Rosemary's Baby

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Rosemary's Baby
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Michael Newton
SeriesBFI Film Classics
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:136
Dimensions(mm): Height 190,Width 135
Category/GenreFilm theory and criticism
ISBN/Barcode 9781844579525
ClassificationsDewey:791.4372
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations 47 colour and 10 b/w illus

Publishing Details

Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint BFI Publishing
Publication Date 28 May 2020
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

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.

Author Biography

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).

Reviews

Michael Newton's lavishly illustrated volume on Rosemary's Baby. Roman Polanski's masterpiece from that tempestuous year, 1968, is one of the best in the whole [BFI] series. * Film at 11 * 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 * Michael Newton's book ... has been a major influence on more recent films. For such a small book, there is a lot packed in here, including lots of colour photos. * SFcrowsnet *