Daily Mail, Thursday, March 5, 2020^ Page 19Why boycott
Polanski’s
new film? It’s
a sad truth
that wicked
men can make
great art
F
amous Polish film director
Roman Polanski is a very
wicked man. or, to be more
precise, 43 years ago he did
a very wicked thing.
By his own admission, he engaged in
unlawful sexual intercourse with a
1 3-year-old girl, samantha Jane Gailey,
now Geimer, in Los angeles. she claimed
in court that she had been drugged,
raped, and forced to submit to various
sexual perversions.
Polanski denied he had done these
things but, following a plea bargain,
confessed to unlawful sexual intercourse.
When he feared he was about to be flung
into jail, he fled the u.s. He has not
returned there for fear of arrest.
This is the background to a huge furore
over a film he has directed, an officer
and a spy, which is based on a novel
by the distinguished British author
Robert Harris.
It tells the true story of the treatment of
Jewish army officer alfred Dreyfus, who
was persecuted by the French authorities
towards the end of the 19th century.
By most accounts, it is a brilliant film. It
won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019
Venice Film Festival. Last week, Polanski,
who is 86, was awarded the prize for
b e s t d i r e c t o r a t t h e C e s a r s , t h e
French ‘oscars’.
Whereupon leading actresses walked
out in protest, and the ceremony’s female
host refused to continue. one star, adele
Haenel, who is known as the face of the
French #meToo movement, sarcastically
shouted ‘Long live paedophilia, bravo
paedophilia’ before storming out.
my sympathies are entirely with those
who couldn’t stomach the feting of
Polanksi. They were being asked to
celebrate the success of a convicted —
p l u s a b s c o n d i n g a n d s e e m i n g l y
unrepentant — rapist. I think I might
Stephen Glover
have walked out too.
B
uT expressing one’s
personal feelings is
one thing. Trying to
have a film banned is
another. That is effectively
what has happened to an
officer and a spy as a result of
pressure from movements such
as #meToo.
a l t h o u g h t h e f i l m h a s
b e e n s e e n b y m o r e t h a n
1 .5 million people in France, and
by many others throughout
Europe, it will not be shown in
Britain, america, Ireland or
anywhere else in the English-
speaking world.
Its distributors apparently
fear a backlash if it is shown in
these countries, where feminist
lobby groups are more powerful
than they are on the Continent.
one could justly say that the
film has been boycotted.
Is this right? I don’t think so.
It seems to me there is a
(^) distinction between on the one
h a n d e x p r e s s i n g p e r s o n a l
di s t a s t e f o r Po l a n s k i a n d
electing not to see his film, and
on the other hand stopping
everyone else from watching it.
The sins of an artist should
not be confused with the work
of art which he or she produces.
It is a hard truth to swallow
that many proficient, and even
great, artists are bad people —
sometimes very bad.
Let me offer some examples.
about two decades ago, there
was a huge controversy about
the artist Eric Gill, and in
pa r t i c u l a r h i s b e a u t i f u l l y
wrought stations of The Cross,
which adorn the nave of the
Roman Catholic Westminster
Cathedral in London.
Gill, who died in 1940, was a
devout Catholic. But long after
his death he was outed as a
serial paedophile who sexually
abused two of his daughters
a n d h a d a n i n c e s t u o u s
relationship with one of his
sisters. He even experimented
with bestiality.
How, it was asked, could Gill
be celebrated by the Church?
The uncomfortable fact was
that a man who was indubitably
a dangerous sexual deviant
had, in his stone carvings of
Christ’s Passion, movingly
portrayed the Divine.
During the controversy I went
along to Westminster Cathedral.
I f o u n d , a d m i t t e d l y a f t e r
something of a struggle, that I
was able to put the enormous
human failings of Eric Gill out
of my mind and appreciate his
wonderful carvings as works of
high religious art.
If the works of bad men — they
are usually men — were banned,
there would be many vacant
spaces in our art galleries, and
a lot of empty shelves in our
remaining public libraries.
The wonderful Italian painter
Caravaggio was often violent,
and, in 1606, killed a man in a
brawl. He fled after being
convicted of murder. Like Eric
Gill, he produced works of great
religious art.
Pa u l G a u g u i n , t h e 1 9 t h -
ce n t u r y F r e n c h p o s t -
(^) i m p r e s s i o n i s t w h o s e f i n e
portraits were exhibited recently
at the National Gallery in
London, took three under-age
wives in Tahiti, and infected
them all with syphilis. He
eventually died from syphilitic
complications at the age of 54.
Writers are sometimes no
better. The 16th century play-
wright Christopher marlowe
w a s f r e q u e n t l y i n t r o u b l e
with the law before being
stabbed to death in a brawl in a
Deptford pub.
Charles Dickens anatomised
unforgettable rogues in his
magnificent novels. In his own
life he dumped his wife Catherine
( w h o h a d b o r n e h i m t e n
children) to take up with the
young actress Ellen Ternan. He
even publicly accused Catherine
of having a ‘mental disorder’.
a nd s o i t g o e s o n. T h e
american novelist Norman
mailer stabbed his wife with a
penknife in 1960, and nearly
killed her. His compatriot, the
great modernist poet Ezra
Pound, was a fascist and a
supporter of mussolini, as well
as an anti-semite.
Nor are composers exempt
from moral failings. German
Richard Wagner was a virulent
an t i -s e m i t e w h o s e v i e w s
influenced adolf Hitler and
the Nazis. Is his music any
less sublime?
Whether a wholly wicked
person could produce a great
work of art may be seriously
doubted since art demands a
high degree of human empathy,
of which very bad people
seem incapable.
But it is surely incontrovertible
that many great artists, whose
works we revere, have been no
better than the rest of us, and
sometimes a lot worse.
and yet I suspect that most
people can see that we should
try to appreciate a work of art
without dwelling on the moral
imperfections of the person
who produced it.
so why boycott Polanski’s
film? I admit there is a difficulty
in that he is still on this earth.
T h e s i n s o f d e a d a r t i s t s
inevitably recede into history,
and are bound to bother us less
than those of living ones.
T
HE fact that Roman
Polanski has not paid
any legal^ penalty for
his crime, and that
h i s v i c t i m i s a l i v e a n d
presumably still affected by
the attack (though she says
sh e h a s f o r g i v e n h i m ) i s
undoubtedly troubling.
I certainly think he should
return to the u.s. and finally
accept his punishment. But I
should be astounded if he did.
after all these years, he appears
to have convinced himself that
his crime was less heinous than
it was — if a crime at all.
attempts by him to compare
his own treatment with the^
terrible punishments meted
out to Dreyfus, the hero of his
film — the poor man spent five
years on Devil’s Island in
French Guiana and another
seven trying to clear his name
— h a v e u n d e r s t a n d a b l y
infuriated Polanski’s critics.
abominate the man, or his
act, but let Roman Polanski’s
film be watched — that is my
message. It is simply one of the
mysteries of life that bad men
can produce good, sometimes
great, art.
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Yes, Roman Polanski is morally repugnant, but
should we be denied his new film?
WATCH STEPHEN GLOVER
WATCH STEPHEN GLOVER
Yes, Roman Polanski is morally repugnant,
but should we be denied his new film?
WATCH
STEPHEN GLOVER
Yes, Roman Polanski is morally repugnant,
but should we be denied his new film?
WATCH
STEPHEN GLOVER
Yes, Roman Polanski is morally
repugnant, but should we be
denied his new film?
aFTER ‘Glovegate’ at the
Palace, Hm will not be
happy to learn that
coronavirus fears might
prompt the cancellation of Emperor
Naruhito of Japan’s state visit in may. The
Queen does not like her diary disrupted.
There have only been three state visits
since 2017 and two have been problematic.
Donald Trump’s visit was pencilled in and
rubbed out of the schedule several times
and King Felipe’s tour was postponed
twice because of political woes at home in
spain and abroad.
MENTION of the sacking of ITN’s Alastair
Stewart over his angry ape tweet proved
less popular with CEO Anna Mallett than
advice on the coronavirus. In her first
town hall address to staff yesterday she
cited confidentiality as her reason for not
explaining what happened to Alastair,
adding: ‘It is has been a difficult time for
all of us.’ Mostly for Stewart methinks.
KaTE’s enthusiastic sipping of a foaming
stein of Guinness in Dublin contrasts
with her grandmother-in-law the Queen’s
reaction when offered a pint of stout
during her visit to the same venue 11
years ago. Hm briefly stared at the stout
with a ‘will I or won’t I?’ expression
before moving on, leaving the pint intact.
FLEABAG’s hot priest
Andrew Scott, pic-
tured, doesn’t cut
the mustard with
designer Tom Ford,
who muses: ‘He’s a
great actor and
he’s very attractive
in a quirky way but
would I use him for
Tom Ford? Well, I’m
not too sure his appeal would transfer to
two-dimensional print.’
WENDY Craig, receiving her CBE from a
gloved Queen this week, has long
remained tight-lipped about her brief
fling with the late sir John mortimer,
which resulted in son Ross. When it
finally emerged in 2004 that Ross was the
Rumpole creator’s offspring, rather than
of her late musician husband Jack
Bentley, Craig, now 85, remarked: ‘It is
just not something that I want to talk
about... and it’s not something I will ever
want to talk about.’ mortimer himself
said of fathering Ross, born in 1962: ‘It
was the sixties and we were all a lot more
excitable then.’
FORMER tennis world No 1 Billie Jean King,
a heroine to many women, says she is
‘thrilled’ to become a Barbie, the doll
seen by many as an affront to the modern
liberated woman. King joins such women
as Florence Nightingale and Ella Fitzger-
ald in Mattel’s line-up of ‘Inspiring
Women’ Barbie dolls. King famously took
on male tennis player Bobby Riggs in a
match dubbed the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ in
which she trounced him.
JaWs star Richard Dreyfuss, 72, labelled
his What about Bob? co-star Bill murray
a ‘drunken bully’. Now he says he’ll write
to tell him: ‘as far as I’m concerned, it’s
over.’ Will grumpy Bill, 69, reciprocate?
LORNA Clarke, the BBC’s first controller of
pop, emails staff seeking new radio sta-
tion managers: ‘Please cascade to your
teams as appropriate.’ With W1A gobble-
dygook like that, it’s no wonder Lorna is
tipped for the top at the BBC.
Ephraim
Hardcastle
Email: [email protected]