Rosemary's Baby (Willian Castle Productions, Paramount, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 25) Turner Classic Movies showed the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby as part of an oddball double bill, co-introduced by TCM host Ben Mankiewicz and actor Paul Giamatti, that also featured the 1962 independent movie Carnival of Souls, reviewed on moviemagg: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/search?q=carnival+of+souls). I’d seen Rosemary’s Baby only once before, on a poor-quality black-and-white TV with an over-the-air signal on an ordinary commercial broadcast. In fact, I had vivid memories of that TV; it was the one I had in 1975, it was a present from my grandfather, and due to a weird glitch in the picture tube the bottom part of the image folded in on itself so when I watched some of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies on it their feet were above their ankles. I was hoping I’d like it better on a modern color TV with a clear and undistorted image, but no-o-o-o-o. Rosemary’s Baby began life in 1967 as a novel by Ira Levin, who’s described on his Wikipedia page as a “Jewish atheist.” The movie rights were purchased by old-line schlockmeister William Castle, who made a deal with Robert Evans, then the studio head at Paramount, to make the film on a major budget and with a prestigious cast. Evans flatly insisted that Castle not direct the film himself – obviously he didn’t want it associated with such previous Castle films as The House on Haunted Hill (1958) and The Tingler (1959). Castle went looking for another director and originally offered it to Alfred Hitchcock, who turned it down – and it’s easy to see why. HItchcock’s one foray into horror, Psycho (1960), had carefully avoided the supernatural; indeed, Hitchcock had been so concerned to make sure the events of Psycho were physically possible he even sent the script to the UCLA psychology department to make sure everything in it comported to the realities of mental illness as they were known then. The director who ultimately got hired was Roman Polanski, who also wrote the script from Levin’s novel.

Rosemary’s Baby deals with a young married couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her aspiring-actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes, who got the part only after both Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson turned it down). They rent an apartment in the Bramford Building (based on the real-life Dakota, a cooperative building whose exterior is used in the film; it’s where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived together and in front of which Lennon was murdered in 1980) whose previous occupant, an old woman, just died suddenly and left behind all her furniture. Guy suddenly gets a major part in a play when the actor previously cast, Donald Baumgart (who’s never seen onscreen but whose voice is heard when Guy calls him, and it’s an uncredited Tony Curtis), suddenly and mysteriously goes blind. Rosemary befriends a woman while the two are in the building’s spooky laundry room, only the day after they met Rosemary’s new-found friend falls out of a window to her death. Rosemary and Guy befriend a senior-citizen couple, Roman and Minnie Castavet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon – Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her part). Rosemary is determined to get pregnant; she’s even used the rhythm method in reverse to figure out when she will be at her most fertile, and she demands that Guy have sex with her that night. She seduces him by playing a soft-jazz record on their stereo and lighting a fire in their fireplace – which causes them a bit of an embarrassment because she’d forgot to open the flue, so the apartment fills with smoke until he’s able to reach into the fireplace and open it without burning his arm. When Rosemary and Guy finally have sex, she dreams that she’s on a yacht with various well-to-do-looking people, and through the walls of their apartment they hear strange music that sounds like Latin chants played backwards. Ultimately, after two hours of long, boring, ponderous exposition, Rosemary realizes that the father of her baby-to-be is not Guy but Satan. Roman Castavet is actually the son of a practicing witch who decades earlier killed himself inside the Bramford, and he, Minnie, and just about everyone around them is part of a Satanist plot which self-described “Jewish atheist” Ira Levin seems to have constructed as a deliberate parody and mockery of the Christian concept of the birth of Jesus. Like the Biblical Mary, Rosemary is told that she is the most beloved of all women because she has been chosen to be the mother of the Chosen One, the Redeemer, only in her case her child has been chosen not to save the world but to damn it.

Rosemary’s Baby could have been the basis for a quite good vest-pocket horror thriller in the Val Lewton mold (though Lewton and his people would have got it on and off the screen in half the time Castle and Polanski took); instead it runs a full two hours and 17 minutes. We get the point pretty early on – these horrific happenings are occurring in the lives of people who are otherwise banal and not very interesting – but there’s only so much we can take of the boring relationship between Guy and Rosemary before being bored ourselves. One thing I liked about Rosemary’s Baby is the sheer number of Hollywood and Broadway veterans who got parts in it, including Elisha Cook, Jr. (as the landlord who shows the Woodhouses the apartment literally from hell), Maurice Evans (as the Woodhouses’s former landlord), Patsy Kelly (as a member of the Satanist cult who at first appears to be playing her usual voice of reason from her 1930’s films), and Ralph Bellamy (as the pediatrician whom the Castavets insist that Rosemary use and who is, of course, part of their cult – as is Dr. Hill, played by the young Charles Grodin, whom Rosemary futilely turns to for help when she realizes what she’s up against).But for the most part Rosemary’s Baby is a dull, plodding film which gets interesting only in the last 20 minutes or so, as Rosemary is finally confronted with her destiny to bear and raise Satan’s child and agrees to take on the task. (One thing Polanski got right is we never actually see Rosemary’s baby; we’re told how ferociously ugly it is, but its actual appearance is left to our imaginations, Lewton-style.) But the biggest single weakness of this film is Mia Farrow’s stupid, annoying performance as the female lead. It’s true that the character is supposed to be something of an airhead, but Farrow really overdoes it.

She’s also victimized by the infamous ultra-short hairdo she was given during the course of the shoot; for the first third of the film she has a Sydney Guilaroff haircut that makes her look like a normal white female, but then she goes to Vidal Sassoon’s studio (Sassoon is actually name-checked in the film’s dialogue as well as given a credit for the horrible abomination he inflicted on Farrow’s head) and ends up with hair that would have been unusually short even for a male. Farrow was married to Frank Sinatra at the time, and the best comment on her awful haircut came from Sinatra’s ex, Ava Gardner, who said, “I always knew Frank would marry a boy someday, and now he has.” (Did she know something about Sinatra that the rest of the world didn’t?) I used to say that the ultra-short hairdo Mariska Hargitay wore during her first few seasons on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was one of the worst haircuts ever inflicted on a basically attractive woman, but it pales by comparison to the atrocity Sassoon wreaked on Farrow here. I’ve compared Farrow to Grace Kelly: both were blonde actresses who had one director who could get far more out of them than anyone else. In Kelly’s case it was Alfred Hitchcock; though Hitchcock was hardly known as an actors’ director, in their three films together he managed to make Kelly seem sensual and alluring, whereas in all her other movies she’s so cold and icy she could have sunk the Titanic. In Farrow’s case it was Woody Allen, and while all the world knows about the bitter events that ended both their professional and personal relationships, the fact remains that under Allen’s guidance Farrow gave the most full-blooded and emotionally complex performances of her career. Ira Levin said in 2002 that he regretted writing Rosemary’s Baby because its popularity had led to a whole cycle of films about Satanism and demonic possession: “I feel guilty that Rosemary's Baby led to The Exorcist, The Omen. A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don't believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong Fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn’t been so many of these books. … Of course, I didn’t send back any of the royalty checks.” Levin’s cunning parable equating the birth of Rosemary’s baby with the birth of Jesus could be considered an example of the Manichean heresy: the idea that God and Satan are equally powerful and the universe is the site of an eternal struggle between good and evil represented by two all-powerful gods. But that’s giving a fundamentally silly movie way too much credit for reshaping American politics and the likely history of the world.