I’ve sat through my share of dusk-‘til-dawn drive-in lineups--X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes followed by The Young Swingers and Bikini Baby--topped off by Sabrina, for some reason known only to the mad programmers of those dew-soaked, mosquito-ridden marathons. I bear down and grip the wheel and stay alert--don’t want to nod in the driver’s seat--while everyone else drops off--and then eventually the dawn, red and slow, and the children stir in the back seat as I ease the Dodge over the hump and home.But to see Rosemary’s Baby that way was both strange and strangely fitting. Roman Polanski’s wife and others have been brutally murdered, her unborn child among them--while up there on the screen is little Mia Farrow, trapped by a grinning John Cassavetes, her kindly neighbors closing in, stroking her like hog butchers with a fresh carcass--and New York City's right outside, but it turns its back on the big old house haunted by middle-class Satanists--who go further than the bored nihilists of The Seventh Victim--they simply stood and hoped their victim would succumb on her own; but Farrow’s tormentors take the initiative: They have a real Lord to serve--and they happily serve her up, and her child.
Rosemary suffers far from the Santa Monica mountains where Sharon Tate and her baby died--but the movies can be cruel, and love their ironies sometimes too much. So East and West Coasts are brought together, the whole country squeezed into a single room where the party rages, eyes rolling up white in Helter Skelter.
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