The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (329 page)

Clearly Poitier saw the danger in such soul-destroying movies, and he made efforts to escape into parts that might be judged purely as entertainment: thus Raoul Walsh’s
Band of Angels
(57);
The Long Ships
(64, Jack Cardiff);
The Bedford Incident
(65, James B. Harris);
The Slender Thread
(65, Sydney Pollack); and
Duel at Diablo
(66, Nelson).

Naturally, he played Porgy for Preminger in 1959, but confined to his knees and only miming the songs, he illustrated the dilemma of a black actor in movies. Richard Roundtree’s
Shaft
seemed freer and much more enjoyable than anything the resolutely polite Poitier tried. Perhaps his most conventional work is best, namely the trilogy of Virgil Tibbs, which began with
In the Heat of the Night
(67, Norman Jewison) as a crude black-white confrontation, but which he developed into a run-of-the-mill black detective in
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs
(70, Gordon Douglas) and
The Organization
(71, Don Medford).

Poitier also branched into direction with three foolishly conceived and miserably handled projects:
Buck and the Preacher
(71),
A Warm December
(72), and
Uptown Saturday Night
(74) in all of which he also acted.

In the seventies, Poitier turned to acting-directing movies largely inhabited by blacks. If they were determinedly righteous films for blacks, it was only for those not used to the stalest clichés of white movies.
Let’s Do It Again
was the best, thanks to Bill Cosby. But Poitier looked increasingly tenuous claiming a middle ground between
Roots
, the Richard Pryor comedies, and the austere cult hardness of black art made and shown in the no-go areas of large cities.

What drives Poitier now? He is handsome, articulate. He could be a commanding figure. Yet his career has trailed away in irrelevant comedies:
Stir Crazy
is Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor;
Hanky Panky
is Wilder and Gilda Radner (replacing Pryor);
Fast Forward
is teenagers; and
Ghost Dad
is Bill Cosby. There’s little else to be said for the lot of them.

For ten years or so Poitier did not act. Then he returned as a cop in the fanciful
Shoot to Kill
(88, Roger Spottiswoode);
Little Nikita
(88, Richard Benjamin); playing Thurgood Marshall on TV in
Separate But Equal
(91, George Stevens Jr); and
Sneakers
(92, Phil Alden Robinson).

Poitier seems semiretired, now. But he
is
mythic—as witness the legend that inspires
Six Degrees of Separation
(93, Fred Schepisi). He made a comeback in
The Jackal
(97, Michael Caton-Jones) and
Mandela and de Klerk
(97, Joseph Sargent). In the Oscars for 2002, his honorary Oscar could have been scripted to grace the awards to Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. Close to eighty, Poitier looked noble—and unthreatening.

Roman Polanski
, b. Paris, 1933
1957:
Rower
(unfinished);
Morbectwo
(s);
Rozbigimi Zabawe
(s). 1958:
Ewag Ludzie z Szasa/Two Men and a Wardrobe
(s). 1959:
Anioly Spadaja
(s). 1962:
Noz w Wodzie/Knife in the Water; Ssaki/Mammals
(s). 1963:
Le Gros et le Maigre
(s); “La Riviere de Diamants,” episode from
Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Mond
. 1965:
Repulsion
. 1966:
Cul-de-Sac
. 1967:
Dance of the Vampires
. 1968:
Rosemary’s Baby
. 1971:
Macbeth
. 1972:
Che?/What?
. 1974:
Chinatown
. 1976:
Le Locataire/The Tenant
. 1979:
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
. 1986:
Pirates
. 1988:
Frantic
. 1992:
Bitter Moon
. 1995:
Death and the Maiden
. 1999:
The Ninth Gate
. 2002:
The Pianist
. 2005:
Oliver Twist
. 2007: an episode from
Chacun Son Cinéma
. 2010:
The Ghost Writer
.

Who would have thought in 1978, when Polanski jumped bail, left America, and fled from the charge of having seduced a fourteen-year-old girl, that the subsequent exile would become his way of life? Don’t such problems get worked out? Isn’t that what Hollywood lawyers do? Until that moment (and he was still only forty-five) Polanski was famous as a survivor. His mother had perished in Auschwitz; his father had been at another camp. His childhood had been so haunted and hunted it was said to have inspired Jerzy Kosinski’s
The Painted Bird
.

Still, the tiny, rather ugly man had asserted himself. He had been a brilliant student, and a subversive guest in Britain. Then he had gone on to America and made two huge hits, both highly influential:
Rosemary’s Baby
(high-class horror) and
Chinatown
(political noir). That triumph had been won in defiance of the slaughter of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, one of the victims of the Manson gang in their raid on Cielo Drive. His was a story of tragedy and obstacle overcome.
Chinatown
had many talents, but most people reckoned it was the decisive Polanski who had made it work. He seemed acutely American in being on the nose.

And then …? Idleness and the oddity of
The Tenant
, which seemed like an unexpected admission of his own distress. Did success crack Polanski, or make him relax? Based ever since his “incident” in Paris, he has made films that do not seem his.
Tess
is stately and pretty.
Frantic
is a silliness, perfectly titled. And
Bitter Moon
was a big flop that struggled to get released in America. Polanski has done some acting; he wrote an autobiography; he has married Emmanuelle Seigner, the beautiful but glassy actress from
Frantic
and
Bitter Moon
. It seems less and less likely that he will leave Paris—or that anyone would care if he did.

The violence in Polanski’s films is not especially prominent; it has seldom erupted with the force achieved by Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Fuller, or Losey. Much more characteristic is the underlying alienation and hostility: the feeling that people are cut off, unsupported by any shared view of life and society. From this solitariness, the move toward acts of violence is stealthy, remorseless, and even comic. Thus
Cul-de-Sac
is a mixture of Beckett and English social satire, uneasily concealing a situation fraught with menacing implications. The couple living in the bizarre house on bleak Holy Island are married, but as incompatible as Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac. They might be together simply to savage one another. While Lionel Stander, who intrudes helplessly upon them, is a refugee from thrillers of the 1940s. The black fun of the film never eases the threat. It was her psychotic sense of decay that led to an overwhelming mental pressure on Catherine Deneuve in a South Kensington flat in
Repulsion
, and that justified her feeling that the world was so demented she needed to begin to destroy it.

Cul-de-Sac
offered the sort of remote locale that shows how far Polanski puts people at their own extremes. Similarly, the shapes and decor of the Kensington flat are the outward signs of Deneuve’s madness: the fragile blonde driven to fearful slaughter by her distorted sensibility.

By the time he was three, the Polanskis lived in Cracow. Both parents were sent to concentration camps; the mother died at Auschwitz. After the war, he went to art school and in 1955 to the Lodz Film School.
Two Men and a Wardrobe
, made as a school project, attracted considerable international attention for its stripped-down view of absurdity. He put up the script of
Knife in the Water
, but it was rejected. He went to France and returned only in 1962 to make his first feature, an academic study of sexual tension and of fiercely contrasting personalities. It showed what Kenneth Tynan called Polanski’s interest in people who can “impose” themselves on others.
Le Gros et le Maigre
is a servant-master relationship, a little like
End Game
, but clearly of Polanski’s own vision. In
Repulsion
, Catherine Deneuve is so imposed upon that she can only reassert herself through murder.
Cul-de-Sac
is a dead end jostling with subtle but crazy power play.
Rosemary’s Baby
, the film Polanski made in New York for Paramount, is about the resonance of evil.
Macbeth
, too, is a story of a man imposed upon by the supernatural, by the outward voicing of his own hopes, and by his wife.

Put in these terms, Polanski’s world sounds narrow and repetitive. What enlarges it is his sense of humor, the lack of self-pity, and the curiosity that he retains for human behavior. Despite every ordeal, his films have a cheerful interest in oddity and a cinematic willingness to give it full play. He uses long, simple takes to encourage the actors and to involve them so totally as to achieve extraordinary moments. There is no better test of the approach than the beach scene in
Cul-de-Sac
, all in one take, with Pleasence and Stander engaged in lugubrious mutual confession, neither one understanding the other, while the pale naked figure of Dorléac goes swimming in the distance and an inexplicable aircraft drones overhead.

That
Chinatown
feels so expert on Los Angeles (and America) owes a lot to Robert Towne. The script was his, and it was enriched by a life in Southern California and by unusual research. Moreover, the project had been conceived for Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, and for Robert Evans as producer. Polanski came to the table later. He warred with Faye Dunaway, and he challenged what he took for softness in Towne’s conclusion. It was Polanski’s experience and his storytelling expertness that insisted on affirming Noah Cross’s power and on having Evelyn Mulwray killed, with Gittes left powerless. Surely that decision was vital, and maybe it required Polanski’s level appreciation of what wickedness could do.

That’s what makes
Chinatown
a great film, as well as a great show. Polanski is everywhere in the film, greedy for detail, jabbing at Nicholson’s nose, urging John Huston’s Cross to be heroic and expansive, harassing Evelyn and getting the look and the feel just right. Years later, the dire sequel,
The Two Jakes
, celebrated Polanski through his absence. By then, he was fatally Parisian.

The Tenant
contains the best and worst of Polanski. It begins with a situation pregnant with discomfort: a precise, enclosed place and a nervous hero longing to be victimized. Polanski plays the part himself and shows us how far the shy wolf face is an image of guilt that knows its destiny will be dreadful. But the promise explodes in exaggeration, and the set turns into a cabinet of grand guignol. In the end it is ridiculous, and evidence that Polanski gets out of hand whenever he loses that stealthy pace of comic fear.

Once upon a time, it would have seemed impossible for Polanski to stagnate. Yet it has happened.
Death and the Maiden
and
The Ninth Gate
did not seem to belong to him, whereas, once, he had put his stamp on anything and everything. This liberty has not enriched him. There has been no talk of a return to America; and no hint of that music not having to be faced. In Paris, Polanski seems disconsolate, a thumb-twiddler. And while time passes, the mood for his best films is nearly forgotten.

The Pianist
was a triumphant return. The winner at Cannes, it was deemed old-fashioned. But at the Oscars, it seemed classical and unusually personal. The best director award was a surprise—but it didn’t persuade Polanski to appear.

However …

Sydney Pollack
(1934–2008), b. Lafayette, Indiana
1965:
The Slender Thread
. 1966:
This Property Is Condemned
. 1968:
The Scalphunters; Castle Keep; The Swimmer
(credited to Frank Perry, with sequences by Pollack). 1969:
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
. 1972:
Jeremiah Johnson
. 1973:
The Way We Were
. 1975:
The Yakuza; Three Days of the Condor
. 1977:
Bobby Deerfield
. 1979:
The Electric Horseman
. 1981:
Absence of Malice
. 1982:
Tootsie
. 1985:
Out of Africa
. 1990:
Havana
. 1993:
The Firm
. 1995:
Sabrina
. 1999:
Random Hearts
. 2005:
The Interpreter; Sketches of Frank Gehry
(d).

Originally an actor, and then a director on TV, Pollack had always shown an interest in enterprising material, persistently let down by his middlebrow approach. Yet he became one of the leading producer-directors in America.

This Property Is Condemned
, from a promising Tennessee Williams playlet, is packed with atmosphere and has one of Robert Redford’s more committed performances. But it follows meekly in the line of Williams adaptations, endorsing the Kazan/Brooks clash of theatrical style and predictable images.
Castle Keep
handles William Eastlake’s inventive novel straight, but only to simplify it. Above all,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
glamorizes Horace McCoy’s pungent novella. Difficult to make a dull film of a marathon dance contest, and all credit to the conventional excellence of Jane Fonda, Gig Young, and Susannah York, but McCoy is apocalyptic and contemptuous of society, whereas the film is a shallow account of pointless energy. The brutal flash-forwards of McCoy’s original should chop in and out like a butcher’s axe. In the film they are made studied and mournful with pretty photography.