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to create an anxiety about reality itself. There would be no Vincent Price or any 3-D. Otherwise remaining faithful to the novel, he did make a few departures from the script in the casting. The book called for a “strapping all-American” woman, and he originally favored his wife Sharon Tate’s friend Tuesday Weld for the part. Jane Fonda was also asked to play the role and turned it down. The studio settled on Mia Farrow, who was married to Frank Sinatra and a star on the TV series Peyton Place. Polanski thought her delicate quality would project vulnerability, so he cast her even though she wasn’t exactly the heartland type described in the book. Polanski knew he needed a central performance that could tempt his audience to indulge in paranoia, the sneaking suspicion that everyone is out to get you. In Repulsion, his 1965 film that takes place in the mind of a mad Catherine Deneuve, the suspense hinges on finding out whether the bizarre things happening (arms coming out of walls, etc.) are real or the product of delusion.

Rosemary’s Baby is also about a lonely, isolated woman unsure if she can trust her own mind. Could her husband really be in cahoots with the Devil? How could that be possible? What’s really unnerving in the film is not the Devil, but that one can be so fragile as to even believe in such a thing. It’s a movie about the terror of neurosis. As such, Polanski told his crew and actors, establishing a strict ambiguity about just about everything was important. He showed only parts of the action, often keeping the camera away from the people talking; motivations are hinted at, but rarely explained.

The movie starts with the young couple, played by Farrow and the director John Cassavetes, buying an apartment in Manhattan. Production designer Richard Sylbert suggested the Dakota, an Upper West Side apartment building known for its famous residents, as a stand-in for the haunted Bramford from the novel. The couple falls in love with the apartment right away. He’s a hungry, desperate actor, and she’s an innocent. No shadows or ominous messages. It’s a scene notable for its banality. But the mundane quickly turns absurd.

Polanski loved Waiting for Godot and in the sixties in France had met Samuel Beckett, who had always wanted to be a filmmaker and was interested in Polanski’s mounting an adaptation of Godot. The plans never went anywhere, but Polanski’s ideas about terror, like those of many of his peers in film, were shaped by the theater. He lived in London in the sixties when Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Beckett were all the rage. In 1966, Kenneth Tynan, the legendary critic then working at the National Theatre, wrote the then artistic director Laurence Olivier, advising that he give Polanski a short-term contract. “He has exactly the right combination of fantasy and violence for us,” he wrote.

Trained at the Lodz film school in Poland, Polanski displayed his agility with the camera in the unorthodox way that the stars of Rosemary’s Baby were shot. Farrow is frequently seen in profiles, her face sliced in half. Other times he showed us her back. When she talked, the audience sometimes saw only the person who was listening. Breaking with the conventions of most Hollywood movies, he stayed on location to root the fantastical story in a hard, tactile realism. Against the wishes of Bill Castle, he shot on Fifth Avenue during the lunch hour: “I want realism, Bill, it can be done,” he insisted.

The first death took place right on the streets of the Upper West Side. Rosemary found the girl’s body splayed on the sidewalk after she jumped out of a window. Polanski shot the scene during midnight and insisted on veracity. “Blood is phony, does not look real,” he shouted at his production team. For a movie about the Devil, Polanski insisted on a faithful portrait of contemporary New York. While shooting on Park Avenue, he asked Mia Farrow to walk into actual traffic to get a shot of the pregnant Rosemary that looked authentic. “Nobody will hit a pregnant woman,” he assured her.

Polanski wanted the details of the