![rosemarys baby movie rosemarys baby movie](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P10AWBi4-y8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Brilliantly played by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is isolated spiritually as much as physically. She is an innocent, cut adrift, crumbling slowly psychologically, an unknowing mother-to-be.
ROSEMARYS BABY MOVIE MOVIE
The viewer is left in no doubt: There is a palpable darkness that pervades this movie from the start.Ĭentral to all this is an expectant mother: Rosemary. Other, more lurid, attacks on the Church are present. Paul VI’s visit to New York City in 1965, mocked by the now-Satanist husband to his still nominally Catholic wife, Rosemary. There are, of course, many subtler, (and therefore all the more disquieting) hints of evil that suffuse the film.įor example, there is a shot of the genuine 1966 Time magazine cover asking: “Is God Dead?” And there are clips of actual footage of Pope St. And what evil: nothing less than the birth of the Antichrist. Many years later, when I watched the movie again, it disturbed me even more than it had that first time, and now I began to understand why.įor a start, until the late 1960s, there had never been a Hollywood film where evil triumphed so blatantly. Barely a teenager, I was not sure then why this was. Here was something distinctive on screen, with a peculiar feel that unnerved me. The jolts on screen were not those that might reanimate a corpse but still disturbed the audience in subtler ways. Even then, I realized that this was a different sort of “horror” film to any I had thus far experienced, and a long way from the studios of Universal and Hammer. I remember the first time I saw the movie on television one Halloween in the late 1970s. The plot revolves around an actor who sacrifices his wife’s fecundity to Satan so that his acting career flourishes and flourish it does.
![rosemarys baby movie rosemarys baby movie](https://union.fsu.edu/sites/g/files/upcbnu1456/files/pictures/ASLC/Blog/rosemarysbabygraphic.jpg)
![rosemarys baby movie rosemarys baby movie](https://posterspy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1a-rosemary95y21.jpg)
Still to this day, Rosemary’s Baby is a chilling movie to watch. And it all began with an occult thriller where the accepted morality and understanding of evil was turned on its head. They were now very much at the forefront of the emerging New Hollywood and the new on-screen morality that it inaugurated. Evans would go on to make Paramount the most successful studio in Hollywood, transforming its fortunes.Įvans and Polanski fashioned, some in partnership, many more influential films after Rosemary’s Baby. When Evans had become head of production for Paramount in 1966, the studio was in the doldrums, ranked the ninth-largest studio in Hollywood. Like that 1967 film about amoral gangsters, Rosemary’s Baby represented a break with old Hollywood and the embrace of the nascent New Hollywood that was being built from ideas both artistic and philosophical emanating from the then-voguish French New Wave cinema.Ī commercial and critical success for Paramount Pictures, Rosemary’s Baby would make both Evans’ and Polanski’s Hollywood careers. In bringing the project to life at Paramount Pictures, Evans was doing for Paramount what Warren Beatty had done for Warner Bros. When he read Levin’s novel, he knew he had found it. Having recently been appointed head of production at Paramount Pictures, Robert Evans, a former actor who had turned producer, was looking for a film that would make his name. Inevitably, after the success of his to-date European films, Polanski was beckoned to the United States with a view to making his first Hollywood film: Rosemary’s Baby, based upon the 1967 best-selling novel of the same name by Ira Levin. Films, such as Polanski’s, with recurring themes of murder, madness and the supernatural, were to be in the vanguard of this emerging order. At that time, European cinema was throwing off moral constraints in sympathy with the perceived dawning of a new age. It was as disturbing a piece of cinema as it was to prove successful with critics and audiences alike. It starred ’60s icon Catherine Deneuve, who played an isolated young woman going slowly mad in a South Kensington apartment, before being subject to a frenzied killing by an axe. His London-based film Repulsion (1965) marked out the young Pole still further. Now, with an eye to the international stage, he went to London. A Polish filmmaker named Roman Polanski had forged, with one film, Knife in the Water (1962), a reputation as a director of promise in his native land.