Posted on 11/30/2020 3:34:41 PM PST by simpson96
By the time Rosemary’s Baby began production in 1967, seventy-year-old Ruth Gordon was already a widely-known, four-time Oscar-nominated actress-writer of the stage and screen who had been recommended for the part by the film’s production designer, Richard Sylbert, a friend of Gordon and her husband-collaborator, Garson Kanin. On screen, few actors have ever taken more perceptible pleasure in animating a destabilizing presence as Gordon, who doesn’t grow into Minnie so much as she wears the character with flair on her patterned sleeves. Her spirited depiction of wickedness is remembered less for its dastardly actions, than for the unnerving aura it suffuses into the film.
Gordon’s real triumph as the mouthy, malevolent Minnie Castevet is all about fashioning a character whose lasting memorability has very little to do with what is on the page and nearly everything to do with how much diabolical detail Gordon manages to invest in every single second of her screen time. You can discern Gordon’s stage roots through her restless, rapid-fire vocality and the full-bodied liveliness of her characterization, swishing and skulking around the frames and making tremendously tactile use of props. In Gordon’s performance, objects as disparate as a pendant, a sponge cake, a soiled rug, and a whistle become indelible tokens of a villain whose fiendishness is seldom explicated.
Enter Minnie Castevet in Rosemary's Baby
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
I still say the Satanists reminded me of Pelosi Reid and Obama
That is one creepy, evil movie.
Getting us ready for Harris? Maybe we should screen the episode of I,CLAVDIVS where Livia poisons Caesar Augustus. Just a taste of the future.
IIRC, Frank Sinatra served Farrow with divorce papers on the set during filming of that movie.
Farrow was either dating Sinatra or married to him at the time she was making this movie and he disliked it intensely ... he called it that "kooky devil shit".
Frank was a great talent but a complete @sshole. Biden/Harris are like him except for having no talent beyond whooring.
Farrow’s part as the bride of Satan was a warmup for her marriage to Woody Allen.
Love Ruth in Harold & Maude.
Ruth Gordon played Clint Eastwood’s shotgun toting mom in ‘Every Which Way But Loose’ in 1978. It was hilarious watching her blast up the Black Widow biker gang.
I liked it too. Under the category of “Delightfully Kooky”
It was in Black & White! I think she died at the end.
There is a part in the movie where Minnie puts a fork full of food into her mouth twisting the fork sideways, mouth closes over the food after it is in. She basically shovels the food into her mouth in an ugly aggressive way.
I really have always thought that was a brilliant, deliberate act to portray the real character of Minnie Castevet. Personal habits while eating showing that secret inner self. An obsession, shown in a piglike behavior, greedy to please herself with food, material possessions. A luxurious apartment, good food, drink, travel, social standing. The reason she can sell a human beings soul out from under them without conscience.
It strikes me every time as chilling wickedness. It’s a small part in the film but it always stands out to me.
Btw, they are not ALL anagrams. Ever notice the only name done is Roman Castavet (Steven Marcado) They cannot do the anagram out of Minnie Castavet.
“That is one creepy, evil movie.”
Read the book first...then saw the movie. The remake had nothing on the original.
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