour from the psychology and social work community, as well as the gaslighting of women.
If Rosemary’s Baby is archly satirical of this penchant for cults and middle-class intellectual fashions and fads, it also satirises showbusiness ambition in the character of Guy (Cassavetes’s oleaginous performance is so creepily convincing that whenever I watch him in another film I immediately feel dislike for him). Guy is desperate for the shirt he’s seen in the New Yorker, and Rosemary uglifies herself with a modeish Vidal Sassoon haircut. This was an economical move by Polanski, he could at once satirise the conformist nonconformity of liberal New Yorkers and visually reference the denuded humanity of the death camps – and point to the conceptual connection between the two.
The dynamics of recruitment to any cult or ideological movement are similar: the propagandising and bribing, the crazed, fanatical leaders and true believers, and those who go along with it for gain, the followers, whether it be for power, money, career success, a sense of belonging and group identity, or even just somewhere to stay, like all those teenage runaways of the late 60s in the US. The opportunity to victimise and harm, and to control the speech and actions of others is also ever-present. Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto treats of an actor’s selling his soul to the devil of Nazism, and he could have based the protagonist on any number of people in the milieu of German cinema, entertainment and academia. However, though Faustian bargains never end well, unlike Mann’s Hendrik Hofmann, Guy Woodhouse remains unpunished at the end of the movie and Rosemary, too, compromises with evil, having in the end got what she so badly wanted, albeit in satirically monstrous form.
The characters of Roman and Minnie also highlight another aspect of totalitarian societies (and the inner dynamics of all cults): the function of nosiness, the loss of privacy, the snooping and spying. Loss of privacy, isolation, the exclusion of wrongthinking outsiders (Guy assiduously keeps Rosemary away from her friends and Hutch is done in) are linked to the demand for total loyalty and is central to all cults and extremist parties. Nazi Germany and post-war communist Poland were both societies of spying, denunciation, informing, betrayal (even sometimes the filial or the spousal), as well as of recruitment, and of the victimisation of those that don’t want to join, and was formative of Polanski’s worldview, one based on the absolute precarity of trust and goodness.
Anatomy of a Scene
Rosemary and Guy arrive for dinner at the Castavets’ apartment. They had met on the street the night before, part of the crowd surrounding the body of Terry after her jump from the Castavets’ window. As the Castavets’ apartment door opens, the film darkens, the scene is soft focus.
Up until now, yellow has dominated the palette, now red is predominant. Red didn’t make an appearance until we saw the blood that haloed Terry’s broken head two scenes ago, but from now on it will regularly bespatters shots, always indicative of violence or the Luciferian: following Rosemary’s rape Guy fills the flat with red roses, and when Minnie and Roman come around to celebrate her pregnancy they apologise for bringing red wine – drunk at black masses – instead of champagne. Pre-dinner drinks in the living room. Roman’s sweater is bright red; he serves vodka blushes; the furniture, carpets and book spines are all shades of red. We’ve moved from a bright, modern, Scandi-ish interior into a rubeus Gothic lair.
As they take their drinks on the sofa, Roman pills a little vodka blush on the carpet and Minnie fusses over the stain. This has been interpreted as highlighting her ordinariness, making a point about the ’banality of evil’. But it is deft characterisation. Minnie is in charge, not Roman; she’s interested in power and control. In the previous scene we heard her termagant berating of him for letting Terry in on their plans too soon (“I don’t know how you got to be the head of anything”), and over successive viewings Minnie seems less and less comical and more and more minatory (Ruth Gordon won an Oscar for Best Supporting actress for her performance).
Roman, a pompous raconteur, moves over to an armchair, framed by two red curtains like a stage, and talks of his theatrical past, his travelling: “name a place, I’ve been there” (like the Devil). As in the rest of the film, the dialogue is loaded, proleptic. Alongside his chair is a small side table with a lamp that splits the space in two; it is the space that will later be filled by the crib of the progeny of Rosemary and the Devil.
We cut to the dining table and the quartet are eating undercooked steaks and drinking red wine. It takes a keen viewer to notice on a first viewing that there are marks of missing paintings on the wall – we’ll see them replaced later in the scene where Rosemary is raped, nightmarish scenes of bloody rapine and apocalyptic devilry. It's our first look at Roman without a hat. Comparing photos of actor Sidney Blackmer, you can see that his eyebrows have been altered to give him a devilish look.
Over dinner, after pouring scorn on organised religion, Roman obsequiously flatters Guy about his acting abilities ("Weren’t you Albert Finney’s understudy?”), while Minnie urges extra cake on him, like a favoured son. Candle flames, red meat, read wine: an antechamber of hell. Roman tells Guy that he’s noticed in him a “most interesting inner quality”. It’s a quality we’ve already noticed, too: he’s an asshole. Throughout the film he’s been controlling, manipulative and bossy towards his wife: he doesn’t thank her when she brings him food and drink, and later we’ll see him demanding she get out of bed to make him breakfast the morning after he’s let Satan violate her.
Minnie and Rosemary go to the kitchen to wash and dry dishes, while the men remain behind in the living room. Minnie questions Rosemary about her family. The couple are being sounded out, one for her fertility, the other for his capacity for evil. “Oh, we’re fertile alright!” Rosemary exclaims in Response to Minnie’s questioning, “I’ve got sixteen nieces and nephews!” For a change, Minnie looks serious and thoughtful.
There’s a close up of Rosemary’s troubled face followed by a POV shot of her looking from the kitchen over to the entrance to the living room, which is a dirge of reds running from the palest pink to the muted scarlet of an empty armchair (suggesting that someone is missing, or, more likely, immaterially present). The close-up is held for around 4 seconds so that we get a sense of Rosemary’s curiosity and disquiet, for Roman and Guy are deep in conversation, but can’t be seen. At several points in the film Polanski frames a scene so that we can’t see the people speaking, increasing the paranoid sense of plotting and secrecy, the most famous example being that of Minnie taking a phone call with her head obscured by a bedroom door that had cinema audiences leaning over to try and look around it.
A column of smoke crosses the screen from right to left. Guy and Roman are smoking, but that column is somewhat unnatural in its volume, steady flow and horizontality. It is smoke from the fires of hell. Like the paired, red-shaded lamps dimly lighting the apartment, glowing malevolently like the eyes of demons, it signals the presence of evil, of Satan. On the mantlepiece directly above Guy’s head is a statuette of the winged goddess Lilith, or the demonic goddess Strzyga of Polish folklore. It seems not laboured but natural to me that Polanski had in mind the smoke from concentration camp crematoria, which after all were the real fires of hell, in which his mother and unborn sibling perished, after a whole nation became a demon-beguiled, victimising coven. When Minnie and Rosemary return to the lounge the men rise suddenly and both look serious, preoccupied, Roman’s mask briefly removed. Blackmer’s acting is extraordinarily subtle – he momentarily wears an expression of the utmost cynicism before seamlessly reverting to the dithering avuncular. A deal has been struck, and Guy has three new best friends, one of them horned, winged and goat-eyed.
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