Another of the movies that I recorded during one of the free preview weekends and had never blogged about before is Rosemary's Baby. It's going to be on The Movie Channel Xtra tomorrow at 9:30 PM, and again a few more times the rest of the week. So, as always, seeing that, I made it a point to watch now to do a post on it.
Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is a young wife married to actor Guy (John Cassavetes) in New York. They're moving into a new apartment that they were able to afford after the last tenant, an elderly woman, had to leave with dementia or something. Heck, she even put a secretary in front of a closet, that's how crazy she was. It's seems like a relatively nice apartment, although I personally though it looked like it was beginning to show its age. But that's not the point of the movie.
The Woodhouses live next to an elderly couple, the Castevets: Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer), a seemingly slightly bohemian couple who have taken in a young woman to help her, named Terry. Rosemary meets Terry down in the basement of the building while the two are doing their laundry, and the two become fast friends.
It's not a particularly long friendship, however, as Terry kills herself by jumping out a window. She was a drug addict anyway, so what are you going to do. Good news is on the horizon, however, as Rosemary gets pregnant, which she's always wanted to do. And the Castevets are nice enough to get the Woodhouses an in with the best obstetrician in town, Dr. Sapirstein (a bearded Ralph Bellamy).
But things start to go sour again. Rosemary starts suffering pains that she's convinced aren't the normal pains of pregnancy, as they just won't go away. And the Castevets are getting a little too involved in Rosemary and Guy's lives, saying that Dr. Sapirstein asked them to make up some herbal/vitamin concoction that, being natural, will be better than those pills. Rosemary just wants one night where she can have her own friends back around her.
One of the Woodhouses' old friends before meeting the Castevets was Hutch (Maurice Evans). He's got something he desperately needs to see Rosemary about. But the next day, when the two are supposed to meet, he never shows up. Apparently he suffered some sort of medical issue that left him in a coma and ultimately killed him. But his last request was that one of his books be given to Rosemary.
That book is a book on witchcraft, and after reading it, Rosemary gets the distinct feeling that the Castevets are actually witches, and they might have less than good intentions for the baby. Of course, she can't get Guy to believe her, and there's no way she'd confront the Castevets directly. She can't even trust Dr. Sapirstein.
But are the Castevets actually witches? The answer to that will be revealed in the final reel. And that's where the beauty of Rosemary's Baby lies. To me, the movie is a throwback to the old Val Lewton style of horror where instead of showing all sorts of gore and violence, the scary things are what you conjure up in your own mind. For the most part, it works stunningly well here.
The movie is also helped by good performances from almost everybody, down to smaller roles from people like Elisha Cook Jr. as their new landlord or Charles Grodin as Rosemary's preferred obstetrician. The one thing that I personally didn't find quite so effective were the dream sequences, but they're the sort of thing where I understand why they're in the movie.
Rosemary's Baby is one of those movies like Soylent Green or The Stepford Wives where you've probably heard what it's about before actually seeing the movie. But even then, the movie still definitely deserves to be seen.
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