Rosemary's Baby (film)

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Rosemary's Baby

Original movie poster
Directed by Roman Polanski
Produced by William Castle
Written by Ira Levin (novel)
Roman Polanski
Starring Mia Farrow
John Cassavetes
Ruth Gordon
Sidney Blackmer
Maurice Evans
Ralph Bellamy
Angela Dorian
Patsy Kelly
Elisha Cook Jr.
Emmaline Henry
Marianne Gordon
Music by Krzysztof Komeda
Cinematography William A. Fraker
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Release date(s) June 12, 1968
Running time 136 min.
Language English
Budget $3,200,000 (estimated)
Followed by Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Rosemary's Baby is an Academy Award-winning 1968 horror film directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow. The film is based on the Ira Levin novel of the same name. Rosemary's Baby was Robert Evans' first big hit while running Paramount Pictures. He was closely involved in the production, and numerous times had to deal with Mia Farrow's precarious relationship with then-husband Frank Sinatra. Farrow and Sinatra divorced soon after the film was completed. Ruth Gordon won the 1968 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role as the nosy neighbor Minnie Castevet.

A sequel titled Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby aired as a made-for-TV movie in 1976 starring Patty Duke as Rosemary Woodhouse, and Ruth Gordon reprising her role of Minnie Castevet.

Contents

The story follows Rosemary Woodhouse, a bright but somewhat naïve young woman, and her husband Guy, a struggling actor, after they move into a New York City apartment. Their new neighbors are an elderly couple, the Castavets, who seem meddlesome and a bit absurd, but harmless. The Woodhouses want to have a baby; on the night they plan to try to conceive, Rosemary has dizzy spells and passes out, experiencing a dream or vision that she is being raped by a demonic presence (see incubus).

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse.
Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse.

A few weeks later, she finds out that she is pregnant. Guy lands a small but noticeable part in a play when the man who was originally cast goes suddenly and inexplicably blind. For the first three months of her pregnancy, Rosemary suffers agonizing abdominal pains, loses weight instead of gaining it, and craves meats such as "blue" steak (barely seared on both sides), and raw chicken liver.

Guy is cast in a sitcom that garners him even more attention, and a number of film studios are eager to sign him up. Following clues left to her by an older friend, who goes into a coma and dies before revealing the whole story, Rosemary comes to suspect that her neighbors are part of a Satanic cult with designs on her as-yet-unborn child, and that her husband is working with them in exchange for his career advances.

An increasingly disturbed and unstable Rosemary becomes convinced that her neighbors plan to use her child as a sacrifice to Satan and the efforts of her husband and neighbors to dissuade her from this idea are in vain. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Rosemary was almost exactly right when Minnie and Roman tell her the child is the son of Satan and that all of Guy's recent success has been due to the deal he made with them to let Satan father their child. At the movie's end Rosemary sneaks next door to kill the demon child but instead begins to mother it leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions about the future of Rosemary's baby.

  • The band Twink covered the theme song using a variety of toy pianos.
  • Today Is the Day uses a (or several) sample(s) from this movie near the end of the song "Never Answer The Phone" off the album "Sadness Will Prevail"
  • The song Evil by Interpol pays homage to the film ("Rosemary/Heaven restores you in life...").
  • Hardcore band Charles Bronson uses several sound clips from the film.
  • Laibach's 1992 Album "Kapital" samples the film on two tracks: "Kinderreich" (sampling Mia Farrow's vocals from the film's theme song) and "Sponsored By Mars" (sampling Maurice Evan's shouts of "Typhoon! Typhoon!" from the scene where Rosemary dreams she is aboard a ship.)
  • In the action movie-spoofing film, Last Action Hero, when Jack Slater and Danny are about to be killed by Benedict on the rooftop of a cinema, he mentions a christening for Rosemary's Baby as one of the things he can do with the magic ticket he stole from Danny.
  • Outkast references Rosemary's Baby in the song Git Up, Git Out on their 1994 album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik: "I used to hang out with my daddy's brothers, I call them my uncles. They taught me how to smoke herb, I followed them when they ran numbers. So in a sense I was Rosemary's baby".
  • Chicago electronic duo Microfilm released their song 'What Have You Done to Its Eyes?' on their 2007 debut album After Dark; the song lyrics are inspired by the film and Mia Farrow's personal life at the time; the title is a reference to Rosemary's famous line in the final scene of the film; samples of an interview with Ms. Farrow from that time period can be heard in the song.
  • In the 1990's sitcom Roseanne, an entire episode of the ill-fated final season is a parody of Rosemary's Baby. Roseanne finds herself in a strange dream-like state where her pregnant daughter, Darlene, takes the place of Rosemary and has Satan's son. Roseanne demands to speak to the baby's father, and ends up speaking to Satan himself, who has taken the form of Roseanne.
  • In the popular romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, Harry and Sally are playing Pictionary with their friends, where Sally draws a picture of a large mouth with numerous arrows shooting from it. Seemingly no one is able to guess what it is, and Harry shouts "Rosemary's baby!" as a guess. It ultimately turns out the answer is 'baby talk'.
  • The Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper song, "Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn)," contains dialogue from the film. The phrases exlcaimed by Sidney Blackmer during the film's climax -- "Satan lives!" and "Hail Satan!" -- can be heard in the song.
  • In the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls, Rory makes a statement about Dean, using context from the movie, to which Dean replies "Rosemary's Baby. That's a great movie"
  • In a season five episode of sitcom Boy Meets World, while living next to a supposed clan of witches, Shawn approaches one, saying "So, Rosemary...How's the baby?"

  • In the movie, Rosemary meets a neighbor, Terry Gionoffrio, in the laundry room. She stares at her and then apologizes saying, "I thought you were Victoria Vetri, the actress." Terry responds by saying, "a lot of people think I'm Victoria, but I don't see the resemblance." In fact, the actress who played Terry is Victoria Vetri (credited as Angela Dorian), the actress and 1968 Playmate of the Year. This scene is described as "one of the in-jokes of the movie".[10]
  • Producer William Castle makes a cameo appearance as the impatient man waiting right outside the phone booth while Rosemary pretends to be speaking with someone on the other end of the line as she anxiously awaits a call-back from her previous gynecologist (played by Charles Grodin).
  • Tony Curtis played the voice part of Don Baumgard, when Rosemary calls him on the phone to inquire about his condition. Reportedly, Mia Farrow did not know that the actor on the phone was her good friend Tony Curtis. [2]. Polański wanted it to be kept secret from her so as to enhance the impression in the scene of Rosemary's confusion. In the scene, Mia Farrow truly shows confusion, as she tries to recall why the voice on the phone sounds so familiar.
  • Some make comparisons of the film's Satanic cult elements to the true-life torture and murder of Sharon Tate (Polański's wife) by the Charles Manson cult followers, just one year after the movie's release.[11] Tate, who was pregnant at the time of her murder, was two weeks away from her due date.
  • Maurice Evans played Rosemary's concerned friend "Hutch" who is hexed and murdered by the cult. Evans played Samantha's warlock father on the TV sitcom Bewitched. The sitcom would make several coy references in 1968-1969 to Rosemary's Baby as a new movie about witches "which show us as quite evil".[12]
The Dakota building
The Dakota building

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