Warsaw horror

Roman Polanski's The Pianist has been hailed as the filmmaker's long-awaited return to the glorious 1960s and '70s, when he made such films as Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and especially Chinatown. This analysis is flawed in two respects. First, though he has been working in Europe for the past 25 years--after jumping bail and fleeing the United States on a morals charge--Polanski has continued to turn out small but quirky films filled with his always-alluring visual style. (I especially liked his bizarre 1991 effort, the shipbound romantic thriller Bitter Moon.)

Second, while The Pianist may be the biggest-budget movie that Polanski has tackled in a long time, and while it features a storyline that is both hugely dramatic and close to the filmmaker's heart, it falls short of what we have come to expect from the 69-year-old Polanski since he wowed the international film community in 1962 with Knife in the Water.

In 1939, 360,000 Jews lived in Warsaw--about a third of the capital's total population. By 1945 only 20 were left. The Pianist is based on the memoirs of one of them, Wladyslaw Szpilman, a famous pianist who miraculously survived the Warsaw ghetto and somehow managed to avoid the trains transporting Jews to the Treblinka concentration camp. His story is inspiring both for its courage and ingenuity, and the book is an especially vivid read since he wrote it soon after he was rescued by Russian troops in 1945.