Product: Rosemary's Baby (El Bebe de Rosemary) [ NON-USA FORMAT, NTSC, Reg.4 Import - Latin America ] (1968)
Rating: 4.0
The "Making Of" Featurette is worth the price of the DVD!
I'll get right to the point: BUY THIS! The movie is a classic and features a superb print for DVD release, but also has a surprisingly wonderful 25 min. documentary of the film - made in the late sixties by a man named only "Hatari". It consists of loads of behind the scenes footage on the set: Mia the hippie painting "love and peace" on her stage door, dancing around and giggling like a school kid, and playing around on the set. Polanski is shown meticulously directing everyone, particularly Mia; placing her hand just so on the table, showing her exactly how to observe the baby in the final scene, framing scenes with his hands, and even having a fencing round with Mia! The whole thing is very, very 60's, which to me is far better and much more authentic and interesting than some cold 2000 documentary might have been. It shows how much fun they had making the movie and how much work they put into it, and how they were THEN, at the time of the film's release. Times were much simpler then, filmmaking was much more about quality than money, and the documentary shows, in kind of a sad way, how much times have changed. Mia was the quintessential hippie, very Beatles-ish, and it's impressive how she could have acted so well, after only moments earlier clowning around like a kid on the set. It's also interesting to learn that Tuesday Weld was seriously considered for the role, and wanted badly by Polanski, but finally overruled by the infamous Robert Evans. Fantastic stuff, and very worth the rather high price of the DVD.As for the movie, I'd never seen it before, and being 33, that's a crime! I'd read so many complimentary reviews of it that I knew it had to be special, so I saved it. While I thought it was extremely well-made and well acted, it didn't strike me on my initial viewing as the 5 star classic I'd heard it was. 4, at best. Admittedly, I'd heard too many good things about it for it to live up to my expectations. It made a huge impression on the public back then, and holds up well today, but reviewing it in 2000, as I am, isn't really fair to it. Be that as it may, to say it's "the scariest movie ever made" or "best horror film" is, in my opinion, a gross exaggeration. It's a very suspenseful movie, but not really in the horror genre. The idea was to have it start out as a "Doris Day" type of film, then gradually grow to a horrifying climax, but I found the climax to be disappointing and needlessly ambiguous. In fact it was nearly campy, though I don't mean to say the ending was bad - just not the payoff I was expecting. And they took too long to get to it, with the "everything's normal" set-up. There's only a few kind-of scares in the movie, and none created by supernatural powers; only people. And sorry, but with what we know about Charles Grodin now, he's just not a very scary fellow, nor is Ruth Gordon. Also, John Cassavetes, while doing a decent job in his role, does not have a single scene where he's creepy in any way, which, if he had been, is something that could have helped this film. Polanski wanted him because he 'looked like a NY actor', but ultimately, I think he was miscast. In short, don't expect to be scared out of your wits by this film; see The Exorcist for that. But, if you want to see a truly well-made, eerie, suspensful film, with a wonderfully adapted script and direction by Polanski, and Oscar-caliber acting by Mia Farrow (and Ruth Gordon, who actually did win the Oscar for her acting in this film), Rosemary's Baby will not disappoint. And if you've seen the movie many times already, the documentary will shed new light on it for you. (There's another, later interview with Polanski, too, which focuses mainly on casting). A 5 star DVD, one of the best!