In my top 10

Rating: 10/10 (9 January 2008)

One thing I love about this film is its strangely cosy atmosphere, and the way it's confined almost completely to people's homes (Guy and Rosemary, Hutch, the Castevets). In those homes people do ordinary things - they dish up food, they grow herbs, wash up, redecorate. It's like a page out of Good Housekeeping. And Rosemary is surrounded by sweet, kindly older people (Hutch, the Castevets, Laura Louise). But then they turn out to be... waah, waah, waah waah! On watching it again (and again, and again) I noticed that the camera is right in among the actors a lot of the time, the frame sometimes cutting off their head or half their body. This makes you feel you're really there with them, not watching them on a stage or through a picture frame. And everybody speaks naturally - not a method "naturalistic" mumble, but the real thing. All the characters have their own way of speaking ("Call me - not your Aunt Fanny!"), and for a lot of the time they are talking about mundane things like making a window seat or picking up eggs from the store. The setting is fabulous (I keep trying to work out the plan of the apartment and how it fits onto the Castevets'). The casting is brilliant. Ruth Gordon, Sydney Blackmer, Elisha Cook Jr., Patsy Kelly, Maurice Evans, Mia and John. As someone else pointed out, Guy is much older than Rosemary, and though handsome he's short, and he's never made it as an actor. Are they living on her money? Even his attempts at taking off the neighbours ("on account of it's one of her specialitays") are lame. He constantly laughs at things that aren't funny. The music, even when it's just a descending chromatic scale, is brilliantly creepy, and I love the theme song (sung beautifully by Mia).