My TiVO cut off the ending, though how much I’m not sure. The last thing I saw was Mia Farrow insisting that the baby was crying because the cradle was being rocked too hard. She walked over to the cradle and was about to rock it “properly” and then the movie cut out. What happens next?
I believe she took it to her breast and nursed it, signifying that she accepted the child.
It was pretty much as in the book. You couldn’t really see the baby, but we were told he was wearing little mittens so he wouldn’t scratch himself(the claws you know). His eyes had pupils like a cat’s eye. She picked him up and started talking to him, and insisted he be called Andrew, as she and her husband had once planned.
Yup yup. The mittens were so cute. (Is it wrong that I see this as a kind of happy ending, and not a deeply disturbing one?)
“He has his father’s eyes!”
Are you talking about the movie or the book? Because in the movie, she takes over rocking the baby from Laura-Louise amd gets a loving maternal look on her face as she gazes down at him.
One can only imagine the conversation she and Guy had when they got back to their apartment. I’m assuming she kicked him to the curb.
I abslutely love that book and spent a year writing an annotated version of it.
Rosemary decides that whle the baby is half-demon, it is also half hers and to accept and raise it. When Roman insists that the child’s name is Adrian after Roman’s father the devil worshipper, she tells him “No, his name is Andrew. He is my child, not years, and that is one point I’m not going to argue about.”
When husband Guy explains that “They told me you wouldn’t be hurt and you haven’t, not really Rosemary. It’s like you had a baby and lost it. And we’re getting os much in return,” she spits at him. I like to think that is their last interaction.
When Roman Polanski decided to direct the film, he tried to make it as much like the book as possible. He even called author Ira Levin and asked him what shirt advertised in the New Yorker did Guy buy? Levin said he’d faked that, just assuming that any issue of the magazine would have a good looking shirt advertised in it. But it turned out the issue for that month didn’t.
As Stephen King wrote in his excellent volume Danse Macabre “If you read the book, you didn’t have to see the movie and vice versa.”
Ooh, another fan, Annie X-Mas. Did you read the follow up, Son of Rosemary? It’s pretty bad but I had to. They mention that Guy takes off soon after Andy is born.
Awful, awful, awful. This vegetarian would druther eat a roast mule than read that dreadful thing again.
Of course she didn’t. We’re talking about an Ira Levin book! All his female characters are submissive, idiotic doormats. Rosemary probably went back to their apartment and proceeded to create Satan’s little sister.
Or something.
Friggin’ Ira Levin. : disgust :
Like the pre-Stepfordized women of Stepford Wives?
Did she spit on her husband in the book? That was the most significant part of the ending to me.
… Either the books are completely different from the movies, or they totally wooshed you.
I’m pretty sure she did. I’m not sure at exactly what point, but I do remember reading that and thinking, yay, finally a reaction! It was kind of frightening the way she reacted to the part where he told her he’d gone ahead with baby night even though she’d passed out. (That is, feeling upset and wronged but not leaving him and pressing rape charges and getting over it as soon as she realized she was pregnant.)
Just checking in to agree that the sequel is horrible. It was so bad it made me think less of the original. Because the idea that Rosemary is sucked into the situation by her natural maternal love for her infant, and then all the possibilities that this brings out are totally wasted by that crap sequel.
It was like it would be if the main character in The Stepford Wives woke up and turned into the Terminator, and began kicking all the male asses in Stepford. Blech.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, exactly.
I’ve only read three Ira Levin books: Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Sliver.
ALL female characters in Ira Levin books (at least those three) seem to be Stepford chicks. Reading those books makes me stabby.
No, I think you miss my point. I’m pointing out that the pre Stepfordized women were actually dynamic, interesting, etc. women, NOT passive doormats as you characterized them. And in fact, many people read the Stepford Wives as a pro liberation tale (i.e., that feminism has frightened men to the point where they need to replace women with androids). Reading it as “Ira Levin thinks women are doormats” seems an overly simplified interpretation.
I apologize in advance if I’m making light of a serious subject but I can see some problems if she decided to press charges.
I can’t imagine it going well after that.
Heh. Well, from her POV, she didn’t know that it was Satan himself. She thought it was her husband violating her while she was unconscious which would also be a crime, though probably not as big as pimping his wife out to Lucifer.
In the 1970s, a husband generally could not be convicted of raping his wife. New York state still* has a spousal exemption on the books, but the state supreme court invalidated it in the '80s.
- At least as of 2007.