ROSEMARY'S BABY: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Paramount, 1968) Paramount Home Video

The greatest deception the devil ever perpetuated was to convince mankind he doesn’t exist. This probably explains why it takes our Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) the better part of 137-minutes to acknowledge her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes) has betrayed the sacred bond of marriage and sold their unborn child to the anti-Christ, merely for the opportunity to advance his own career ambitions. Most people regard the start of a marriage as one of the happiest times in their lives. Leave it to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to unsettle theses expectations with an unnerving and unerring glimpse into the catastrophe that will eventually become Rosemary and Guy’s lives. Polanski, who wrote the screenplay based on Ira Levin’s novel, was an unproven commodity in Hollywood, despite his reputation in Europe as a consummate professional. In Hollywood, director, William Castle had practically begged Paramount’s production chief, Robert Evans to snatch up the rights to Levin’s psychological thriller while the book was still in galleys. Evans, who admired Castle’s taste but felt his skills as a B-budget director of schlock horror left something to be desired, agreed to buy the book, provided Castle remained strictly the producer on the project. Castle reluctantly agreed, then quietly resented Evan’s hiring Polanski to helm the project.

Evans first choice for Guy – Robert Redford – declined the role citing prior commitments. Polanski wanted Tuesday Weld for the part of Rosemary, described in Levin’s novel as a fresh-faced, wholesome creature of bucolic naiveté. Polanski next thought of his own wife, Sharon Tate. But the studio wanted a ‘name’ and Mia Farrow – with her most recent success on TV’s Peyton Place, as well as her marriage to Frank Sinatra, fit this bill. Polanski eventually concurred Farrow was an ideal choice. But Sinatra remained ‘frankly’ unconvinced. Old Blue Eyes would eventually give Farrow an ultimatum – him or the movie - then have his lawyer serve divorce papers right in the middle of the shoot. Farrow, who had come from the traditional workman-like Hollywood family, chose to honor her contract instead of her marriage – in hindsight, a very wise decision. In the meantime, the relationship between Polanski and Cassavetes curdled. The two men – both having acted for other people as well as directed their own projects – started out the best of friends on Rosemary’s Baby. However, this mutual admiration was not to last, particularly as Cassavetes felt less comfortable with his part as written, was forced by Polanski to stick to the script, and, thereafter began keeping to himself, reshaping his role according to his own counsel. This created friction and a general unpleasantness between director and star. Polanski would later muse Cassavetes performance was solid although he was also quick to point out that by the end of the shoot the actor had become a “pain in the ass”.

Viewed today, Rosemary’s Baby remains an undeniably spooky movie. Yet, its status as a horror classic is something of a curiosity. True enough the tale of a young couple’s exposure to their seemingly harmless elderly neighbors, who just happen to be Satan worshipers, their dilapidated apartment complex a New York hotspot for human sacrifice and witchcraft, does lend itself to the clichés of horror. But Polanski’s direction, and indeed, the film as it exists, never adhere or even come close to lampooning the time-honored precepts of the horror genre. The genius of the movie, like the novel, is that it remains psychologically perplexing, offering the audience a strange dream-like dementia that gradually descends into pure nightmare and madness from which there is no escape. Our story begins with the Woodhouse’s move into The Bramford, a Gothic-styled apartment complex first shown to Guy and Rosemary by superintendent, Mr. Micklas (Elisha Cook Jr.) who informs them the previous tenant has died unexpectedly, but assures them, from natural causes.  An old friend and writer, Hutch (Maurice Evans) later explains to the Woodhouses that the Bramford has a reputation, plagued by various unexplained occurrences, resulting in several well-publicized murders/deaths/suicides throughout the years. Regrettably, Hutch’s fantastic historical account does little to dissuade Rosemary or Guy from having another look about the place.

The apartment, still furnished, is gloomy and foreboding, but yields an immediate fascination in the discovery of a rather large secretariat blocking an unassuming broom closet. Rosemary sees potential in the rooms and encourages Guy to sign the lease. A struggling actor whose previous roles have amounted to a few bit parts off-Broadway and a reoccurring stint as a car salesman on a TV commercial, Guy obliges his wife and the couple move in. Almost immediately Guy and Rosemary are befriended by Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer), slightly doddering, exceptionally nosy neighbors whose paper-thin bedroom wall butts up against their own. While doing her laundry in the Bramford’s dimly lit basement Rosemary is introduced to Terry Gionoffrio (Angela Dorian), a reformed drug attic whom the Castevets have taken in as their ward. Terry tells Rosemary, Minnie and Roman have been like the parents she never had. Rosemary casually admires the rather odd pendant given Terry by Minnie, containing a rather odious smelling Tannis root.  It seems Rosemary has made a new friend. But shortly thereafter, Terry is discovered by Rosemary and Guy lying in a pool of blood on the pavement outside the Bramford, having fallen – or perhaps jumped – from one of its open windows.

Guy initially finds the Castevets quite intrusive, an opinion to change after Minnie goads Rosemary into accepting a dinner invitation. While Rosemary and Minnie clear the table, Guy and Roman develop a strange bond, predicated mostly on Roman’s flattery of Guy’s talents as an actor. The following day, Guy misses out on a juicy part in a Broadway show. But he is hardly forlorn. In fact, he hurries over to Roman’s apartment, leaving Rosemary at the merciless nattering of Minnie and her best friend, Laura Louise (Patsy Kelly).  To express her gratitude, Minnie gives Rosemary Terry’s pendant, informing her it is a good luck charm she should always wear.  The next day Guy receives a phone call from the producers of the play, explaining that the actor they hired instead of him has inexplicably lost his sight. Flush with success, Guy rushes over to tell Roman, returning hours later with red roses for Rosemary and encouraging her to start their family. That night, however, Minnie arrives during their romantic dinner with ramekins of chocolate mousse as a sort of celebratory dessert. Guy devours his. But after only a few spoonfuls, Rosemary reasons there is some sort of bizarre aftertaste.  She becomes ill and passes out, succumbing to a series of hallucinations, imagining herself nude and surrounded by the elderly tenants aboard a yacht on stormy seas. Raped by a demonic presence, and concluding that “this is no dream” – Rosemary awakens with a startle in her own bed the next morning, discovering scratches across her nude body. Guy sheepishly fabrics a story, he was drunk and took advantage of her while she lay unconscious, an invasion of her body that drives a wedge between Guy and Rosemary until a few weeks later when she learns she is, in fact, pregnant.

Rosemary is encouraged by Minnie and Roman to drop her obstetrician, Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) in favor of Dr. Abraham Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), one of the most revered and prominent in his profession. A close personal friend of the Castevets, Sapirstein begins an aggressive regiment of vitamin drinks he says Minnie will make for Rosemary from her fresh-ground herbs - far more potent than the usual pills other obstetricians generally prescribe.  All, however, does not go according to plan. Rosemary becomes increasingly ill, suffering severe abdominal cramps and extreme weight loss. Her cravings gradually veer into the grotesque consumption of raw chicken liver. Despite her gauntness, Sapirstein assures Rosemary she is well and has absolutely nothing to fear.  Alarmed by Rosemary’s frailty, Hutch also takes notice of the pendant around her neck and the curious smell emanating from it. After she explains the Tannis root within is also part of Minnie’s vitamin drink regiment, Hutch decides to do some quiet research. Later, he telephones Rosemary at home, setting up a luncheon date for the next afternoon. Only Hutch never makes it to their prearranged rendezvous outside the Time/Life Building.  Telephoning his house after waiting for him for several hours, Rosemary learns Hutch has inexplicably slipped into a coma. Three months later, he dies in hospital, but not before briefly regaining consciousness and encouraging his doctor to give Rosemary a book on witchcraft he had been researching on her behalf. At Hutch’s funeral, his close friend, Grace Cardiff (Hanna Landy) gives Rosemary the book with a cryptic message: “the name is an anagram”. After some puzzlement, Rosemary uses a Scrabble set to deduce that Roman Casavets is really Steven Marcato, the son of a former Bramford resident accused of worshipping the devil.

Beginning to suspect she is in great danger, and perhaps Guy has been swayed to their witch’s coven, Rosemary also becomes suspicious when she realizes Guy has previously stolen a tie from the actor who went blind, and also a glove from Hutch. Perhaps, these personal effects were used by Roman and Minnie to cast destructive spells on both men. That afternoon, Rosemary refuses Minnie’s vitamin drink and comes to suspect Dr. Sapirstein is also a part of the coven who seeks to possess her baby. Frantic, Rosemary packs a suitcase and escapes the Bramford to Dr. Hill’s office. He listens intently to her seemingly paranoid tale before encouraging her to lie down in one of his unoccupied examination rooms. Hill tells Rosemary he will place her in protective care at Mount Sinai, but instead telephones Guy and Sapirstein who come to retrieve Rosemary and take her back to the Bramford.  Attempting yet another escape, Rosemary is subdued by Guy and Sapirstein. She goes into labor and is sedated, awakening hours later only to be told her baby has died. However, in the days that follow, Rosemary hears the whimpers of a child coming from Roman and Minnie’s apartment. Remembering how the secretariat had been pushed up against the hall closet, Rosemary finds a secret passage behind its walls that leads directly into the Castavet’s apartment.  Armed with a butcher knife, Rosemary follows the sounds of a child crying into Minnie and Roman’s living room where the devil worshippers, including Guy and Sapirstein, have gathered to celebrate the birth of Satan’s offspring – Rosemary’s baby.  Horrified, Rosemary spits in Guys face, but is lulled to the cradle by Roman who encourages her to be a mother to her child. The film ends with Rosemary gently rocking the cradle.

Rosemary’s Baby is bone-chilling, yet remarkably restrained entertainment. The true horror of the piece is not derived from special effects or the rank gruesomeness that would progressively infiltrate and devolve the horror genre into the blood-n-guts purgatory where it remains to this day. Even in its depiction of satanic worship, Rosemary’s Baby is genuinely self-possessed, with Polanski keeping the more demonstrative aspects of human sacrifice and the occult to the imagination. In retrospect, Rosemary’s Baby owes much to, and is more on par with Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim (1943) another tale of innocence lost through demonic worship, than likeminded fare, The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) where Satan becomes ‘the star’ of the story. Yet, Rosemary’s Baby does not cheat the audience from exorcising its penetrated fear. Partly because Farrow’s Oscar-worthy performance is so ‘damn good’ and efficient at extolling the inner tumult of this raped waif, impregnated by the anti-Christ, and partly the result of Polanski’s ability to elicit genuine revulsion through a style that is unsettling, though never graphic (a la William A. Fraker’s brilliantly claustrophobic cinematography and Richard Sylbert’s haunting production design), the film mounts in its suspicions with a gradual, methodical calling – ever so slightly tweaked and, to occasionally toy with the reality of Rosemary’s imploding sense of self-preservation.  

Take, for example the sequence when Rosemary, having discovered Sapirstein is a part of the witch’s coven, hurriedly rushes to a telephone booth on a street corner in Manhattan, determined to telephone Dr. Hill for his counsel and salvation. Polanski stages the sequence from a vantage just outside the glass booth, with Farrow’s frantic protagonist desperately clutching the receiver – all the while exposed to passersby who infrequently attempt to intrude on her conversation. Polanski has already primed the audience by giving Sapirstein a distinctive curly haircut. Thus, when a man comes into view from behind Rosemary with his back to the camera and a haircut similar the doctor the audience holds its breath while assuming the worst – that Sapirstein has found Rosemary. In fact, in the next few moments it is revealed the man just outside the booth is just another passerby (actually played by William Castle) who is patiently waiting to use the telephone.  But the sequence does more than elevate the nail-biting suspense of the moment. It also challenges the audience to reconsider all that has gone before it. Are Rosemary’s fears about the coven founded, or is she merely experiencing a pre-partum anxiety that has temporarily overtaken her logic and sanity? Until the final moments of this movie we are never certain which scenario holds true. On the one hand, Minnie and Roman’s behavior could definitely be considered as shifty. On the other, it could just as easily be misconstrued as harmless, if annoying; just a lonely old couple thoroughly fascinated by their new youthful tenants and the prospects of playing pseudo-grandparents to a new offspring.

Polanski’s staging of Rosemary’s decline is, deliberately, of no help to clarify things for the audiences in any concrete way. What has he given us? A missing glove and exchanged neckties to suggest a coma and unexplained blindness.  Garbled chanting obscured by dense plaster walls while Rosemary suffers a nightmare that ends with only her suspicions something out of the ordinary has occurred. A strange smell emanating from a pendant bequeathed as a gift by a neighbor grateful for her consolation after Terry’s untimely death. Are these omens of some paralyzing demonic truth or exaggerated precursors, merely of odd behavior that is just that – odd, but thoroughly harmless? Polanski remain circumspect in his deliberations until the very last scene when Rosemary is faced with the dread, she has birthed the devil’s child.  In that moment, all of Polanski’s ambiguous construction implodes. The mystery is solved, the riddle exposed. The audience faces Rosemary’s shocking fate with the same sort of detachment our heroine feels as she approaches the cradle in defeat. She cannot kill her child to save the world.

Rosemary’s Baby arrives in native 4K from Paramount, an interesting decision, considering the studio earlier farmed out a 4K scan to standard Blu-ray in Criterion. For decades, the look of the movie on home video has remained highly unresolved. William A. Fraker’s mood-evoking, softly focused cinematography always looking slightly blurry, or dull in standard def.  Criterion’s earlier Blu gave us the first home video release to closely mimic Fraker’s look in hi-def. There was, some justifiable concern, Paramount might not get Rosemary’s Baby right – even, in 4K, as the studio tends to favor DNR to homogenize image quality. But, in fact, herein the results are fairly impressive, with but one anomaly. The Criterion release sported some robust colors that were fairly attractive. This 4K has a more subdued color palette. This is evident immediately. The main titles, on the Criterion Blu, sported flamingo pink lettering. In 4K, the lettering registers more of a pastel pink. Flesh tones that were quite warm on the Criterion, have considerably cooled in UHD. Overall, the 4K adopts a slightly darker image quality. Fraker’s cinematography is better resolved, especially in long shot. There are subtler refinements in overall detail that are quite pleasing, especially in projection. We get the same Dolby TrueHD 2.0 audio. It’s flat with limited bass and zero spatial separation.

The 4K has no extras. But Paramount has packaged a standard Blu-ray, containing two featurettes: at just under a half-hour - 'Mia & Roman', and, barely 16-mins. of a retrospective on the movie. We also get 2 trailers.  Sorely missed: the goodies that accompanied the Criterion standard Blu release – a 50-min. doc. on the making of the movie, with participation from Mia Farrow, Robert Evans and Roman Polanski that offers fresh insight and fascinating backstories, the 1997 audio-only interview with author, Ira Levin, and, Komeda, Komeda - a feature-length doc on composer, Krzysztof Komeda. Bottom line: don’t trade in your Criterion. But consider the Paramount 4K for its improved resolution. It’s subtle, but distinct – especially on displays larger than 85 inches. One minor quibble here. Paramount’s clever cover art, to simultaneously depict in silhouette a pregnant Rosemary and the beast chomping at her belly is one of the ugliest impressionistic covers to appear in a long while. The original classic poster art, used for the Criterion Blu is more evocative of this movie. Recommended – with caveats.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

3