Olde Review: Rosemary's Baby

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Saturday's ASUW films in 130 Kane are Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, and Robert Wise's The Haunting.

Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) Rosemary's Baby opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche. 

 

And so is the opening situation--two young newly-weds-in-love house-shopping. We've seen it hundreds of times. It's an everyday occurrence. The apartment is lovely, the couple buys it, and everything is quite normal. 

 

Until a new-found friend of Rosemary's commits suicide, and Rosemary's relationship with her eccentric neighbors turns rather familial, and a bizarre fate befalls the fellow who got her husband's job. Now, that it looks like success for them, they decide it's time to have a kid...and see, there's this chocolate mousse...

Well, I don't have to go any further for I'm sure the legend of Rosemary's Baby has preceded it. 

 

But what separates Rosemary... from other gothics is the perverse outlook of its director, Roman Polanski. Yes, everything's normal, and it is that very normalcy that makes the intrusion of Demonic Forces so doubly terrifying. One can accept odd happenings on a dark and stormy night on a cliff-top castle, but on a sunny day in a New York apartment complex?** 

It makes the horror so much more palpable to be surrounded by normalcy for it increases the possibility of something happening to you. And thus, Polanski places threats in such "normally" innocent and reassuring things as a chocolate mousse, or Ralph Bellamy (who had hawked aspirins for years on the tube) playing a "witch" doctor, if you'll excuse the pun. 

It's an unorthodox approach to the Gothic Horror Story...at least it was in 1968, when it was released, and to paraphrase an ad for Polanski's latest film, The Tenant, "No one does it to you like Roman Polanski."***--not William Friedkin in The Exorcist, or Richard Donner in The Omen. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is head and shoulders...and horns, above them.

 

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on October 22 and 23, 1976 

 

Still true, but, my God, after Polanski's conviction of child-rape, that's one hell of a movie tag-line on The Tenant! Polanski's arrest, trial and conviction would come later, two years after The Tenant was released, but it sure is the ultimate sick joke.

As for Rosemary's Baby, it still tops the lists of "Movies No Pregnant Woman Should Watch" and it still takes the prize as the best "Devil Walks Amongst Us" movie (sorry, Damien and Regan), and it's no small part due to Polanski's sick sense of humor—Orson Welles, in one of his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, referred to him as "one of those morbid boys"—and his way of mixing the mundane and the sacrilegious. 

The most entertaining parts of Rosemary are the elderly and uncomfortable neighbors—the "legacies" of the Bramford Hotel, and the best of them is sprightly Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role. It resurrected Gordon's career, and she went on to star in a long list of films in her twilight years. But, there are others, like Patsy Kelly, Ralph Bellamy (the joke in his early roles was that he was always the dullest of leading men and Polanski makes full use of that reputation here), Elisha Cook, Jr. (a favorite of producer William Castle), Hope Summers, and Phil Leeds (he would end up a fixture on "Seinfeld"), all semi-familiar faces that, in other circumstances, might provide comfort, all part of a conspiracy to make an anti-domestic situation to welcome the Anti-Christ.

Add to it the presence of Mia Farrow, the urchin break-out star of TV's "Peyton Place" who'd just married...Frank Sinatra!...and had a quality that could charitably be called "odd." You're not sure if she's going crazy, has a pre-postpartum depression, or if something weird is actually going on, and it keeps audiences on a tightrope tension of sympathy for/suspicion of Rosemary, the yin and yang of our sympathies and cynicism. And, of course, Polanski (out of Ira Levin, who cloned Hitler and roboticized housewives in other thrillers) turns that into your worst nightmare.

Producer William Castle had a carnival-barker-showmanship to him, gimmicking customers into screenings of his goofy-creepy thrillers and horrors and after Hitchcock (inspired by Castle's box-office receipts and asking "what if someone good did it?") managed to best his efforts with Psycho, he wanted to do the Master of Suspense one better. With the solid story-ideas of Rosemary's Baby, head and tails above what he could conceive, he was able to get that much better and gain some industry clout, although he ultimately had to cede most of the creativity to Polanski, and his Paramount studio-bosses. He would always be a B-movie-maker, but Rosemary's Baby made him see the promised land of the A-list.

 

* Yeah, there's nothing wrong with your computer--there is no song. I usually backed my radio-reviews with an appropriate piece of music, and for this one, I used the actual theme on the soundtrack (that I recorded on cassette from a TV broadcast...I used to do that).

Here it is:

 

** Ironically enough it's the high-end and rather exclusive Dakota building, standing in for the "Bramford." John Lennon would be shot in front of the Dakota a decade later.

*** EEE-Yikes!

 

Legendary producer-showman William Castle appears outside the telephone booth for a cameo.

 

Brass Target

Saturday is, primarily in these parts, "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Brass Target (John Hough, 1978) General George Patton was a rather colorful part of the Second World War, but, like many generals of that conflict, he was consigned to the realm of obscurity, despite his considerable efforts to the war effort.

 

That was until 1970 and the release of Patton, which went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of its year, thanks in no small part to a (pardon the pun) commanding performance by George C. Scott. Patton—and Scott's performance—went beyond merely reviving the story of the man and his accomplishments but also catapulted the general (as well as his foibles and eccentricities) to the echelons of Myth. Those who see newsreel footage of the real Patton are often surprised at his high-pitched voice, his thick Virginia accent, and his rather tentative way of speaking, none of which Scott chose to portray in his characterization. The cult of Patton-worship after the film's release—especially among conservatives—can be construed as a response to Scott's strong portrayal, rather than to the man himself.

 

Another thing that Patton didn't portray was the matter of Patton's death, choosing instead to fade to black as the general walks his dog near to a quixotically-resonant wind-mill, keeping the spirit alive. Patton, who seemed most comfortable in the role of warrior, ironically died soon after the fall of Berlin, eight months into the peace, the result of injuries sustained in an auto accident—his limousine was going too fast across a railroad line and smashed into a truck, and the 60 year old General was the only injury. He'd broken his neck; two crushed vertebrae. He lay in traction for 12 days before succumbing to a blood clot in his heart on December 21st, 1945.

But, the cult of personality, post-Patton, wouldn't let it go at that. For quite a few years—but most notably after the movie's release—there has been idle speculation that Patton's death wasn't be accident, but was planned. No one offers proof, no one can point to a specific reason—they're "just asking questions"—but it's more to the point that some logic circuits just can't handle the fact that Patton who'd served in two world wars would end up dying from the result of something so mundane as a car crash (just as so many couldn't fathom that President Kennedy could be killed by one lone gunman). Imagination is a wonderful, but often faulty, thing. Imagination, though, doesn't make things true.

But, it can make money. The Patton death controversy didn't pop up until the 1974 publication of "The Algonquin Project" (or "The Oshawa Project," internationally) by Frederick W. Nolan, who cooked up a plot to assassinate a Patton-like commander (re-named George R. Campion) in order to keep him from investigating the theft of 250 million in Reichsbank gold being shipped to Frankfurt, a inside-job robbery that claims 59 American lives.

But, when the film-rights were sold and the project made, the commander's name was changed back to its source, George Patton, and the film followed the rest of the fantasy-land speculation, completely ignoring that Patton wasn't killed in the car-crash, but only injured. His surviving and subsequent 12 days of traction are completely ignored.

Instead, we get a sub-par plot of Army Intelligence officers (round up the usual suspects: Patrick McGoohan, Robert Vaughn, and Edward Herrmann) who pulled off the gold heist—in an elaborate plan that could have gone wrong in many ways, not least of which is that gold is heavy and difficult to transport. Once the theft is discovered, Patton is determined to find out whodunnit—he's livid over the loss of life—and it is arranged that before he can get very far into the investigation that he be killed by a hired assassin, Peter Shelley (Max von Sydow).

It is up to OSS Major Joe De Lucca (John Cassavetes) to determine who was behind the robbery, a task complicated by the plan's similarity to a mission De Lucca himself had masterminded against the Nazis some time earlier. That puts him in the sights of Patton's investigation, but for De Lucca, it merely means that whoever's behind it knows of him, his tactics and has enough security clearance to know what's what in the particularly-secretive-because-it-is-so-new OSS.

There are complications—enough to distract De Lucca from the obvious—and bodies begin piling up, only verifying to him that he's on the right track. And then, there's some romantic entanglements which serve no dramatic purpose other than to put Sophia Loren in the picture.

It's a lousy movie, but I can see why people wanted to do it—money. Cassavettes took less film roles later in his career as he was concentrating on film-making, and this one probably paid for a couple of his. Points to the movie for that. And he also might have also wanted a chance to play with von Sydow (playing another inscrutable assassin—he seemed to be doing that a lot in the paranoid '70's), whose character plays two roles, one in very plain sight as a diplomat and one in the shadows as a very undiplomatic hit-man (the two careers seem to be mutually exclusive in attitude and temperament and either job could impair, if not jeopardize, the other—different color contact lenses notwithstanding).

Great disguise there, Max. 

Superman, at least, puts on a pair of glasses.

But, one shouldn't quibble about details, especially sophisticated ones, as the whole plot is built on the substantial lie of Patton being assassinated. It's a wonder they didn't do it in modern dress, as focused as they are on "accuracy". 

It's taken me a long time to actually sit down and watch this movie, as I knew the Patton history, and knew that the central focus was a canard, so why bother? But, 45 years of blissful ignorance of the inanities of the thing I can chalk up to a "win". I'm just glad I didn't waste any of my money on it. As its failure at the box office helped lead M-G-M to shut down its film-making division—in 1979 M-G-M honcho Kirk Kerkorian announced that they were a hotel company—the studio probably wished the same thing. Ironically, I watched it on Turner Classic Movies (Ted Turner having bought the studio's assets in March, 1986, primarily for its film library), so I guess there's something of a happy ending, after all. 

 

The Killers (1946/1964)

Ernest Hemingway wrote his short story "The Killers" in 1927 for Scribner's Magazine. It's a simple story about two gunmen who come to a small town diner in Summit, Illinois and briefly terrorize the nighthawks there (including Hemingway's young alter-ego, Nick Adams), before setting their sights for their target—a washed up fighter nicknamed "The Swede", who, curiously, accepts his fate and tells Nick (who runs to him at his boarding house to warn him) that he's tired of running and not to do anything because nothing can be done. Nick leaves town knowing full well "The Swede" will be killed, but he can't stand being there any more, knowing a man has surrendered to his fate and awaits his execution.

Of "The Killers" Hemingway said "That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote. I left out all Chicago, which is hard to do in 2951 words." 

But that kernel of a story is perfect for a full-length motion picture (it's also been adapted into un-embellished short films, one by Andrei Tarkovsky as a student—see below), allowing film-makers to fill in the blanks, speculate about the circumstances that would set into motion the specifics of the short story, creating a preamble and, if one is concerned with the morality of the tale, an epilogue.

But, the two most well-known adaptations of the tale titled "The Killers" take a completely different approach to the titular characters—in the first, making them secondary, and in the second, the driving narrative force—and its unknowable back-story.

As the blurb for the later version says, "There's more than one way to kill a man."

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) Credited to Anthony Villiers (with unbilled contributions by John Huston and Richard Brooks), the movie starts with Hemingway and leaves him behind. Two toughs in suits, Al and Max (Charles McGraw and William Conrad) drive into Brentwood, New Jersey and case the burg. They check out the local service station of the Tri-State Oil co. and then set their sights on Henry's Diner across the street. Henry's offers boiled dinners but they don't come any more hard-boiled than Max and Al, who immediately start to get cute with the menu and calling the guy behind the counter "Bright Boy." They're looking for Pete Lund, "The Swede" ("What did Pete Lund ever do to you?" "He never had a chance to do anything to us..."), but Pete usually comes in at 6 and he's not there, so he's not showing up. So, Max and Al start to mess with the only other patron, Nick Adams (Phil Brown*), Lund's co-worker at the filling station, telling him to get in the kitchen with the cook (Bill Walker), where Al ties them up and Max stands guard. Satisfied that "The Swede" isn't showing up, the two leave, allowing Nick to get untied and warn Lund (Burt Lancaster). But, Lund won't leave saying, finally, enigmatically, "Once I did something wrong."

Pete is gunned down in his room by Al and Max. But, that's not the end of the story. Tri-State's insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmond O'Brien) is checking out the killing to see what's going to be done with Lund's $2500 life insurance policy. The local police aren't handling the case because the two gun-men are from out of state. Why? Examining Lund's body, he notices that the dead man's knuckles are scuffed up like the hands of a boxer and he has his office check out local rings. He tracks down the beneficiary, but she doesn't know any "Pete Lund," she knew him as "Mr. Nillsson," who stayed briefly at her boarding house. But why would he name her as beneficiary?

A check at the office finds that the victim's real name is Ole Andreson, ex-prize-fighter and that tip comes from Lt. Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene) from the Philadelphia police department. Lubinsky once busted Andreson a few years back—ironic as the two grew up together and were friends since childhood. But, that's part of it. Lubinsky's wife, Lily (Virginia Christine) used to be sweet on the Swede (and Sam was sweet on her), but Ole dumped her for another woman, Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), and Kitty was involved in rackets, and pretty soon, Ole was involved with both. It was Kitty that got Ole arrested when he took the fall for her shoplifting charge—and violently resisting arrest. But, Lubinsky wants in on Reardon's investigation because, as he says, "once a copper, always a copper."

Ole spends three years in jail, pining for Kitty and determined to make it on the outside. When he gets out, his former cell-mate, Charleston, tells him about a big job being planned, knocking over the payroll of the Prentiss Hat Co. (in Hackensack, New Jersey), the "biggest caper anyone's pulled in a long time" according to its ring-leader, "Big" Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker). When Ole goes to meet Charleston at the planning, he meets Colfax, "Blinky" Franklin (Jeff Corey), 'Dum-Dum' Clarke (Jack Lambert), and oh yeah...Kitty's there, as she's hooked up with Colfax again. Charleston, having spent too much of his life in prison, opts out. But, "the Swede" is in, probably because of Kitty's presence. But, it doesn't make relations between Colfax and Ole amicable. They get worse the night of the robbery.

The original meeting place to split the dough gets changed, and the only one who isn't let in on it is The Swede. That meeting place is burned down at about the planned time for the meeting. This leads to what Reardon ultimately calls "the double-cross to end all double-crosses," that will leave most of the culprits dead, including the two killers who started the gun-play, when it all gets figured out not-so-nice and not-so-simple.

Huston, Brooks and Villiers stage the story like Citizen Kane: a guy dies at the beginning and a snoop goes around talking to people trying to learn the big secret of the dead guy, interviewing them one by one, their stories told in flash-backs, running parallel forward courses to the ultimate answer of who put the killers onto Ole and why. Siodmak had a way with pulp material and he and cinematographer Woody Bredell produce some amazing lighting effects, whether its to highlight Gardner's cheek-bones or stage a murder without gunfire. It was the first movie of Burt Lancaster, launching his career, and the first big role of Ava Gardner's, while also giving Edmond O'Brien a chance with a major screen role of a type that he would continue to play throughout the 40's and early 1950's.

Mention should also be made of the tough brutal score by Miklos Rosza, which folks will recognize even if they've never heard of the composer or seen this version of The Killers. The opening bars over the Universal Studios logo are a stark four-note motif that is repeated whenever the hit-men Max and Al appear on-screen, and it so impressed a young producer named Jack Webb that he used it as the opening theme for his series "Dragnet" in all of its incarnations. It may inspire some audience giggles, but these things have to start somewhere.

Hemingway's reaction to this version of The Killers? I've read a couple stories—one where he went into the john and threw up; the other (from producer Mark Hellinger who had a vested interest) where he set up a private screening for Hemingway at his domicile in Sun Valley, Idaho. Hemingway attended the screening with an overcoat in which he had a full bottle of gin in one pocket and a full bottle of water in another. After the screening, he shows the two full bottles to the studio publicity man and and said "...didn't need 'em."

The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964) Adapted by Gene L. Coon (who was a showrunner/scripter for the best episodes of "Star Trek") and directed by Don Siegel (who was briefly attached to direct the first one), this version was originally designed to be a TV-movie, but was deemed "too violent" for "The Tube" and was thus released to theaters. Coon, who wrote it under the title "Johnny North,"** took a completely different approach to the adaptation, leaving out Hemingway's basic story and the characters that formed the basis of the original, but leaving in the plot that Huston and Brooks and Villiers designed for the back-story—and even—when it fit—some of the dialog. But, with one very important difference. This time, the point of view isn't from the investigating insurance agent. It's told from the point of view of the contract killers who are hired to "take out" the man "who just stood there and took it." Although, the two have a rule that they never discuss the work, this one is different enough that it makes the older one of the two gun-men curious and decides to do a little digging to find out what it was about this particular guy that he didn't run from certain death but just took it passively. Call it professional curiosity.

Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager) are an odd pair of hit-men. Lee is young and a bit of a goof-ball, almost child-like attracted to flashy things. Charlie is older and "going gray" and has been doing "this" ("this" being killing people) for a while. They show up at "The Sage School for the Blind" for a job and walk around unnoticed—two guys wearing shades indoors in a school where a lot of people wear shades. They head to the principal's office—she's sightless, too (the blind leading the blind?) and after viciously toying with her a bit to find out the location of their target "Jerry Nichols," they knock her unconscious and start casing the school for Jerry. 

After some cursory reconnaissance, they find that "Jerry Nichols" is teaching an auto repair class in the school's basement. Even though "Nichols" is warned by a telephone call, he stays in the classroom, telling his students to get out quick. During the confusion of the exiting would-be mechanics, Lee and Charlie burst into the room, and "Jerry" (John Cassavettes) just stands there and takes several silenced slugs from the two hit-men, who use the confusion to briskly walk out.

On a train away from the scene, the two killers start to talk, but Charlie is ruminating on the hit. He recognized "Jeff" as Johnny North, former race car driver that might have had some criminal past. And he won't let it go. There are four elements that has him thinking: 1) Johnny North "just stood there and took it," while anybody else would try and run 2) the price for the "simple" hit was $25,000, an extraordinary sum of money to kill one guy and 3) Johnny North was involved "in a big mail-robbery in California, supposed to get away with a million bucks"—what happened to the million dollars and 4) the person who hired the hit wasn't worried about those million dollars "and the only person who doesn't worry about a million dollars is the guy who has a million dollars." He wants to find that million dollars.

It's partially curiosity, partially greed, but he and Lee decide to divert to Miami to find out more about the late Johnny North and that missing million dollars. They'll follow a trail of witnesses: first, Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins), Johnny's pit-boss and chief mechanic (and friend—very good friend), who witnessed Johnny get involved with one Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson), who liked hanging around the pits and basically ran over Johnny going 90, until all he could think about was Sheila, to the point where his high-living brings him low when he crashes during a big race breaking his leg and messes up his peripheral vision, not that he could see anything beyond Sheila, anyway. Earl tells a hospitalized Johnny that he's not the first guy she's had a fling with, but she keeps going back to a guy named Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan), an older racketeer who can keep Sheila in the lifestyle that she's grown accustomed to. It's the last time Earl sees Johnny.

Next, they move to New Orleans where an acquaintance of Browning's, Mickey Farmer (Norman Fell) has a gymnasium. They turn the heat on Mickey (literally) and he picks up the next chapter of the story, where Browning and Farmer are planning a big mail robbery that depends on some fast driving on some bad road in a car that might require a little tweaking of an engine. Browning can't do it, so Sheila recruits her old friend Johnny who's fallen on hard times driving demolition derbies. He's suspicious of the whole job, but Sheila's very convincing, especially when she tells Johnny that Browning plans on not splitting the million, and if Johnny can deal with Browning first, she and he can run away together. That's enough to seal the deal.

So, the next step is for Charlie and Lee to head to Los Angeles, where they find Browning has done very well for himself, going straight and starting a lucrative development and construction business. He has no idea what happened to the million dollars, or what happened to Johnny North after the robbery—he only has a vague idea where Sheila is, but Charlie and Lee are very persuasive with their pistols, telling him they want to meet Sheila to get the rest of the story and where that million dollars is. They say that he needs to arrange a meeting and if he doesn't—or if he plans a double-cross—they'll find him...eventually.

It's the meeting with Sheila that's the most disturbing. The hit-men have a time set up and they show up a couple hours before expected and are far rougher with Sheila than with any of the men they've interviewed, punching her around and even almost throwing her out a high apartment window. If Marvin and Gulager have the flashier parts, it's Dickinson who gets the best part and, as one might expect, she plays the hell out of it, both in her seductive flashbacks and the hysterics of her "interview" with Charlie and Lee. Ultimately, one shouldn't feel too sorry for the character—she's been in control the whole time, and is responsible for a lot of carnage along the way..

"...I don't have the time."

It's similar in composition (certainly with the introductory killing and the flashback structured piecing together of the story) to the earlier film, but the tone of the latter version of The Killers is—despite it's sunnier settings and color photography—tougher, grittier, and deeply cynical, especially considering that the vast majority of the characters in the 1964 version are completely unadmirable, back-stabbing sociopaths whose only redeeming quality is they're too busy turning on each other to do any permanent harm to the outside world of innocents, mostly represented as passive bystanders and watchers. The 1964 Killers is a bit like a circular firing squad, where the bad-guys get exactly what they deserve...from each other. It's almost a noir farce in living...and dying...color. Hemingway might have been horrified. 

What Hemingway would have thought can't be known. He died by his own hand on July 2, 1961.

A couple of after-after thoughts: Actress Virginia Christine appeared in both versions—as Lt. Sam Lubinsky's wife in the first, and as the principal of the Sage School for the Blind when Charlie and Lee are looking for Johnny. Older folks might remember her as "Mrs. Olson" hawking Folger's Coffee.

Jack Browning was the last major role played by Ronald Reagan before he pursued his political ambitions. Older folks might remember him as a President of the United States. Even older folks remember him as an actor playing good guys. He's not too convincing playing a bad guy, but he does have a cynical rueful look that's endearing.

Andrei Tarkovsky's student film of "The Killers"

Steve Soderbergh has an interesting side by side video of both versions of The Killers which can be found on his Extension 756 site here. 

"If there's one thing in this world I hate, it's a double-crossing dame."

* Here's some juicy trivia for you: the actor who played Hemingway's alter-ego, Nick Adams, is the same Phil Brown who played Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen in Star Wars.

** The screenplay was titled "Johnny North", but, for whatever reason—maybe due to some situations and lines of dialogue being similar—Universal Studios chose to hang it with the title "Ernest Hemingway's The Killers", a move that director Don Siegel was dead set against.