One of the nicest things about living in a city like Los Angeles is that I get many opportunities to see older movies on the big screen. On Saturday night I braved the rain to make my way to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s screening of Roman Polanski’s classic chiller. 
For those of you who might not be familiar with this wonderful movie, the plot concerns a young couple, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her actor husband (John Cassavetes) who move into a creepy old New York apartment building (actually, the famous Dakota). Their noisy and peculiar neighbors (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) appear excessively interested in Rosemary’s pregnancy. It had been many years since I’ve seen this movie, and the first thing that struck me was how amazingly good Ruth Gordon is. Thirty-eight years after the movie was made, it is clear that the Oscar she won for the performance had little to do with sentiment. She is on fire as the dotty Minnie Castevet.
And whatever you may think of Mia Farrow as an actress, she’s absolutely tremendous as Rosemary. Her physical frailty only emphasizes her steely determination to keep a suspected coven of witches from getting their claws on her baby. And what can I say about Mr. Polanski that hasn’t been said? He is a master at finding the creepy in the everyday. Rosemary’s comfortable Upper West Side life becomes more and more frightening with very little overt cinematic tricks or gimmicks. Polanski understood that the unknown is the most frightening thing and that the more banal and humdrum evil is portrayed, the more frightening it is. There were a few members of the audience sitting near me who were clearly seeing the movie for the first time, and I really enjoyed their increasingly alarmed reactions as the noose of the fiendish plot grows every tighter on poor hapless Rosemary. It’s interesting that Frank Sinatra, Farrow’s then-husband, absolutely hated that she was making a movie like Rosemary’s Baby. He visited her on the set and made scenes. The iconic Vidal Sassoon short-short pixie haircut she gets halfway through the film was probably the last straw for him. He served her divorce papers on the set. What a nice, supportive husband.
Mia, it was worth losing Frank to make this movie. It’s the performance of your career. While I don’t approve of watching movies on television (I don’t want to hear about how great your home theater setup is, not interested, blah blah blah blah I can’t hear you), since not everyone who reads this blog has the opportunity to see great films like this on the big screen, I recommend that everyone go out and rent this movie immediately. See how horror films are supposed to be made.
There’s an amazing shot in the film taken while Cruz is washing dishes. The camera is placed directly above her, so the audience is staring straight down at her (remarkable) boobs. How many other gay directors, I wonder, would put together such a shot? (I mean, besides John Waters . . . and then the boobs would be on a man.)
