Rosemary's Baby : BFI Film Classics - Michael Newton

Rosemary's Baby

By: Michael Newton

Paperback | 3 September 2020

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Rosemary's Baby is one of the greatest movies of the late 1960s and one of the best of all horror movies, an outstanding modern Gothic tale. An art-house fable and an elegant popular entertainment, it finds its home on the cusp between a cinema of sentiment and one of sensation.

Michael Newton's study of the film traces its development at a time when Hollywood stood poised between the old world and the new, its dominance threatened by the rise of TV and cultural change, and the roles played variously by super producer Robert Evans, the film's producer William Castle, director Polanski and its stars including Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.

Newton's close textual analysis explores the film's meanings and resonances, and, looking beyond the film itself, he examines its reception and cultural impact, and its afterlife, in which Rosemary's Baby has become linked with the terrible murder of Polanski's wife and unborn child by members of the Manson cult, and with controversies surrounding the director.

About the Author

Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and Kind Hearts and Coronets (BFI Film Classics, 2003).
Industry Reviews
Rigorous, nimbly placing Mia Farrow's diabolical pregnancy within a landscape of '70s paranoia and employing four pages of colour stills to unpick the film's hallucinatory rape scene. * Total Film *
[An] excellent study of the classic Sixties horror film. * CHOICE *

The BFI Film Classics Series

Babette's Feast : BFI Film Classics - Dr Julian Baggini
Cleo de 5 a 7 : BFI Film Classics - Steven  Ungar
La Grande Illusion : The BFI Film Classics - Julian Jackson
Rosemary's Baby : BFI Film Classics - Michael Newton
Performance : BFI Film Classics - Colin  MacCabe
Thelma and Louise : BFI Film Classics - Marita  Sturken
Andrei Rublev : The BFI Film Classics - Robert Bird
Bringing Up Baby : The BFI Film Classics - Peter Swaab
Spirited Away : BFI Film Classics - Andrew Osmond
The Big Lebowski : BFI Film Classics - J.M. Tyree
La dolce vita : BFI Film Classics - Richard  Dyer
Jaws : The BFI Film Classics - Antonia Quirke
Amores Perros : The BFI Film Classics - Paul Julian Smith
Taxi Driver : The BFI Film Classics - Amy Taubin
The Wizard of Oz : The BFI Film Classics - Salman Rushdie
Blade Runner : The BFI Film Classics - Scott Bukatman
2001: A Space Odyssey : BFI Film Classics - Peter  Kramer