The Criterion Collection

The infectiously Manhattan-centric cast of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is a treasure chest of sudden stars and cherished character actors, each of the film’s central and supporting parts filled with great deliberation and preproduction forethought, and every periphery teeming with fascinating faces, some now half remembered, others completely forgotten. You can begin to get a sense of this range of screen presences simply by examining the image above: that’s Sidney Blackmer front left, of course, and the great Hope Summers in blue (more about them in a moment). The identity of the woman in the rear remains unclear to us; the painting above her head depicts the story’s archwarlock, Adrian Marcato. Hard-core Russ Meyer fans stand a fleeting chance of recognizing the man wearing white and with his hands clasped at left rear: that’s Sebastian Brook, who appears briefly, flabbergasted and fuming, as a fashion photographer in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (“Susan, I’m simply in a rage!”). And the man on the far right: Elmer Modlin, an actor who never went anywhere and almost certainly would have disappeared entirely from history had not a stash of his letters, photographs, and videotapes been discovered in a Madrid trash can by filmmaker Sergio Oksman, who turned his find into a fascinating short documentary released just this year: A Story for the Modlins (trailers can easily be found online). The story of Modlin and his wife, Margaret, a painter, could be one of the Bramford building’s urban legends. Such is the nature of Rosemary’s Baby: it is a place where the odd, the awful, the creepy, and the vaguely comic seem to coagulate with ease, a cinematic haunted house that’s also a perfectly preserved time capsule of the midsixties, when America suddenly appeared to be its own kind of horror movie and the story of the birth of a new Satan amid a generation of flower children proved as uneasily prophetic as it was instantly—and perhaps even infernally—profitable.