5 Off My Head - Miss You Miss Gordon

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This past Saturday mark the 25th anniversary of Ruth Gordon's death. I had it marked in my calendar and everything, so deep and lasting an impression did the lady leave in her wake. I figured I had to do something in her honor, and since it's a performance etched on the inside of my skull it only seems natural to talk about her Oscar-winning work as Minnie Castavet in Rosemary's Baby (aka my favorite movie of all time, one I talk about too much probably but oh well, deal with it).

So here are my five of my favorite moments of Minnie's, in no particular order., and off the top of my head (yeah I'm writing this without having the DVD on me and not having seen the film in a couple of months, yet I'm still able to go into probably excessive detail about each moment... did I mention I've seen this movie a million times? Cuz I have.) And if you think narrowing it down to five couldn't possibly have been hard then you weren't around the night I tweeted the entirety of Rosemary's Baby - my love for every single frame of this film is bottomless, and narrowing anything down to a reasonable amount is akin to torture.


"Umf, ads." - The first time Minnie sweeps into Rosemary's apartment she takes inventory of every corner, new color, piece of furniture, what it cost, and so on, and it's hilariously capped off by one final act of privacy invasion, once Rosemary finally gets her ushered to the door, where she rifles through their mail right there on their doorstep in front of Rosemary's baffled face. It's the first time we'll see Minnie steam-roll over Rosemary's politeness but far from the last. Like that time she gets Rosemary pregganant with the devil's baby. That time sucked especially.

"The c-c-c-c-arrrrgh-ppppet...." -Watching this movie I holler out every line of dialogue with the mounting fervor of the entranced. It's charming, believe me. And the fervor's always at high pitch here at the start of the first date between the Woodhouses and the Castavets, where Roman accidentally spills some vodka blush and Minnie, ever lady-like, hocks a loogie of her disapproval at him as she leaps to the floor. Nobody's ever made a simple rug sound so phlegmatic before or since.

And her obsession with the floor's integrity is mirrored wonderfully at the end when Rosemary drops the butcher knife upon finding out the truth of their scheme and Minnie is shown pulling it out of the wood and rubbing at the nick it leaves.

Minnie eating her cake - This is also from the first dinner that Ye Olde Satanists and their young womb-bait share. All four actors are pretty much on-screen during this moment and yet once you find Ruth Gordon in the frame there's no turning back, you won't see or care what anybody else is doing. You think her make-up and costuming is gaudy? Wait until you watch her chew on a slice of cake. My lord. The frosting appears to dislocate her jaw.

"As long as she ate the mouse, she can't see nor hear. Now sing" - I don't know how this little line of dialogue became the one that I quote the most from the movie, but that just shows to go ya how a magician with language like Ruth could transform something that must've seemed sort of inconsequential on the page into music. The way she turned the entire sentence into one violently staccato word. "S'longssheetthamouseshekinseenorheeeeernowsing." It just slips off the tongue like beautiful barf.


Her entrance - What a spectacular burst of vodka blush do the Castavets make, popping out of the darkness of that black city street, stumbling willy-nilly and not at all premeditatedly upon the corpse of the gal they'd been like grandparents to, literally picking her up off the sidewalk. Such color! I knew I was in love from the first instant I saw Minnie daintily put on her glasses.

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