[Polanski] is teaching us how to regard him. Knife in the Water, his fine first film, was a tight little Sartrean engine of internal forces. Since then, the horrors in his films have become much more external, at best merely entertaining. Repulsion, a chronicle of psychotic murders, was coolly frightening, if largely gratuitous. Cul-de-Sac was a far-out thriller-rag, less successful but sometimes ingenious. The Fearless Vampire Killers, which Polanski says was mutilated by the distributors, was an amusing idea for a Dracula spoof, but it completely misfired. Rosemary's Baby seems to settle in right where he wants to live: as a manufacturer of intelligent thrillers, clever and insubstantial. Only a director with wit could have made the witchcraft credible. Only a director with real cinematic gifts could have made a sequence like the one where Rosemary barricades herself in the apartment or the childbirth scene. Only a director...