Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, February 21, 2009 1:52:29 PM
Over thirty years ago, Roman Polanski fled the US after being
charged with statutory rape. The victim, a 13-year-old girl, accused
the then-44 film director of forced sexual intercourse and sodomy.
After getting generous terms of release during the pretrial procedures,
he fled to France in 1978 and has never returned. A Los Angeles court
convicted Polanski in absentia.
Last year, a documentary attempted to spin the case to make Polanski
the victim of a judicial conspiracy, rather than the fugitive from
justice that he is. In Salon, Bill Wyman takes aim at the auteurs behind Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and the Hollywood whitewash of one of their own
In some ways, it should hardly surprise anyone that the film industry
would try to rehabilitate Polanski. His annual appearances at Cannes
always come with the wistful reminder that he cannot travel to the US
or practically anywhere else without fear of extradition. These
usually neglect to mention Polanski’s conviction, and also the brutal
nature of the crime against a girl who could barely be called
adolescent. Wyman, though, doesn’t spare readers
It’s equally a drag to include the fact that Mumia Abu Jamal shot
and killed a Philadelphia policeman into the protests against his
execution, but that’s also fairly relevant. Hollywood has for decades
championed the criminals over the victims when its politics coincide
with the former rather than the latter. That explains, for instance,
the massively epic biopic that Steven Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro
are making about Che Guevara, the murderous revolutionary and terrorist.
But Polanski is more than just a sympathetic figure to Hollywood for
his politics. He was one of their stars, in the advent of independent
directors, mentioned in the same breath as people like Scorcese,
Frankenheimer, Malick, and others. Unlike Mumia and Che, Polanski
belonged to Hollywood — and Hollywood used its power of propaganda to
turn Polanski into the victim, rather than the villain, in this play.
Read all of Wyman’s article; it’s definitely a keeper.