International playa, Holocaust survivor, accused rapist, discotheque Pan, Lilliputian ladies man and occasional film director (Knife in the Water, Chinatown). Even the freakishly spiking EKG of a reality show plotline couldn’t touch the depths and shoals in the lifecycle of 75-year-old Polish auteur Roman Polanski.
Christopher Sandford’s Polanski: A Biography may inspire that peculiar twinge of uber-humility that occasions tales of paraplegic mountain climbers and crack babies metamorphosed into Harvard grads. It’s hard to call what the average Jarek does “living” when you stack it next to the full-color epic of Polanski.
Sandford documents Polanski’s life tip to tail: his birth in 1933 Paris followed by his family’s singular bad luck in returning to Krakow just in time for the nascent extermination of Polish Jews. Polanski’s pregnant mother Bula was eventually killed in Auschwitz, his father Ryszard was taken to the notoriously horrific Mauthausen camp, and Polanski’s childhood was spent hiding out with animal-like cunning from the Nazis. Polanski’s cinematic idée fixe of persecuted individuals contending with a brutally corrupt system was learned early. In Sandford’s astute observation of the hemmed-in individuals who populate his films, “claustrophobia is to Polanski as the frontier is to John Ford.”
Polanski’s adult travails were no less dramatic, albeit with Polanski often morphing from prey to predator, as a non-ironic Austin Powers with a rep for chasing submissive tail and shirts buttoned down to his groin. Polanski was equally into control on set, a taskmaster with a fetish for endless retakes. “We go again,” was a favorite refrain. One can only imagine what exhaustion that philosophy yielded in the bedroom.
And in 1968 came the murder of Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and their unborn son by Manson Family members, a loss that offered a disturbing symmetry, Sandford points out, to Polanski’s own pregnant mother’s murder decades earlier in Auschwitz. But Polanski’s most brutal manhandling in the press was yet to come, in 1977 when a photo session with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey ended in a miserable little pool house “seduction” involving drugs, champagne, sodomy and an accusation of rape that inspired him to flee the country in 1978 for permanent exile in Paris.
Polanski’s films were as eclectic and free-range as the contrapuntal forces of levity and tragedy that also defined his life. As Sandford notes of Polanski’s early output, “over a six-year period that had also seen the Manson murders, Polanski’s CV had included a memorably deranged Dracula spoof, a Satanic-cult blockbuster, a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare, an ill-advised excursion in soft porn and the definitive Thirties thriller.” As much as Sandford sees Polanski in the company of ’70s New Hollywood, the director was just as reminiscent of an earlier age of filmmakers in the Howard Hawks or John Huston mold, crafting polished, expert entertainments in varied genres.
As world cinema’s greats—Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman—stack up like cord wood, a Polanski revision (begun with the release of Marina Zenovich’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired) is certainly due in his 75th year. A biographer of other larger-than-life phenomena (Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger), Sandford appears more engaged by the artist than the art. Sandford is arguably no cineaste, but he seems surprisingly tone deaf in regard to Polanski's films, often deferring to critical consensus and box office. He calls The Pianist Polanski’s “masterpiece” and fails to appreciate a strain of delicious perversity and sadness in box office disappointments like Bitter Moon and The Tenant. Though he’s quick to point out parallels to Polanski’s personal experience in his adaptations of Oliver Twist and The Pianist, Sandford never plumbs one of the most interesting paradoxes of Polanski’s career: how this notorious tomcat could center so much of his work on deeply sympathetic portraits of women (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Tess, Death and the Maiden, Bitter Moon) contending with a predatory, misogynist world. In place of close readings of Polanski’s film, Sandford often dwells on film-buff trivia, spending an annoyingly inordinate amount of time cataloging the continuity errors in Polanski films: the director glimpsed in reflective surfaces or the odd historic gaffe in The Pianist.
Sandford’s is ultimately a cool, unauthorized appraisal absent of hagiography and mixed with equal parts respect and skepticism for his subject. There are some satisfyingly bizarre anecdotes—including one about the landlord of the Cielo Drive house where Tate met her end, who sent Polanski the bill for removing blood from the carpeting and drapery. Sandford also discusses a rumor that Polanski surreptitiously returned to the U.S. in 1991 to direct Anjelica Huston, Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman in an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in a Beverly Hills mansion. Polanski fetishists will luxuriate in Sandford’s details of Polanski’s schizophrenically fascinating life, even if many will continue to find the most profound and satisfying insight into Polanski in his films.
History Re-Creeps Itself
While Roman Polanski might enjoy his reputation as an international fugitive, thumbing his nose as the U.S. by living large—he had a cameo in 2007’s Rush Hour 3—there have been rapscallions throughout the ages that make him look like an amateur. After all, what’s one weird-looking filmmaker compared to a Greek god? Below, our list of history’s greatest scoundrels.
Zeus
Despite being a big, scary god and having dozens of children with scores of ladies, goddesses and humans alike, Zeus was still a total dog. Despite having a smoking-hot wife (and sister) in Hera, the goddess of women and marriage, he still had a major thing for underage girls and was also getting some from Ganymede, a sweet young shepherd with a taste for older dudes.
Grigori Rasputin
Even with his role as an advisor to the Tsar and being known as an all-around 19th-century macher, Rasputin had some dirty tricks up his pervy Russian sleeves. Besides knocking up two women and leaving them both high and dry, the longhaired lothario is also rumored to have forced himself upon a nun. No wonder an ex-prostiute knifed him in 1914.
The Marquis de Sade
Imagine being the guy that sadism is named for. Damn. In the 1700s, nobody was more lecherous than Sade: The guy beat and poisoned prostitutes, imprisoned his lovers, took up with his wife’s sister—all while humping his houseboy. And although he spent many of his last years in and out of prisons and institutions, he still managed to take up with a 13-year-old girl who worked at the asylum he died in.
Woody Allen
We always thought Mia Farrow was the creepy one; she had that army of children, got all uppity about Tibet and talked kind of like crackheads do before they mug you. Boy, were we wrong. After a 12-year relationship, Farrow left him after she found old nudie pics of her daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, that Allen had snapped. The four-eyed freak managed to talk Previn (who was never really his stepdaughter, as he and Farrow never married) into getting hitched to him in 1994 despite their 34-year age difference.
Christopher Sandford’s Polanski: A Biography may inspire that peculiar twinge of uber-humility that occasions tales of paraplegic mountain climbers and crack babies metamorphosed into Harvard grads. It’s hard to call what the average Jarek does “living” when you stack it next to the full-color epic of Polanski.
Sandford documents Polanski’s life tip to tail: his birth in 1933 Paris followed by his family’s singular bad luck in returning to Krakow just in time for the nascent extermination of Polish Jews. Polanski’s pregnant mother Bula was eventually killed in Auschwitz, his father Ryszard was taken to the notoriously horrific Mauthausen camp, and Polanski’s childhood was spent hiding out with animal-like cunning from the Nazis. Polanski’s cinematic idée fixe of persecuted individuals contending with a brutally corrupt system was learned early. In Sandford’s astute observation of the hemmed-in individuals who populate his films, “claustrophobia is to Polanski as the frontier is to John Ford.”
Polanski’s adult travails were no less dramatic, albeit with Polanski often morphing from prey to predator, as a non-ironic Austin Powers with a rep for chasing submissive tail and shirts buttoned down to his groin. Polanski was equally into control on set, a taskmaster with a fetish for endless retakes. “We go again,” was a favorite refrain. One can only imagine what exhaustion that philosophy yielded in the bedroom.
And in 1968 came the murder of Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and their unborn son by Manson Family members, a loss that offered a disturbing symmetry, Sandford points out, to Polanski’s own pregnant mother’s murder decades earlier in Auschwitz. But Polanski’s most brutal manhandling in the press was yet to come, in 1977 when a photo session with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey ended in a miserable little pool house “seduction” involving drugs, champagne, sodomy and an accusation of rape that inspired him to flee the country in 1978 for permanent exile in Paris.
Polanski’s films were as eclectic and free-range as the contrapuntal forces of levity and tragedy that also defined his life. As Sandford notes of Polanski’s early output, “over a six-year period that had also seen the Manson murders, Polanski’s CV had included a memorably deranged Dracula spoof, a Satanic-cult blockbuster, a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare, an ill-advised excursion in soft porn and the definitive Thirties thriller.” As much as Sandford sees Polanski in the company of ’70s New Hollywood, the director was just as reminiscent of an earlier age of filmmakers in the Howard Hawks or John Huston mold, crafting polished, expert entertainments in varied genres.
As world cinema’s greats—Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman—stack up like cord wood, a Polanski revision (begun with the release of Marina Zenovich’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired) is certainly due in his 75th year. A biographer of other larger-than-life phenomena (Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger), Sandford appears more engaged by the artist than the art. Sandford is arguably no cineaste, but he seems surprisingly tone deaf in regard to Polanski's films, often deferring to critical consensus and box office. He calls The Pianist Polanski’s “masterpiece” and fails to appreciate a strain of delicious perversity and sadness in box office disappointments like Bitter Moon and The Tenant. Though he’s quick to point out parallels to Polanski’s personal experience in his adaptations of Oliver Twist and The Pianist, Sandford never plumbs one of the most interesting paradoxes of Polanski’s career: how this notorious tomcat could center so much of his work on deeply sympathetic portraits of women (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Tess, Death and the Maiden, Bitter Moon) contending with a predatory, misogynist world. In place of close readings of Polanski’s film, Sandford often dwells on film-buff trivia, spending an annoyingly inordinate amount of time cataloging the continuity errors in Polanski films: the director glimpsed in reflective surfaces or the odd historic gaffe in The Pianist.
Sandford’s is ultimately a cool, unauthorized appraisal absent of hagiography and mixed with equal parts respect and skepticism for his subject. There are some satisfyingly bizarre anecdotes—including one about the landlord of the Cielo Drive house where Tate met her end, who sent Polanski the bill for removing blood from the carpeting and drapery. Sandford also discusses a rumor that Polanski surreptitiously returned to the U.S. in 1991 to direct Anjelica Huston, Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman in an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in a Beverly Hills mansion. Polanski fetishists will luxuriate in Sandford’s details of Polanski’s schizophrenically fascinating life, even if many will continue to find the most profound and satisfying insight into Polanski in his films.
History Re-Creeps Itself
While Roman Polanski might enjoy his reputation as an international fugitive, thumbing his nose as the U.S. by living large—he had a cameo in 2007’s Rush Hour 3—there have been rapscallions throughout the ages that make him look like an amateur. After all, what’s one weird-looking filmmaker compared to a Greek god? Below, our list of history’s greatest scoundrels.
Zeus
Despite being a big, scary god and having dozens of children with scores of ladies, goddesses and humans alike, Zeus was still a total dog. Despite having a smoking-hot wife (and sister) in Hera, the goddess of women and marriage, he still had a major thing for underage girls and was also getting some from Ganymede, a sweet young shepherd with a taste for older dudes.
Grigori Rasputin
Even with his role as an advisor to the Tsar and being known as an all-around 19th-century macher, Rasputin had some dirty tricks up his pervy Russian sleeves. Besides knocking up two women and leaving them both high and dry, the longhaired lothario is also rumored to have forced himself upon a nun. No wonder an ex-prostiute knifed him in 1914.
The Marquis de Sade
Imagine being the guy that sadism is named for. Damn. In the 1700s, nobody was more lecherous than Sade: The guy beat and poisoned prostitutes, imprisoned his lovers, took up with his wife’s sister—all while humping his houseboy. And although he spent many of his last years in and out of prisons and institutions, he still managed to take up with a 13-year-old girl who worked at the asylum he died in.
Woody Allen
We always thought Mia Farrow was the creepy one; she had that army of children, got all uppity about Tibet and talked kind of like crackheads do before they mug you. Boy, were we wrong. After a 12-year relationship, Farrow left him after she found old nudie pics of her daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, that Allen had snapped. The four-eyed freak managed to talk Previn (who was never really his stepdaughter, as he and Farrow never married) into getting hitched to him in 1994 despite their 34-year age difference.
