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Knife in the Water
To fully savor the Roman Polanski who came to America and blew us away with Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, it's imperative to sample the Polanski who, in his native Poland, made such a sensational splash in 1962. Working with the most basic of elements — a husband, a wife, a hitchhiker, a boat, a toxic psychological stew of jealousy, resentment, competition, boredom, betrayal — Polanski announced his haunting ability to make anxiety carry the weight of action.
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Rosemary's Baby
Polanski gave the devil his due in his peerlessly disturbing 1968 masterpiece about a fresh young couple, a New York Gothic apartment, an old creepy pair of busybody neighbors, and the single most hideous haircut ever worn by an actress in a starmaking role (credit Vidal Sassoon, if not Satan). A primal nightmare of pregnancy gone wrong, but also a paranoid parable of late-'60s godless America, this is arguably the one movie not directed by Hitchcock that could just as well have been.
