Polanski, Huston, the Tenant and stuff

Roman Polanski didn't seem worth thinking about. He's in France, they aren't going to extradite him and there's nothing anybody can do about it. I think it's weird how many people wanted him to come back to the United States. We're getting along fine without him.

But now the French have turned on him.

You know, long ago, my sister told me she hated John Huston. She claimed that she read an interview where he said he was just like the guy he played in Chinatown. It wasn't true. Huston has said that he didn't especially like himself as an actor and that his performance in Chinatown was the only one he was really pleased with. I don't know how my sister managed to twist that the way she did.

But now I wonder about Polanski and the horrible little man he played in the movie. Was this is true personality?

Or maybe he was like the guy in The Tenant.

The time I went to see The Tenant

I was in high school. It was Friday or Saturday night so I walked over to the university to see what movies were playing. I decided to see The Pawnbroker. I read a description of it and thought, okay, so I walked over there.

There were four different classrooms where they showed movies on weekends. I walked to the wrong one and went to The Tenant instead. It had a one noun title so I didn't realize I had made a mistake.

"Which one is the Holocaust survivor?" I kept wondering.

I didn't know who Polanski was, but I thought he was too young to have been one, although he actually was.

I sat there struggling through half the movie trying to reconcile what I saw on the screen with what I read on the poster for a different movie. Finally, I gave up and relaxed and watched uncritically and found it really creepy.

Years later, I recommended it to someone else. They rented it and watched and told me later that they were cursing me the whole time because they didn't care for it.

I should have paid closer attention and maybe watched it a couple of times before offering an opinion, but that was in the days before home video, so you could only see it once and come to snap judgement.

Oh, and I recommended it to another person who didn't remember what I said. I recommended The Tenant and the French movie Forbidden Games, and she mixed the two up and rented Polanski's Diary of Forbidden Dreams and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.