Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy
based on the novel by Ira Levin
written for the screen and directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw Rosemary is everything. He’s just Guy. It’s that tension–between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table–that serves as the tightrope in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. As portrayed by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is precious and flawed, full of life and surrounded by death. She is the venerated object, the cathedral she imagines the night she’s drugged and violated; the most precious thing, the sanctified earth planted with the pestilential corruption of masculine ambition. Rosemary’s Baby opens with a lengthy consideration of the buildings that surround Central Park like vultures in their priestly black, voracious and solemn, gathered around a carcass that is, in this configuration, the sole hint of life in a metal savannah. Polanski is a genius of architecture and the consideration of it. His spaces are predatory, or at least become so: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” and the apartment that sprouts hands from its walls and, here in Rosemary’s Baby, the “Black Bramford.” He puts pretty blondes into the maw of his constructions–sacrifices to the Minotaur wandering through his Labyrinth–and watches them get swallowed by the Stygian black. He is the Minotaur. The pitch is his, along with the appetites. Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest films about what women endure in a world that sees them as seed incubators, nesting fowl, and finally trophies: meek and pretty. But Rosemary isn’t meek, simply outmatched, surrounded, flanked by the men she’s supposed to be able to trust.

Panning across Central Park, Polanski stops on the Dakota, which plays the Bramford. It’s a building that Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary’s pal Hutch (Maurice Evans) tells us is cursed by infernal doings and dark rumours, cursed now for us by its association with John Lennon, shot dead in its archway by a religious lunatic. Rosemary and Guy are there to check out an apartment in the Bramford. I love how the elevator operator (D’Urville Martin) looks like he knows something. So does a handyman who shakes his head furtively at Guy, though Guy doesn’t notice. Philip Kaufman is taking notes somewhere: the same background paranoia suffuses his Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 10 years’ time. Maybe Polanski was taking notes from Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass from seven years prior: the feeling that everyone knows something you don’t, and they’re always watching you. That’s us. We know something is going on, but we don’t say anything. The things happening to Rosemary are our fault because we don’t warn or help her; we watch her. Polanski engulfs Rosemary, formulates her to a slide and positions her beneath the microscope of his camera. I think of how Farrow’s real-life husband, Frank Sinatra, forbade her to be in this film, but she chose immortality in a picture written and directed by a man, adapting a book by a man. She is Rosemary. She’s the only hint of life in this blasted, infernal place, and just as Central Park is lined with totems of glass and iron, she is closed in from all sides by men.

The building manager, Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook, Jr.), shows them a recently-vacated apartment that’s more expensive than they can really afford (Rosemary doesn’t work and Guy is a struggling actor, maybe you saw him in “Luther” or “Nobody Loves an Albatross”), but it’s close to where the action is and Rosemary can picture what the overstuffed environment could be with a young, hip woman’s touch. She does brighten it up, of course she does, with yellows and whites and less furniture and clutter, but the way Polanski shoots her in it, she’s like a lab mouse. After a takeout meal on the floor of their empty living room their first night there, she tells Guy they should “make love,” I think to fill all that negative space with the vitality of their youth and the promise of the rest of their lives. She is everything. She is hope and light, and she doesn’t stand a chance in this miserable world. She is a light that is guttering and going out. No, her light is being snuffed out. The only other director I can think of who is this cynical about what marriage does to a woman is Alfred Hitchcock. Guy doesn’t want a baby, not yet, because he’s having a hard time finding work, and he worries, as men will worry when they mistake having a good job for being a good husband. Men will make bad decisions based on what they think they’re supposed to be doing while watching their families grow away from them. It would be easier to feel sorry for men if they weren’t responsible for the greater portion of evil in the world. Guy is pathetic. Grasping, desperate, pathologically in need of affirmation, and exactly the variety of solipsistic narcissist who would sell his child to the Devil if it meant he could claim the achievements against which he measures success. And he does.

Their neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), are invasive, nosey, perhaps lonesome people who can’t seem to leave Guy and Rosemary alone. The Woodhouses make fun of the old-timers, but Guy is flattered by their attention: It’s of the kind he can’t quite ask for from his wife, that of doting parents blind to the obvious limitations of their unremarkable children. Everyone keeps giving Rosemary things to drink and eat. Everyone is preoccupied with how she looks and how those looks change. Guy receives the break of a lifetime, and that night, Rosemary is drugged and dreams that a beast rapes her. She wakes up with deep scratches on her arms and back. Guy, who’s about to become a very famous actor but is, in fact, a terrible actor, tells her that contrary to how she might remember it, no monster did that, it was merely him, unable to contain his lust. (He grimly compares it to necrophilia.) A monster, yes, but not a supernatural one. Her relief towards the end of the film when one person at last believes her is more devastating than any single horrific thing in this, one of the most legendary horror movies of all time. The source of horror in Rosemary’s Baby is how women are broken by men. I can’t think of a better author for it–the gaslighting, the rape, the betrayals, the abuses of an unbalanced power dynamic–than Polanski.

Rosemary is threatened with commitment to a mental hospital by kindly Dr. Sapirstein, who’s played by warm, cuddly American institution Ralph Bellamy–because among Polanski’s many perversions, his desire to subvert every representative institution of decency is foremost and conspicuous. (See again: Hitchcock.) Calling women “crazy” is the first chapter of the abuser’s playbook. “They said they wouldn’t hurt you and they didn’t. Not really,” says Guy; telling women traumatized and in terrible pain that they are neither is the second chapter. There has never been a better film than Rosemary’s Baby at articulating the absolute horror of being a woman in a society that does not value them as human beings. Not even Vertigo. Rosemary’s body is not her own. Her choices are taken from her, and she is encouraged to doubt the evidence of her eyes and her biology. Rosemary comes from a big family. She has three brothers and sisters, plus a gaggle of nieces and nephews, but where are they now, when she needs them most? Is she an outcast? Is she too defiant? Too painful a reminder of what they’ve given up? She refers to herself as “fertile” and yearns to be a mother, but when she’s finally impregnated, it’s through a rape her husband has facilitated and a coven of witches seeking to foster the birth of the Antichrist. And her dreams for her future, her measures of personal success, are turned against her. While getting strapped to her bed in the first stages of labour, she apologizes to her unborn child for the promises she won’t be able to fulfill. She fought a losing battle, and all she has left to say is “sorry” when it isn’t her fault.

Rosemary has quotidian dreams. She longs for a home in which to raise children, and Rosemary’s Baby works in large part because refuge surrounded by loved ones is what anyone wants. The trick the Devil plays on her is how she’s given what she’s always wanted but as the host of a cuckoo that has been implanted in her body via deception and betrayal. Polanski strengthens our attachment by assuming her point of view each time she wakes up from a terrible episode. Bleary-eyed, disoriented, in danger so long as she refuses to conform. She knows she’s being hurt but can’t believe it’s by the people she trusts most not to hurt her. Still, she fights. She listens to her friends, and then her friends start to die; she tries to run, but because he’s an abusive prick, Guy has isolated her from her support system. She stops leaving the apartment: the space she adored becomes a prison cell. Her world shrinks. The Bramford begins to eat her.

Ira Levin, author of the source novel (as well as a continuation, Son of Rosemary, that bears little resemblance to the movie’s own sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976), a telefilm directed by Polanski’s editor Sam O’Steen that’s not without its charms), is obsessed with word games. Levin loves language, and in moments that predict Clive Barker’s experiments with words as gateways, he fixates on their deviousness. They have their own mind, words–they tell without telling and are disloyal to the creator and reader alike. Indeed, while an anagram in Rosemary’s Baby reveals Roman Castevet as the son of a notorious warlock, the sequel novel hinges on another anagram: “roast mules.” Rosemary spends the bulk of the book fixated on its solution, engaged in the rearrangement of Scrabble tiles. I am reminded of the myth of the Golem, animated by a single word, and of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” which, once spoken, snuff out the stars in the sky, one by one. I’m obsessed, too, with the games Polanski is playing with words: his sharing a moniker with Roman Castevet, for instance, or his casting of a man named “Cassavetes” in the same film. Even Rosemary announcing that Vidal Sassoon has chopped her hair off mid-film parallels Vidal Sassoon chopping her hair off during production. Fascinatingly, Rosemary’s pixie cut is only ever ridiculed, despite Sassoon receiving an onscreen credit.

Straightforward in the film’s narrative as the revealing and disguising of possible salvation, even an exchange of books (clutching Rosemary’s copy of All of Them Witches, Charles Grodin’s unctuous Dr. Hill asks, “Can I keep this?”; “Hutch gave that to me,” she says, outraged) is laden for me with dark metatextual hindsight: The thing lodged in my skull about Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s marriage is how she left a note in a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles suggesting that she and Roman do the adaptation of it together. I wonder if Polanski thought about Hutch’s gift and Dr. Hill’s confiscation of that gift when he eventually adapted Thomas Hardy’s harrowing tale of rape and gendered power dynamics as Tess with Nastassja Kinski, 28 years his junior and with whom he remembers having an affair she steadfastly denies. Rosemary’s Baby is a Lament Configuration: the more you open it, the more Hell escapes. It is, in my editor Bill’s estimable assessment, “genuine witchcraft.” Find in it the blueprint for the next century’s personal and collective apocalypse. If there are lines drawn around this thing, everyone is colouring outside of them. Rosemary’s Baby isn’t metatext, it’s accursed. It knows more than it ought. It tells more than it should.

Late in the film, when it’s her last chance, Rosemary wanders into the middle of a busy intersection and is buffeted by angry traffic flashing past. It echoes the scene from Polanski’s Repulsion where Catherine Deneuve, playing a young beautician seeing the world as it really is following a sexual assault, wanders along a city street while Polanski’s camera spins around her like a swarm of hornets. Even without literal, physical architecture, Polanski describes, using quick cuts and distorted close-ups, walls closing in: shackles clicking shut; gags fitting into place. The moment Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray is freest in Chinatown is the moment she’s shot in the face. A year after this movie’s release, the Manson Family will butcher Sharon Tate, who was pregnant with Polanski’s baby–an act that has grown in our cultural memory into a totem for the end of any hope for social progress. Rosemary’s Baby, with its pronouncements about the death of God, is the sort of prophecy built not on superstition and hocus-pocus but on a keen understanding of what a world run by men like Polanski does to women. It is the birth of the Paranoid Decade in as significant a way as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider: the dawn of the new dark, when all our aspirations were proved to be naive. How terrible knowledge is when it brings no profit to the wise.

THE 4K UHD DISC
by Bill Chambers Commemorating the film’s 55^th anniversary, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby returns home to Paramount on 4K UHD disc after a sojourn in the Criterion Collection. Though hardly the revelatory upgrade that Criterion’s 2012 Blu-ray was, this in-house 4K transfer is rock solid, whatever the inherent limitations of the source material. The 1.85:1, 2160p presentation has a colour grade similar to the Criterion transfer, albeit with a slightly yellower tinge that warms up the palette a bit, giving it an earthier appearance that feels organic. What the increased resolution does is magnify the film’s deliberately soft focus rather than sharpen it, which is as it should be but isn’t going to convert anyone on the fence about upgrading to 4K. That being said, the 45 Mbps bitrate strikes me as a little low, and I found the film grain itself to lack definition, although it’s certainly there. Viewable in Dolby Vision and HDR10, the HDR enhancement invigorates those foggy light sources in the Woodhouse apartment and occasionally plunges the picture into a bolder darkness than it’s enjoyed since the cinema–without, impressively, swallowing shadow detail. (Indeed, DP William Fraker’s lighting comes across as more chiaroscuro in general.) I like that the yellow bulb above the entrance to the closet has an almost infernal glow now; we notice it before we even notice the secretary, a veritable neon warning sign that goes unheeded. The attendant 2.0/16-bit Dolby TrueHD mono audio is a substantial downgrade from Criterion’s 24-bit LPCM track, clocking in at 700 Kbps vs. Criterion’s 1152 Kbps. On paper that’s a real disappointment, but my ears just aren’t sensitive enough to detect the difference. Krzysztof Komeda’s score sounds lush enough, and the track delivers all those muffled, half-heard conversations with an uncanny dislocation despite the absence of stereo imaging. Overall, this incarnation of Rosemary’s Baby is pretty close to how I remember the film looking and sounding on the revival circuit in the mid-’90s.

Included with the 4K platter is Paramount’s mediocre Blu-ray from 2021. It is here that you’ll find the only extras associated with this release, starting with two vintage featurettes: 2000’s uncredited “Rosemary’s Baby: A Retrospective” (17 mins., SD) and Hatami’s “Mia and Roman” (23 mins., SD), from 1968. Limiting its talking heads to two legendary players who are no longer with us, producer Robert Evans and production designer Richard Sylbert, and one who’s since been fairly definitively cancelled (guess who), the former recounts how Evans lured ski fanatic Polanski to Paramount by dangling an offer to direct Downhill Racer in front of him before pulling a bait-and-switch and giving him Rosemary’s Baby to read instead. Sylbert, we learn, was instrumental in bridging the culture gap between Polanski and an American audience, translating an early remark from Polanski that Ira Levin’s book reads like a soap opera into a title sequence reminiscent of a Doris Day movie. Casting gets discussed (Polanski originally wanted Tuesday Weld for “milk-fed” Rosemary and Robert Redford for Guy), as does a telephone cameo from Tony Curtis that left Mia Farrow discombobulated because she recognized the voice but couldn’t place it. Naturally, this was Polanski’s intention.

Meanwhile, “Mia and Roman” is like something you’d watch in a classroom in the ’70s, and I mean to sound nostalgic: you can practically hear the clickety-clack of the 16mm projector over this weathered montage of B-roll and film clips. Polanski, then 34, provides a voiceover rife with the unmistakable arrogance of a wunderkind who’s got Hollywood in the palm of his hand, though he manages not to contradict anything his older self says in the subsequent piece and has nothing but praise for his collaborators, especially Farrow. Occasionally, Farrow will interject, as in a detour that contrasts Polanski’s dabbling in Formula One racing (“Roman’s hobbies denote a restless nature”) with her hoarding of pets, and William Castle gets a nice, earnest mention at the end as one of the ‘fathers’ of Rosemary’s Baby. Original and “redband” 50^th-anniversary reissue trailers (3 mins. and 36s, respectively) for Rosemary’s Baby round out the supplements; the latter looks superior because it’s in HD, but it’s significantly less cool than the alternative, whose memorable tagline (“Pray for Rosemary”) helped open the picture in an atmosphere of controversy and debate. Only U.S. copies come with a download voucher for the digital version–but on the bright side, Canadians aren’t saddled with that controversial new key art. At the very least, I wasn’t.

137 minutes; R; UHD: 1.85:1 (2160p/MPEG-H), BD: 1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English 2.0 Dolby TrueHD (Mono), English DVS 2.0, French DD 2.0 (Mono), German DD 2.0 (Mono), Italian DD 2.0 (Mono), BD; English 2.0 Dolby TrueHD (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), German DD 2.0 (Mono); UHD: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch subtitles, BD: English, English SDH, French, German subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Paramount