Altogether, the book is a bad fit for Polanski. Unlike Oliver, Polanski is a Jew, who as a terrorized child survived the Nazi Holocaust (both his parents were deported to concentration camps where his mother died). Then as a young man and budding artist he survived the Communist domination of his homeland. (Later, already an international celebrity, he survived the butchering of his wife and unborn son in the Manson Family killings in 1969.) Knife in the Water (1962), his first feature, was made in the state-controlled Polish film industry and shows that Polanski knows how to spin a romance, a bleak one. In the movie a handsome young hitchhiker stops the car of a successful journalist and his younger wife by stepping into the middle of the road. The couple is on their way to the marina for a weekend of sailing, and though annoyed with the hitchhiker they invite him to come along. On the boat the older man is the captain, of course, but he also keeps trying to prove, with increasing sadism, that he's more of a man than the hitchhiker, who can't swim. The wife senses something more responsive in the young man but is not free to express a preference. The gamesmanship escalates until the hitchhiker is pitched overboard, but the kid has some tricks of his own it turns out.

Polanski shoots this pessimistic tale in a silvery-velvety black-and-white, and brings to it an unusually knowing attitude, especially since its appeal is essentially adolescent. (The young man remains nameless, a fill-in-the-blank for us to identify with in the games the older man keeps rigging on his own turf.) Knife in the Water suggests that the older generation of morally adaptable survivors provides the only possible role model for a young man, if he plans to function to any degree in that authoritarian society. A young man will either become like his corrupt elders, and presumably get a trophy woman of his own, or drown. The best he can hope for is to beat the tough older men at their own game, but that's still losing. To Polanski, surviving in such a society, in such a world, is not the same as winning, and you get this feeling from his movies even after he left Poland--Rosemary's Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974), Death and the Maiden (1994), and The Pianist (2002), for instance.

Despite Dickens's optimism, Polanski isn't any sunshinier filming Oliver Twist, and the maddening thing is not just that we hardly need another movie adaptation of it (it's toward the bottom of Dickens's accomplishments and has been filmed umpteen times), but that there are other Dickens books that haven't been given the major movie treatment that would better suit Polanski's temperament. Barnaby Rudge, for instance, with its startlingly cinematic depiction of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, would have been a far more logical follow-up to The Pianist than Oliver Twist, especially given the anti-Semitism at the heart of the allegory in the latter, which Polanski can't redeem or shoot straight, but merely covers up. And Our Mutual Friend has many darker characters and a more disturbingly uncanny landscape, including a Thames so full of dead bodies it spawns a minor industry of recovering them, a mound of garbage believed to contain a fortune, and a taxidermist's and bone-articulator's shop where a man goes to inquire after his own amputated leg.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog