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Men Explain Things To ... Rosemary

Here's an excerpt from my piece on Roman Polanski's classic Rosemary's Baby, a movie not just about the horrors of devil worshipping neighbors and doctors, but the horrors of people (men) constantly talking at you. This is something I've discussed before, back in 2009 (with much controversy with Repulsion) and in a video essay in 2010, in regard to Polanski heroines, and that Rosemary is being told what to do -- by men -- but I go into greater detail with this one. Read the entire piece here. And don't miss it at on the big screen in beautiful 35 MM at the New Beverly Oct. 21 & 22.

“But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

Guy: You know what Dr. Hill is? He’s a Charlie Nobody, that’s who he is!

Rosemary: I’m tired of hearing about how great Dr. Sapirstein is!

Guy: Well, I won’t let you do it Ro.

Rosemary: Why not?

Guy: Well, because… because it wouldn’t be fair to Sapirstein.

Rosemary: Not fair to Sap… – what do you mean? What about what’s fair to me?!

“Please don’t read books… And don’t listen to your friends, either.” So says Dr. Sapirstein in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a movie famous as a classic horror film, darkly comic, a masterpiece, but one that also serves as a powerful allegory for women being told to shut up, let the men talk and … “you’re crazy!” Every time I watch the film, I have to wonder: Did novelist Ira Levin (and Polanski himself) listen in on an OBGYN  appointment? Did his wife or girlfriend come home one day and complain that a doctor told her she was nuts because she felt, as Rosemary will state, like she had a tight wire in her stomach because she was actually fucking pregnant? Did she get a “bad” haircut that was, in truth, fantastic? (Polanski returns to the unfairly maligned haircut in his highly underrated, brilliant Bitter Moon). Did someone berate their wife for not wanting to eat a dessert with a “chalky undertaste?”

These scenes are so specific, that beyond the pact with the Devil story, it’s hard to ignore how much fragile Rosemary has to endure simply based on everyone telling her what to do. Forgive me for using this overused term, but it’s one of the most mansplaining movies of all time. It’s like being stuck in a satanic vortex of mansplaining where you’re going to have to accept your devil child or run far, far away just to get these people to stop talking AT YOU… Well, for Rosemary, the love of the child supersedes devil worshipers, the medical profession and her terrible husband, and she will accept her newborn, no matter what they’ve done to his eyes. It’s, in the end, heartbreaking and extremely touching.

And so it begins, there's much more to this piece, from Rosemary's Charlotte Perkins Gilman yellow wallpaper to Polanski's The Tenant, echoing the predicament of poor Rosemary ... read my entire essay at The New Beverly Cinema.

Mamoulian and March's Magnificent Madness: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Check out an excerpt from my debut piece for the iconic, movie-lover utopia, The New Beverly Cinema, the only revival house in Los Angeles that projects exclusively on film (no digital). Here, I tackle Rouben Mamoulian’s innovative pre-code masterpiece, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring a brilliant Fredric March. Do not miss this one, playing Oct. 19 & 20.

Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens with such a passionate proclamation of, at first, sound, that the very theme of the picture is addressed immediately – Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” banged away by a jocund Dr. Jekyll. This was the first use of that piece in a sound picture and later became an oft-employed sonic invocation of villainy, but, here, it registers just as Fredric March’s Jekyll plays it – a cry of the splintered psyche: startling, yet romantic, beautiful even sensual — the id we wish to release from the shackles of our repression. One we can both unleash and control by pounding that organ.

Be careful what you wish for. Or wish to control. Or pound.

The sound moves to image, revealing Jekyll’s elegant hands at the organ as he casually addresses his butler who reminds the doctor of his lecture. Immediately, Mamoulian (via cinematographer Karl Struss) has placed us, the viewer, in the eyes of Jekyll (we are Jekyll, according to Mamoulian, “the audience does not see him, they are him,” and, in turn, we will be Hyde), we don’t see his face, we see what he sees — the innovative POV and moving camera fluidly walking us along with Jekyll, chatting with our butler, entering the foyer wherein the butler asks the first doubled question: "topcoat or cape, sir?" Cape and top hat, of course, and we finally see Jekyll (ourself) in the mirror. There’s that handsome Fredric March, there you are, in what will be many uses of doubling, splintering and in many ways, soul searching and, of course, sexual frustration and release. It’s much like Robert Montgomery’s later POV usage in the impressive Lady in the Lake (which was used entirely throughout) but Mamoulian’s technique is much more seamless – a purer integration of camerawork and special effects with story and theme, and one of the greatest synthesis of style and substance in all of cinema. (Something Mamoulian was absurdly, unfairly dismissed for later, chiefly by Andrew Sarris who found him all show and acrobatics: “Less than meets the eye… an innovator who ran out of innovations.”)

The sequence continues, and we follow Jekyll, still from his POV, out to his coachman and on his way to his lecture hall, everyone addresses him with respect, and then, after his lecture, which we finally watch outside of Jekyll’s eyes (about the potential to split the soul of man), a student jokes to another: “Why don’t you stay at home and send your other self to the lecture?” What we then learn about Dr. Jekyll is that he is in a crisis, not professionally, but romantically, sexually. He yearns to marry his beloved, Muriel (Rose Hobart), but her father (Halliwell Hobbes) is maddeningly making him wait. Jekyll is going crazy over this: “You’ve opened a gate for me into another world… But now the unknown wears your face, looks back at me with your eyes.”

His desire intensifies while, on a walk with another doctor, he helps a woman of ill repute smacked down in the street. That’s Ivy (a ravishing, touching Miriam Hopkins), whom he’s immediately attracted to and flirts with, making much about her garter when really admiring her lovely leg. In a scene that’s one of the pre-code-iest of them all, Ivy sexily strips down to nothing and pulls the sheets over her, beckoning him to return. He wants to. We want to. He and we will.

And so begins Jekyll’s test on himself – the potion that will transform him into Mr. Hyde. The potion, a sort of demented Viagra is curious, since Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote the famous novella in 1866, was rumored to be on cocaine while writing the iconic strange case – he was bedridden with TB and his story came to him in a dream… and he wrote it fast. How ahead of his time he likely did not know. But the potion, or drug, morphs Jekyll into that creature, a depraved, simian, man-beast, overly virile, overly agile, lacking a conscience, a delighted, giggling sadist so pleased with himself that the picture turns the viewer on ourselves. Do we want a shot of that stuff? Are we pleased now? Well, in a perverse way, perhaps we are, at first...

There's much more! Read the rest of my piece at The New Beverly. And see the movie. 

Something Wild: The Criterion Release

"I am a product of violence myself. By the age of 15 I'd been through Auschwitz and Belsen and my family destroyed... Without motivation, without warning. One's whole life is literally changed by making oneself cope with violence. The force cannot destroy the sensitive... Tennessee Williams believes that violence destroys sensitivity but I don't believe this -- we go on, the life force goes on in spite of it." -- Jack Garfein

I am thrilled that Jack Garfein's Something Wild is getting the Criterion treatment it so richly deserves. This movie has meant a lot to me for many years (I programmed it on TCM in 2010 and presented it at Telluride in 2012 with Jack -- a very moving Q&A) and I'm so happy Jack gets to see this release and to be a part of it. (Among the special features is my new on-camera interview with Jack, along with an interview with Carroll Baker, Foster Hirsch on the Actors Studio’s cinematic legacy, a Master Class with Garfein and an essay by the wonderful Sheila O’Malley.) Please, do give this film a look. And another look. 

Garfein is a director so ahead of his time that, even after 50 years, his two features The Strange One (1957) and Something Wild (1961) continue to inspire, disturb and provoke empathy. These complicated, human stories remain modern and experimental to this day. This is Garfein – an artist who beautifully combines expressionistic lyricism with raw naturalism while exploring still controversial subjects; never preaching, simplifying or insulting his characters: The fascistic military dehumanization and homoeroticism of The Strange One, and the complexity of rape and entrapment in his brilliant Something Wild.

Garfein, born July 2, 1930 in Czechoslovakia came to the U.S. after surviving Auschwitz, joined the Actor’s Studio, directed, in his early twenties, “End as Man” with Ben Gazzara and founded the Actors Studio West. His accomplishments are too vast to list, but he remains one of the great acting teachers, and continues to instruct in Paris. He’s chronicled his return to Auschwitz with his documentary The Journey Back, and has written “Life and Acting - Techniques for the Actor.” He remains a power in the world of acting and film. 

So again, so happy that Something Wild, Garfein’s brave, empathetic, confounding, mysterious and in the end, darkly beautiful picture, one so powerful that it shocks and distresses viewers to this day, is getting a January release. This expressionistic and naturalistic work of art (the location shooting is remarkable) dared observe the complexity of rape by following a young woman (a haunting, moving Carroll Baker, Garfein’s then-wife) after she is viciously attacked by a stranger in the park. The psychologically chaotic aftermath – her anxiety, repulsion, depression and eventual withdrawal from society -- not, and then by her own choice – is given a potent punch with the arrival of a tremendous Ralph Meeker in a performance you’ve never seen before. Not one to oversimplify, this story of victimization, strange love, survival and more, turns into a twisted Stockholm syndrome/true love (or not, which makes it even more intriguing) tale that still provokes argument. With a score by the virtuoso Aaron Copland, title sequence by legendary Saul Bass and cinematographer by the remarkable Eugen Schüfftan, Something Wild is an unsung masterpiece.

Jack Garfein is a sensitive, perceptive maverick. Once you've seen his work, it's impossible to forget.

With Jack in Telluride, 2012, high in the mountains at Gray Head.

More from Criterion here.