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It takes Roman Polanski two minutes to find the Gothic Old World in Sixties New York, a slow drift over the Manhattan skyline ends with a high-angled view of what might be a Malbork medieval cathedral. The building has a history of "unpleasant happenings," the newly vacant apartment has a sinister passage behind a cabinet, just the spot for a hip young couple. A baby for the pliant gamine (Mia Farrow), her husband (John Cassavetes) is much too self-centered for a child until the elderly couple next door (Sidney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon) take an interest. In her domestic labyrinth, the heroine grows sallow, internalizes her agony, slowly awakens to the horror of being a walking womb for a bunch of frumpy Satanists. "Darling, you got the pre-partum crazies." From TV to Broadway is the Faustian joke, a bit of thespian vanity to expose a subterranean grid. The elegantly profane ambience is couched in Lewton's The Seventh Victim, the big city is a swarm of yentas and quacks and dandified gargoyles, everybody is every polite and everybody is out to get you. Meticulous Hitchcock notes scattered throughout (the Notorious poisoned cup, Suspicion's word-scrabble), Fuseli and New Age psychedelia for the nightmarish ravishment. The chocolate mousse with the "chalky undertaste" is of course the mise en scène itself, a Ross Hunter-type gloss cannily deformed by anxiety and the gnomish grins of familiar Hollywood faces. (There's Ralph Bellamy behind a warlock's beard and Patsy Kelly's double-take in the middle of a black sabbath, and there's the great American independent as the actor who can't wait to sell out.) The finale envisions a sardonic Nativity tableau, with the camera briefly panning from the blasphemous proclamations to hilariously register Gordon's irritation at a huge knife dropped on her nice wooden floor. Cohen's It's Alive is a perfectly unvarnished analysis, Polanski in The Ninth Gate provides his own send-up. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. With Maurice Evans, Victoria Vetri, Elisha Cook Jr., Emmaline Henry, and Charles Grodin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |