I never read Ira Levin’s novel, “Rosemary’s Baby.” Was it much more disturbing than the film? I found William Peter Blatty’s novel, “The Exorcist,” to be spooky, what with Regan MacNeil’s burgeoning “friendship” with Captain Howdy (the Assyrian demon, Pazuzu). Reading that part of the novel late at night, I almost thought I heard Captain Howdy, walking around in the attic or banging on the wall.
Although, sitting in the movie theater, watching the film version with my friends, we all laughed when Linda Blair “up-chucked” into the distinguished Max Von Sydow’s face. (Imagine if Barnabas had “ralphed” into the saintly Bathia Mapes’s face as she and Joshua attempted to exorcise Barnabas in the Tower Room during that oh-so-memorable DS episode? “Then go to the house of the curse!”)
I did read Ira Levin’s novel, “The Boys from Brazil” and subsequently the film version, starring Gregory Peck, Sir Laurence Olivier and James Mason. I preferred the novel to the film version. (I think Nicholas Blair would have approved of the evil Dr. Mengele’s plan to create multiple Adolf Hitlers to wreak havoc in the world.)
“Veronica’s Room” was a short-lived Ira Levin play on Broadway. I saw it in previews, and it was cool to see the great Arthur Kennedy and the great Eileen Heckart perform in person. The play was especially creepy, but what elder would you expect from an Ira Levin work?
Oh, yeah, Uncle Roger, your remiscence of your mother’s friend taking her two young kids to see “Rosemary’s Baby” in a local drive-in, reminds me when my parents took my brothers and I to see “Psycho” at a drive-in on the beautiful New Jersey shore way back in the early 1960s. In my parents’s defense, they didn’t see that “Psycho” had been condemned by the National League of Decency. (I don’t believe
that it actually was condemned by the league.) And, besides, my parents could not get a baby sister on short notice to watch a bunch of bratty little boys on short notice.
After all these years, I remember enjoying seeing that very pretty lady, Janet Leigh, taking a shower in the film, but things quickly got “somewhat” intense!