ROSEMARY’S BABY, gestated by Ira Levin’s 286-page bestseller, was spawned on screen in the summer of 1968, and became one of the year’s biggest and most-talked-about hits, joining 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet Of The Apes in the top-10 circle, signalling that movies about otherworldly subjects had finally arrived as ‘respectable’, sufficiently artistic to get critical consideration and both adult and sensational enough for wide commercial appeal. Unlike those two futuristic epics, the induced existential panic in this one was contemporary and home-based, rattling nerves already primed to twitch by a most fractious year. *

“What have you done to its eyes?”

New York City. ‘Rosemary Woodhouse’ (Mia Farrow) and husband ‘Guy’ (John Cassavetes) score what looks like a dream deal on a apartment in the Gothic-styled ‘Bramford’ building (the real-life Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side). Their next-door neighbors are the ‘Castavets’, an older couple. ‘Minnie’ (Ruth Gordon) and ‘Roman’ (Sidney Blackmer) are effusively friendly. As Rosemary and Guy settle in, things take turns, for the better—hopeful actor Guy lands work and Rosemary gets pregnant—and for the puzzling; the Castavet’s move from effusive to insistent, Guy turns rather distant, and Rosemary has a hideous nightmare, followed by a pregnancy that is more worrisome than hopeful. What exactly is going on, and who are these new friends, really, and who are the other people that they know?

While the setting and trappings were modern—a homey dwelling in the busy swirl of a big city—the “What’s happening?” fear factor has haunted imaginations from the days of castles, dungeons and dark forests full of goblins and trolls, the blend allowing the audience to not only tap into a recent strain of Satanism but revisit the age-old, theologically inculcated terror of demons in the service of a master fiend. The shrewd spookiness—the ordinary beset by the supernatural—was putty in the directorial and screenplay handiwork of Roman Polanski, 34, steering his first American movie after earning critical notice for years with his foreign-made films Knife In The Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers. Paramount guru Robert Evans gave the go-ahead, Polanski’s exacting execution took the budget up to $3,200,000, and a smart ad campaign went to work while sales from the novel Rose in conjunction. Farrow, 21, had done a small role in 1964’s nifty military drama Guns At Batasi but was mostly known from 263 episodes of TVs Peyton Place and her two-year marriage to Frank Sinatra (which ended during the shoot). She was in two other movies in 1968, but neither Secret Ceremony or A Dandy In Aspic clicked critically or commercially. Waifish, bright but brittle, decidedly fffbeat for a leading lady, she’s stellar as Rosemary who goes from sweet to spectral, happy to horrified. While she’d do fine work later, the deceived and surrounded mother/incubator of this creepy crawl remains her signature role.

Also unusual as a lead, Cassavetes, 39, was fresh off being an integral member of The Dirty Dozen, which had notched him a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Along with Rosemary’s Baby, in ’68 he released the $275,000 indie drama Faces, which he wrote, produced & directed. Gordon, 71, and Blackmer, 72 are a dream (or nightmare) team, and their unsettling influence is backstopped by another old pro, Ralph Bellamy, 73, as a doctor whose manner is reassuring but whose ‘advice’ comes from the school of dark arts. Gordon’s flip strangeness nipped her the Oscar for Supporting Actress and Polanski’s screenplay was nominated. The nightmare sequence is a classic, literally hellish.

“Witches… All of them witches!” “This is no dream! This is really happening!”

The disorienting score is from Krzysztof Komeda. With Maurice Evans, Charles Grodin (in a low key), Patsy Kelly (craziness jollified), Angela Dorian, Elisha Cook (creep alert), Emmaline Henry, Hope Summers, Wendy Wagner, Marianne Gordon. The voice behind a key phone call belongs to Tony Curtis: he’d just finished Don’t Make Waves with Polanski’s fiancée Sharon Tate, who may be glimpsed as a party-goer. 137 minutes.

* Discomfort incoming!—if the national pulse in 1968 wasn’t elevated enough by social and political upheaval, movies further fed the macabre mood with Barbarella, The Conqueror Worm and Night Of The Living Dead.  Their imaginative weirdness mixed with more Molotov’s being lobbed onto the cultural bonfire from The Green Berets and Wild In The Streets. Enter Nixon, stage Right.

** The Hell you say!—speaking of devils, everyone’s favorite Soviet ogre Josef Stalin slyly shrugged that “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” On a less tragic level, trying to get a semi-accurate read on box office stats is an endless buttpainski for the comrades who toil in the review mines. Different (capitalist!) sources tag Rosemary’s Baby as either ’68’s fifth, seventh or eighth most-seen picture. ‘The Numbers’ says it sold 25,492,691 tickets, equal to one out of every eight Americans at the time. Cogerson’s ‘Ultimate Movie Rankings’ posts it as grossing $42,900,000 domestically, which may include re-releases. Anyone who can  unearth foreign earnings will be allowed into the fallout shelter.