...for once, the interfering director got it right, and the author--Robert Towne--had it wrong. But Polanski--a Holocaust survivor, and husband of a murdered wife--he *knew* how this film had to end. And it was only during that time in Hollywood, the true Golden Age of movies--1965-75--that brief era when American movies were made for grown-ups--when a film this shattering, with an ending like that, could have been made. Imagine some corporate suit in Hollywood OKing that ending today!

Polanski seemed to be followed by a tragic angel all his life. Jerzy Kosinski's magical novel, The Painted Bird, is supposedly based on Polanski's ordeal as a castaway child on his own trying to survive in Nazi Poland. He learned to act by posing as a Pole so no one would know he was Jewish. Polanski's own autobiography, Roman, long out of print, is one of the most unbelievable stories I've ever read and a very convincing defense of the charges that led to his exile.