The Devil you know ...

Rating: 9/10 (7 August 2007)

Ira Levin's novel about a girl impregnated by the Devil may have been a cut or two above the usual 'schlock-horror' fiction of the day but it was hardly to be taken seriously. When Roman Polanski set his cap on it he was already established as an 'art-house' director with a strong critical following. It may have seemed like dumbing down. Of course, as I've often said, hindsight is a wonderful thing and knowing what we know now of Polanski's ability to skip fairly effortlessly between genres and to make movies of artistic merit as well as appealing to a wider audience, we ought not to have been too worried. "Rosemary's Baby" is a cracker.
It's the story of a susceptible young bride with an active imagination, (some might say, over-active), married to a struggling actor who, to anybody should be instantly recognizable as something of a sleaze-ball, (John Cassavetes fitting the part perfectly). They move into one of those large brownstone buildings in New York where they quickly make friends with the nice, if a trifle interfering, old couple across the hall. Soon Rosemary is finding out all about her building from her old friend Hutch who has. perhaps, an unhealthy interest in the occult. It seems that a coven of devil-worshipers once lived there and her nice old neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet, may still be carrying on the practice.
Before you can say Beelzebub, Rosemary's husband Guy has sold his soul to Satan and is helping to hold his drugged wife down while someone or something large and scaly is mounting her. Soon Rosemary is about to have Rosemary's baby, (well, Rosemary's and the Devil's), and naturally, considering who or what is inside her, the pregnancy doesn't go according to plan. Rosemary starts to fear for her health and the health of her baby, (well, she was drugged at the time; how the hell does she know who the father is!). She also starts to put two and two together and comes up with the notion that Roman and Minnie and their band of witches and warlocks want her, as yet unborn, baby as some kind of human sacrifice. Little does she know! So far so 'schlock-horror', (subsequent movies cashed in on the theme with a lot less subtlety), but Polanski stuck to the old adage that what is truly terrifying is what is left to our imagination. With the exception of the conception we never actually see the demon, (and even there only glimpsed, only suggestively). And when finally Rosemary does give birth, the monster is shielded from our gaze.
The movie also plays beautifully with another kind of fear, that of any expectant mother for the safety of her unborn child. Had Polanski not chosen to show the drug-rape we might have gone along with the theory that everything that was happening to Rosemary was a figment of that over-ripe imagination. Indeed there were times when you thought that maybe everything was, that Polanski was going to pull the rug from under us and tell us it was all a bad dream. Instead he serves up a different ending, one that is all the more disturbing, (and one which posits a game of 'what if's ...).
As Rosemary, Mia Farrow, (at the time mostly untried on the big screen, a gamine-like elf of a creature), is terrific. She is so good at getting inside the character of Rosemary, with her mounting hysteria and her physical deterioration, that you begin to fear for the actress herself. At times Farrow seems to be taking method acting a tad too far. As if to counter the 'realism' of Farrow's performance, Ruth Gordon is gloriously over-the-top as Minnie, the old witch next door. Gordon knows she has the part of a lifetime and she milks it for all it's worth, (listen to how she makes Lipton's tea sound like the most sinister drink in the world). Gordon won an Oscar for her performance and richly deserved it; (Farrow failed to get a nomination).
The movie itself was very successful and it opened the floodgates for so many inferior movies on the same theme that its own reputation has tended to suffer. It isn't the best film Polanski has made and in the end it never quite goes deep enough but it's a good frightener and a deliciously dark comedy with one of the best performances of the sixties and that's good enough for me.