Rosemary’s Baby opened exactly 50 years ago today. All my life I’ve understood that the fictional building that Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse move into at the very beginning (i.e., the Dakota in real life) is called the Branford. In fact novel author Ira Levin called it the Bramford, the first syllable coming from Bram Stoker.
From HE review of Criterion’s Rosemary’s Baby Bluray, posted on 10.22.12: “The Rosemary’s Baby Bluray, in short, wasn’t mastered with the idea of taking your breath away, or at least the idea of taking away the breath of someone like myself, a Bluray-worshipping, semi-sophisticated cineaste and ex-projectionist who doesn’t mind a little tasteful DNRing. It’s made for the purists who will say “whoa, really nice grain structure!” It looks like it’s being projected at the Criterion theatre a week after Bobby Kennedy was killed with a first-rate projectionist in the booth. Grain purists like Glenn Kenny will probably be happy, and I’m not putting Kenny down when I say this. So I’m not complaining. Really. It’s fine. I’m just saying ‘it is what it is.’
“I’ve given up on seeing Rosemary’s Baby at 1.66 in my lifetime, but I would have been just a tad happier if Polanski and Criterion guys had at least used a full-screen 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio and given it just a bit more height instead of faintly cropping at the tops and bottoms in order to give it a 1.85 aspect ratio.”
