Word: polanski
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mogul's product: Yamaha cycles, Pall Mall cigarettes, and assorted brand names are shown on TV sets, dropped on tables, and exhibited shamelessly throughout. The exteriors are bleached-out process shots taken on different days with no attempt made to reconcile light changes. When a little action is necessary, Polanski drags out the hand-held camera for some shaky realism (catch Hitchcock filming violence with a hand-held camera!); and repeatedly, Polanski substitutes tight close-ups for style. If nothing else, Rosemary's Baby is ugly--aesthetically derelict, the groping of a bombed-out mind...
...fortune to make the movie. It's a sure-fire success formula--not exactly a sublime collaboration of great artists, let alone unusually talented craftsmen. Rosemary's Baby, then, would be easy to dismiss as a slack and inadequate thriller were it not for everyone's desire to take Polanski seriously as an auteur...
Seen in relation to Polanski's previous work, Rosemary's Baby is distressing. Given that his films concern human isolation and the problems therein, Polanski stopped looking for solutions with Cul-de-sac which ends hopelessly with all relationships breaking down and everyone left in their own tortured hell. Not content to leave his films in limbo, Polanski seems to offer a solution to isolation by affirming the brotherhood of devil worship and the black forces, rather than warning us of their existence...
...Killers is just a bad joke: a little kid's desire to let the bad guys win for once as realized by a thirty-year-old adolescent mentality. But Rosemary's Baby is on their side too; the witches win, Rosemary accepts Satan's spawn as her son, and Polanski's careful dating of 1966 as the year One (the black calendar beginning with the birth of the son of Satan) suggests that 1968 is the year Three, that all things malevolent are heartily thriving...
...want the bad guys to win. They can erase the black-and-white division between good and evil, or make it tougher for the good guys, or even cloud everything in ambiguity. But there are too many reasons around for not affirming devil worship to allow us to accept Polanski's recent films without pausing for thought...