The movie was based on a novel of the same name by Ira Levin, and even before its publication in 1967 the book’s galley was circulating in Hollywood. “Rosemary gave birth to a cloven-hoofed infant,” wrote the film critic Pauline Kael, thumbnailing the plot, “her actor-husband having mated her with Satan in exchange for a Broadway hit.” For the record, we never see a cloven hoof, or even the baby, though we do hear it crying in its crib. Rosemary may not have known what to expect of her first pregnancy, but she creepingly realizes it isn’t this. It’s all easily explained away, and yet it all accumulates into something unthinkable- demonic. Only instead of the angry upsets that propel your average soap-adultery, rivalry, long-lost relatives popping up out of nowhere-the upsets in Rosemary’s Baby amount to little more than neighborly nosiness, nagging afterthoughts, strange smells, and small catches of coincidence. Its story of a young couple in 1960s New York City unspools like a soap opera, with the pedestrian pace of the everyday. This sci-fi mind-bend, which launched a thousand questions-and a thousand super-analytical answers-remains visually mandarin and magisterial, a monolith of a movie. Another matter entirely is 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.įifty years later, Romero’s zombies have their own maggoty territory in television’s lineup of horror, while Planet of the Apes is a film franchise re-invigorated by motion-capture recording (the last eight years have seen the “Rise of,” the “Dawn of,” and the “War for”). The fourth picture, set in a Manhattan apartment building of Victorian vintage, hugged close to the hearth-too close-and is the only one of these four films framed through the eyes of a woman.
The marriage ends in divorce, and the bottom line is: Evolve or die out. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, after presenting its own ensemble of prehistoric hominids, made a stylish marriage between speed-of-light technology and mankind. Gorillas, chimps, and orangutans rule the world. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes envisioned a future in which Homo sapiens, having destroyed its own civilization through nuclear war, is relegated to the bottom rung of a new dominance hierarchy. Unapologetically gruesome, its story of reanimated corpses who hunt meals of live human flesh rattled adults and left children in tears. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a black-and-white B movie with a bled-out complexion. The year 1968 saw the premieres of four films that are now cult classics, each one dancing with doom.
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