He was always a hard bird to figure out.

He made his name with some key foreign films (Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac), then was invited to Hollywood to make "Rosemary's Baby," which he famously made with so much loyalty to the book (line by line, visual description by visual description, down to the magazine on the table in a doctor's office), that it remains one of the most faithful adaptations of a movie ever made.

Then his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was butchered, and the world wondered how he would mourn:

By making an ultra-bloody British "MacBeth," that's how. It seemed to "fit," somehow (and it was the first film of "Playboy Productions," with plentiful Playboy coverage and nude models for Roman to enjoy.)

Next, a return to America for the ultra-polished production of "Chinatown," with an overlay of LA political corruption and sexual perversion (incest, right on time for the 70's R-rated check-off list of sexual frankness) that seemed to again tell the critics: "man, that Tate murder and those Holocaust parents...no wonder Polansi made this movie."

And then the 13-year old girl in the hot tub and...well, ever since,he's been an auteur with an asterisk.

Polanski won Best Director for "The Pianist" in a classic case of Hollywood Solomonic decision-making: Scorcese was pitted against "Chicago" and the Holocaust-friendly "Pianist" offered Hollywood multiple escape routes: foil Harvey Weinstein, hold off on Scorcese, honor the sexual expatriate Polanski....award another Holocaust movie (hey, it was better than the one with Roberto Begnini!)

All these years later, we still don't REALLY know: was the bloodiness of "MacBeth" and the perversion of "Chinatown" and the sexual congress with a pre-teen the issue of Sharon Tate's massacre and Roman's parental tragedies, or was Roman really one sick puppy all the time, anyway?

One thing's for sure: though Polanski made some notable foreign-based films after his exile ("Tess" and "The Pianist" come to mind), we'll never know if we lost a few more classic productions with the Old Hollywood polish of "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown." Those two films stand as his most popular monuments, the perfect fusion of European artistic sensibility and good old-fashioned American Studio Know-How.

HEY.

The Prophet Solomon (as) was innocent of the allegations levelled against him. He was a good, pious, upright prophet of God. Rather, his accusers were hypocrites and liars who sought to spread lies in order to gain power and authority and the punishment for their betrayal was the loss of their empire.

"All these years later, we still don't REALLY know: was the bloodiness of "MacBeth" and the perversion of "Chinatown" and the sexual congress with a pre-teen the issue of Sharon Tate's massacre and Roman's parental tragedies, or was Roman really one sick puppy all the time, anyway?"

And does it REALLY matter, at least in the case of "sexual congress with a pre-teen"...?

There IS such a thing as taking auteurism too far.

Yes he's an artist. Yes the crime he was accused of was very unpleasant. But come on, "a liar to the bottom of his soul." Get over yourself writer. Or think for a moment about his life as a six year old child in Nazi-occupied Poland. Yes, the jails are full of abused children. The sneering tone of the article is pompous and absurd.
Whatever you think of Polanksi's personal life (and other lives of artists you admire), HE IS AN ARTIST. His art will be studied and admired long after he is gone. And if you don't get that, YOU'RE a liar to the bottom of YOUR soul.

Odder still, at least to me, was Polanski's status as a maker of "art" films.

His breakthrough Knife in The Water is an effective but reasonably conventional thriller about a potentially-violent love triangle. It seemed to have political overtones because the boorish husband (Leon Niemczyk) is a Party official (that was enough for the Polish government, certainly--Polanski defected westward soon afterwards)

Repulsion, a few years later, is messy and opaque in style and the script seems to have been written with an eye on how many opportunities, logical or otherwise, can be found to show the heroine in the nearly-nude. Catherine Deneuve has a few moments that are genuinely poignant and/or unsettling, but mostly she's a blank canvas for the director to sketch his perverted little obsessions and fantasies on (that was Deneuve's main job as an actress in the 1960's; it started with Vadim's Vice et Virtu and extended to a couple of go-rounds with Luis Bunuel (at least he allowed Deneuve to go through her paces in St. Laurent dresses). Cul-de-Sac, which starred Deneuve's sister, Francoise Dorleac (and which I saw just this morning), is even worse. As best as I can tell, it isn't about anything--and no, Lionel Stander bellowing at everyone and Donald Pleasance dressing up in Dorleac's nighties doesn't add up to subject matter.

Dance of The Vampires is almost too painful to describe, as misfired comedy always is--indeed, this is best described as a comedy made by people with no discernable sense of humor; which leaves people like Ferdy Mayne and Alfie Bass, both gifted actors, looking completely stranded. Only Sharon Tate seemed to float above it all--maybe it was being in love with the director, or simply native common sense. Maybe she had already read the script for her next film, the genuinely funny Don't Make Waves. At any rate, she emerges as the only human being in this fumbling mess and the only member of the cast to deliver much of a performance. And anything said about this film goes double and tripe for his next shy at comedy, 1972's What?

As previously noted, Polanski was very quite faithful to Ira Levin's novel, so you have to wonder if the vastly superior script is due to that fidelity or to the fact that Polanski wasn't collaborating with the sceenwriter Gerard Brach for the first time in several years. This is one of the few movies where Polanski's direction might very well have made a difference; he gives the sequence where poor Rosemary is raped by the Devil a fever-dream quality that is truly unsettling. Still, the main thing that recommends this film to me is the acting; not just Ruth Gordon, but Mia Farrow and Stanley Blackmer and particularly John Cassavettes as Rosemary's skunky husband. Mind you, Cassavettes was wonderful no matter who was directing, even himself.

His film of Macbeth is a cold, heartless mess. The actors (John Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw) are trying to do Shakespeare's tragedy, and Polanski and Kenneth Tynan, and doing misanthropic melodrama about how anyone in spitting distance of political power is a heartless, worthless bloody-minded waste of oxygen. The murders that Macbeth commits to gain and hold on to power have no shock beyond the visceral, because the people he is killing are as rotten as he is and would do the same to him if necessity and opportunity presented itself. Given that Polanski had fallen under the thumbs of the Nazis and the Communists, one can understand why he might feel this way. But that doesn't make this film any less of a reduction of a great and wrenching piece of work. And what the hell was Tynan's beef, anyway? Weren't there enough struggling actresses agreeing to play S & M spanking games with him while he was working on the script?

As for Chinatown, the film has always struck me as one of the greatest examples of dumb luck intersecting with the contemporary mood in Hollywood history; a story about abuse of power and political corruption, starring two of the top stars of the time, is released just as the House Judiciary Committee opens hearing to consider impeaching Nixon. Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson were great (particularly Dunaway), Robert Towne's script had lots of juicy, funny, profane dialogue, the crew was a who's-who of Hollywood crafts talent, and Jerry Goldsmith wrote an extraordinary score. All Polanski would have had to do is show up and point the camera in the right direction to make a good movie. I'm sure he did a lot more than that, but there's nothing singular about his direction here. His influence on the script was actually detrimental, I think. Towne's original tough-but-tender ending (Dunaway murders her awful father, Nicholson waits twenty years for her to get out of jail) was re-written on Polanski's orders to end in utter despair and the complete triumph of evil. Once again, given what he had known of the exercise of power in Europe, maybe this made sense. But in America, even swine who avoid jail time tend to lose their good names and some of their friends. Nixon was almost impeached had had what few scraps of his good name were left basically taken away from him. Evil sometimes evades consequences, but it rarely experiences complete triumph, either.

About the rest of his films, I can say little. The Tenant seemed like a Satan-less rerun of ROSEMARY'S BABY; Tess was more notable for Nastassia Kinski's numerous costume changes than anything else (this was a Lana Turner/Ross Hunter fancy-dress marathon wardrobe--plus bustles). The Pianist won Polanski his gold-watch Oscar. As for Oliver Twist, why waste your time on Polanski's version when you have a DVD of David Lean's?

Astute analysis, and you've either seen or remembered more of the early Polanski than I have.

He made a name in the 60's when all critics looked to Europe first. I recall an ad tag line for "Repulsion": "Makes 'Psycho' Look Like a Sunday School Picnic." Whatever.

Cassavetes was a wonderfully surly husband to Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby." Robert Redford turned the part down (he would have been MORE horrifying), but Cassavetes, just off of "The Dirty Dozen," was scarily untrustworthy from Scene One.

Polanski, an Old School cinematic craftsman at heart, reportedly got into a raging argument with Cassavetes on set, finally accusing him: "You call yourself a director and you're not. You know nothing of art direction or costumes or acting. You just point a camera at people and let them improvise."

"Rosemary's Baby" was a huge hit in the almost-R-rated countercultural year of 1968 (it was a summer movie, the "R" rating emerged in November via MPAA edict.) Weirdly, I recall "Rosemary's Baby" getting a near-simultaneous opening with the other bit Paramount summer hit, "The Odd Couple" -- and they were kinda the same. Scary and depressing doings in creakingly old multi-room New York City apartments!

To me, the problem with "Rosemary's Baby" is that once you KNOW the solution (either hearing about it, or guessing it)...there is no movie. She's gonna have Satan's baby. That's it. We're way ahead of HER, for the whole movie. As Richard Sylbert said, "It's the Horror Movie With No Horror In It."

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Was Dance of the Vampires the original title of "The Fearless Vampire Killers Or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are In My Neck?"

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Jon Finch was an interesting British actor with a great R-rolling Shakespearean voice and Johnny Depp's young looks. He got back-to-back auteur movies -- Polanski's "MacBeth" and Hitchcock's "Frenzy" -- and went nowhere as a star. His biggest second chance was in "Alien" (1979) where he had the John Hurt role of the guy the alien burst out of. But Finch got sick, Hurt replaced him, and the rest is history. Maybe we would have had Jon Finch in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"...we have John Hurt there.

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"Chinatown' is a classic, indeed, for the CONFLUENCE of elements, on screen and off. Towne's once-in-a-lifetime (for him) original screenplay. Jack Nicholson (for whom Towne personally wrote the script) making the move from gritty indie man to "Romantic Movie Star" (but with a great big bandage on his gashed nose for most of the movie.) Faye Dunaway, perfectly cast for the first time since "Bonnie and Clyde." John Huston, perfectly cast, period.

"Chinatown" certainly fit that Nixon Resignation summer of 1974, and it fit the whole movie YEAR, in which paranoid conspiracies and downer endings were the norm: The Parallax View, Godfather II, The Conversation, The Towering Inferno, Lenny, and on and on. "Jaws," "Rocky" and "Star Wars" were birthed in 1974...as a backlash.

But "Chinatown" was also perfectly crafted, wittily written, gorgeously photographed, nicely acted...and perverse (the incest angle.)

Favorite scene: Nicholson confronts Huston near the pond, against a mouth-watering azure-purple sunset and with a great exchange (paraphrased from memory):

Nicholson: How much are you worth?

Huston: I have no idea.

Nicholson: 20 million?

Huston: Oh, my, at least that.

Nicholson: What more do you want? What can't you afford? What more could you possibly need to buy?

Huston: The FUTURE, Mr. Gitts!

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In his exile years, Polanski made a couple of notable European-made bombs with known American stars: Walter Matthau (in for Jack Nicholson) tanked with "Pirates," and then the Great Harrison Ford made the un-thrilling thriller "Frantic."

So Roman had some bombs to go with his hits....

Dance of The Vampires WAS the original title of The Fearless Vampire Killers--I think it was producer Martin Ransohoff who changed the title (it was also Ransohoff who insisted that Polanski hire his protege, Sharon Tate--a good idea, as it turned out).

To me, one of the major problems with Rosemary's Baby is that we get the Antichrist without The End Times; a more logical ending would have Rosemary horrified about her baby but privately amused that the cackling Satanists have, in fact, done God's will. You may or may not believe in such things, but if you're going to dramatize one half of the equation, you need to include the other--NOT one of those end-of-the world wet dreams churned out by right-leaning fundamentalist wing-nuts, but at least the suggestion that the events described in Revelation are lurking in the future.

Robert Redford would have been great perverse casting as Guy; in fact, Redford had done several rather chilling turns as villains on television (I still remember him as a murderous, baby-faced bootlegger in an episode of The Untouchables and he was both terrifying and heart-breaking as an unraveling psychopath in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour--beautifully supported by Zohra Lampert). Still, Cassavettes was pretty wonderful himself; he caught the bitterness and frustration of someone barely staying afloat in a profession that they really love--the frustration isn't just financial, it's emotional; you get the feeling that serious actors, like serious artists of all types, only feel really alive when they're practicing their art. And I love the repeated references in the dialogue to Ronald Alexander's play Nobody Loves an Albatross, a wonderful Hollywood satire--you can easily see Cassavettes playing the rat-fink protagonist with ease. I can also easily imagine Polanski getting into a fight with Cassavettes; not just as a director (Cassavettes was quickly becoming a name in film-making circles), but because Polanski loved abusing his actors; I still remember an on-set still of Polanski quarreling with Emmeline Henry, a very good character actress (she was a regular on I Dream of Jeannie and was very good in her small role as one of Mia Farrow's friends), and his on-set abuse of Faye Dunaway during the filming of Chinatown was legendary (Dunaway, to her credit, gave as good as she got).

John Finch came to Macbeth straight off the set of the Hammer production The Vampire Lovers (he was the male love interest to the heroine, saving her from vampirism and lesbianism--the film implies that it was more important to save her from the latter--but only after she'd gotten it on with another busty babe first). His film career sputtered mostly because he wasn't all that ambitious--he still does plenty of stage work, particularly Shakespeare.