Blast from the Past

I just watched Rosemary's Baby with a couple of young(-ish) people. There's always something a bit worrying about revisiting a film you've loved years ago.

I can report that it has entirely maintained its power to creep people out. The key is that remarkably little emphasis is given to the nitty gritty of Satanism and the presence of Satan himself. All the horror comes out of the ordinary domesticity. The main characters are very much like the cast of a Sixties sitcom: the young couple, the husband who's having problems at work, the nosy neighbours, the avuncular doctor. It works wonderfully as a young pregnant woman's paranoid fantasy: what if the husband your having snappy rows with the the couple next door who get on your nerves and the doctor who you don't feel properly listens to you - what if they were all conspiring to steal your baby?

For a few movies, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Roman Polanski had the ability to portray London or New York or Los Angeles as if he'd arrived from another planet. He also had the weirdest sense of humour. Like calling the horrible neighbour Roman Castavet, a strange combination of his own name and that of John Cassavetes, who incidentally gives the most wonderfully nasty performance.

All the best horror, even vampires and zombies, comes out of the fears under the surface of our everyday lives. Lesson one for anyone writing suspense or horror: start from the ordinary and work out rather than the other way round. This is even true of movies like The Birds and Jaws. These seem like entirely exterior threats but Hitchcock and Spielberg managed to make you feel that they were manifestations of some strange communal anxiety.

It's interesting the movies that do and don't stand up. We watched the Hal Ashby/Robert Towne, Warren Beatty movie, Shampoo, the other day. It felt horribly dated. The problem with Warren Beatty is that he was always really a 1950s swinger with a 1970s hairstyle.

I've tried Beatty out on my daughters (as it were) and they really can't fathom what their mothers and grandmothers saw in him. Although we loved McCabe and Mrs Miller (which Beatty himself loathed), partly perhaps because he is entirely hidden behind a vast beard and drowned in a Leonard Cohen soundtrack. On the other hand, the young Marlon Brando is a bit hit with our household's younger women - and older woman, for that matter.

Five Easy Pieces stands up. The Godfather movies get better with each decade - I think some of the weaker, TV-movie sort of performances of some minor characters don't stand out so much. I'm worried about Apocalypse Now, though, especially after the disastrous extended version, with those awful 1970s sex scenes. 

PS Sorry about the lay-out problems in my previous post. I wasn't drunk. I thought I'd worked out how to lay out verse on the page. I was wrong.