Pray, Pray

It turns out that Ms. Spenser has never seen Rosemary's Baby (1968). Since she wants more horror, I queued it up.

Mia Farrow (Rosemary) and John Cassavetes are a young couple apartment hunting in New York. They wind up at the “Branford”, played in exterior shots by the Dakota. It  seems an old woman had just died, so the apartment opened up. Rosemary made friends with a young woman, Victoria Vetri, in the laundry room. She had been a drug addict before an older couple took her in. We meet this couple when Vetri throws herself off the roof.

The couple are Roman and Minnie Castavet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon). Minnie is nosy but nice, pushing her way into the apartment and chatting in her broad NY accent. She would always push until just before Rosemary would break. Roman is a well-travelled raconteur, with some vague show business connections. He offers to help Cassavetes, a struggling actor, with his career. In fact, Cassavetes gets a part that he thought he had lost when the first choice actor suddenly went blind. But that couldn’t have anything to do with the neighbors, could it?

When they decide to have a baby, Gordon interrupts their romantic pre-coital dinner to drop off dessert, a chocolate “mouse”. Rosemary only eats a bite of hers, but suddenly collapses. She has a bizarre vision of being raped at her neighbors apartment by a diabolical beast. The next day, she discovers that she has had sex - her husband said she had passed out, and he didn’t want to miss baby-making night.

This is about where Ms. Spenser dropped out. The horror isn’t the supernatural, it’s what the ordinary people do.

So, now Rosemary’s pregnant. The neighbors get her the best OB/GYN in town, who prescribes an herbal drink that Ruth Gordon fixes for her. She gets pale and loses weight, and starts feeling horrible pains, but everyone tells her this is normal. Around here, she gets her Mia Farrow pixie cut, declaring, “It’s Vidal Sassoon”. But everyone tells her it looks horrible.

The horror in the movie is mostly about what pregnancy does to a woman’s body and mind, but also about the horror of neighbors. It’s about living in the city, crushed up against every random idiot, and discovering your husband prefers them to you. It’s clever and sort of funny in places. I have to admit that as a youth, I was very fond of Ira Levin, and read several of his novels, including Rosemary’s Baby and a Brave New World ripoff, This Perfect Day. This is a very faithful adaptation. It also has some great performance’s, especially Gordon’s. There are a bunch of older actors, like Elisha Cook Jr. and Ralph Bellamy.

Ms. Spenser’s verdict, however, is that this is not a scary movie, just a creepy one. In the end, I have to agree.