Sharon in "Eye of the Devil" or "13"...

I found this quote in an old article. Sorry I don't know what article it was. I think it came out of a British Magazine from 1965. It just had a short item about her:

"Astoundingly photogenic, infinitely curvaceous, Sharon Tate is one of the most smashing young things to hit Hollywood in a long time!" This is what is being said all over Europe right now about the young actress Sharon Tate now shooting her first film "Eye of the Devil."

I tried to do some screen photos of her in the film. I wish they were better but still, I hope you enjoy them.

More from Sheliah Wells...

Here's another article I found. It had to be translated.

Constanze Magazine (German) Dec. 15, 1970

"She Liked All People."

"She looked self-confident and well-balanced. Finally, she seemed to find herself," says Sheliah Wells, the 26 year-old-actress and for six years Sharon Tate's best friend, who has tears in her eyes when she speaks with Constanze about the murder in Bel Air.

"I do not understand how Sharon could get involved with these hippies. But she saw in every person only the good."

In the sitting room of her house in Laurel Canyon, from where one can see Hollywood the elegant Sheilah sits with us. In her arm she holds her eight month-old baby, Amanda Tate.

"Sharon was Amanda's Godmother," says Sheila as she holds her baby near. "And the baby's middle name is named after Sharon, Amanda Tate."

Shelia strokes her baby's hair. She remembers: "Sharon loved children above everything. Actually, she loved all people. In all the time I knew her she never had a bad word to say about anyone. On the contrary: If I sometimes complained about something someone said to me with Sharon, she'd always say: ' I am sure they did not mean it that way.' She was a really good person. She couldn't say no to anyone."

However, this trait could get Sharon into trouble as Sheila also adds: "All these people where always around Sharon ...and I have often said to her that she should be a little more careful in her contact with them. About four weeks before her death Sharon visited me. She said that someone gave a birthday party at her house yet she hardly knew anyone who attended."

Sheila goes on to add: "I want to make one more point about how Sharon could not hurt anyone's feelings. Abigail Folger and Voyteck Frykowski who lived in Sharon's house had drapped an American flag over the sofa in the sitting room." How could any true American take the holiest good of the nation--the American flag and do this as a joke was how Sheila reacted. She asked Sharon, who was educated as an officer's daughter, how she could tolerate this crime to the flag. "Do you know what she answered?" In Sheilah's voice we hear a surprise, when she says what Sharon's reaction was. "She said: ' Yes, I also do not agree with it. But I may spoil Gibby and Voyteck's fun if I say anything.' "

There were also drugs being taken around her by the Millionairess and her Polish lover (Abigail Folger and Voyteck Frykowski). Although most were suppose to be of the harmless kind. Sheila nods: "I remember an evening in July, about three weeks before the murder. I was with Sharon in the bedroom watching television. In the sitting room on the sofa lay Gibby and Frykowski. Sharon pointed at the both and said sighing: 'These people ... I do not understand this, they are always stoned. ' "

But wasn't Sharon known to also partake in drugs? The Hollywood Reporter stated that Sharon had tried LSD and other drugs. Sheila twitches her shoulders. "I can say nothing in addition. With me Sharon has never spoken about these things. Maybe, she has tried out marijuana, but everybody here in Hollywood has. But I am definitely sure: Since she expected the baby, she did not take anything. Sharon was so glad, so incredibly excited about her child, she would do absolutely nothing that might affect or hurt him."

Sheila believes, like so many people in Hollywood, that Sharon was a victim of her own kindness. Because she was not able to make a distinction between friends and enemies, she left herself vunerable.

Of their marriage, Shelia says, the Polanskis "always welcomed you in. Sharon always made everything like a fairytale. They educated themselves together with each other."

"Screenland" - November 1969

"Screenland" - November 1969
Interview with Sheliah Wells by Marcia Borie

Sharon Tate
"She Was So Generous, So Trusting, She Never Shut Her Door To Anyone."

They tell you that Sharon Tate was involved in a sex cult. Or a drug cult. Maybe it was the hippies. Or maybe it was witchcraft. Whatever-the Sharon Tate of the headlines is a little bit lurid and very far out.

But somewhere there was a real Sharon Tate. What happened to her during her years in Hollywood? Why had she ended tragically, so grotesquely? What was Sharon Tate really like? We turned to her closest girlfriend, actress Sheliah Wells, for the answers.

We think this exclusive interview is the truest, most loving thing you'll ever read about Sharon Tate.

"Sharon Tate was my best friend. Once, we were roommates. She introduced me to my husband. She was the godmother to my baby daughter who is named for her.

"In the six years time that I knew her, she never said an unkind word about anyone.

"In all the thousands of words that have been printed about her since her death, none really told about my friend - about the Sharon Tate I knew.

"We were introduced six years ago by a man who was my agent as well as hers, Hal Gefsky. We got along so well that the first week we met we decided to try and find an apartment together. And that's how it all started - our friendship.

"The place we shared was a nice one-bedroom apartment on Clark Drive. It was tastefully decorated in early actress. And there were all these people always dropping in. Sharon really loved being hospitable.

"From the beginning, my friends used to tease me. 'How can you wake up in the morning and look at that face of hers?' It was a good question. Sharon was so over whelmingly, so incredibly beautiful that anyone not knowing her might think it took a lot to live with such a beauty. But you see that was another thing about Sharon. With all her beauty, everyone loved her. I never heard anyone say a bad word about her, not even another actress. And in this town that's not only a rarity, it's an impossibility!

"I think the greatest thing I could say about Sharon was that she was for real. I mean really for real. Like I said, I haven't heard any stories or news reports that tell about Sharon the way she really was. Even I, who loved her, find it hard to say what I mean so that she doesn't come out sounding all spun sugary. Sharon was the type of a girl who had no defenses, no pretenses, she was just herself all the time. Like if a friend said, 'Hey, that brand of toothpaste you're using is no good. It hurts the enamel.' Most people would answer back, 'Well, maybe you think so, but my dentist recommended it, so there.' You know, on the defensive. But if you said the same thing to Sharon, she'd say, 'Oh really? No kidding? Gee, bad for the enamel? Then I guess I'd better change brands.' It was this incredible talent of hers for believing everybody, for being so easily persuaded, that may have eventually done her more harm than good.

"She was so trusting, so eager to accept people as they were, so generous. Why, there were times, this past year or so, when a whole bunch of people would be at her house and she'd come up to me and say, 'Hey, I wonder who so and so is.' Just like it wasn't her house and she wasn't entitled to know. Sharon never shut her door to anyone.

"Anyway, we shared an apartment for a year. Then Sharon left. For a while she dated Jay Sebring and then she went off to Europe to make a film. She met Roman over there.

"You know something funny. I've never seen Sharon on film. I know that sounds strange but I just never did, even as close as we were - or perhaps because we were so close. It's like if a friend said to you, 'I did something yesterday and it wasn't very good, so don't tell.' If you were a close friend, you wouldn't. Well, that's how Sharon felt about her movies. Always she'd tell me, 'Oh, Sheliah, the movie I just made was so awful, don't bother going to see it.' And because I had such love and respect for
our friendship, I never did.

"As far as Sharon and her relationships with people, she always had a way of finding such goodness in others. If someone hurt her, she'd say, "Oh, Sheliah, I'm sure they didn't mean to.' She'd always make excuses for others. Sharon was just totally loving and also totally vulnerable. She was just a remarkable person, she never gave up on anybody.

"Sharon used to say that Wende Wagner and I were her two closest friends. Wende is married to Jim Mitchum. She's a darling girl. Both of us, I think, represented a kind of security and stability that Sharon never seemed to find. We were her touch with the real world. Both Wende and I make up our minds to do a thing and then go ahead and do it. But Sharon was always so easily persuaded, so vulnerable. I keep using that word but it's one that fits her so well. Vulnerable.

"There's one thing some people have wondered about. Whether or not the baby could have been saved if the police had come in time. I don't know about that, but all I can tell you is that Sharon wanted that baby more than anything else in the world. That baby belonged to her. Now he will always be with her. They will have a headstone together. It will say: Sharon Tate Polanski and Baby Son Paul Richard Polanski. Yes, they gave the baby a name. He was named Paul for Sharon's father, and Richard for Roman's father.

"As far as Sharon's marriage was concerned, all I can tell you is that Sharon and Roman were in love. They were a combination of beauty and genius. She tried so hard to please him.

"You know it's funny, but all the time we were roommates, Sharon and I never went out on a double date. Sharon liked one kind of boy, I liked another. In fact, all the time we shared an apartment Sharon never tried to fix me up on a date. Then one day, after she'd moved out, I was really surprised when she called and wanted to introduce me to someone. She had been working on a film called 'Don't Make Waves' with Robert Webber. They'd had lunch together with an actor friend, Fred Beir. Suddenly Robert and Sharon decided that Fred and I would be perfect for each other. Fred and I fell in love on our first date. We were married in January, 1967. Sharon and Roman were married a year later, in January, 1968. My baby, Amanda Tate, was born March 16, 1969. And five weeks later, Fred and I started to have serious problems.

"Although Sharon was in Europe at the time, she heard about Freddie and me. So when she came home, just three weeks before she died, Sharon called Freddie and invited him to come up to her house. He went over and she talked to him. That was Sharon. She was always going out on a limb for everyone. Everyone but herself.

"There was an ethereal quality about her. She had this thing I sometimes wished I'd had, even though I knew that eventually it might be bad for me. Do you understand? She had this kind of beauty and fragility, and you just knew she was bound to get hurt because of it. But still you couldn't help but admiring that quality in her. She was just such a special person.

"Early on the night she was murdered, my phone rang. It was Sharon. She asked me to come over. I told her I couldn't, that I was having a few people in for dinner. Then she said, 'Can I come over to your house?' I said, sure, of course, come on over. But a little while later she called and said she wasn't coming. She was too tired, she said. She'd decided just to go over to a local drive-in and get a hamburger. I told her that was silly. In the time it took her to drive to the restaurant she could come over to my place. And I asked her to spend the night. But Sharon said no. She had to do her hair. She thought she'd better stay home. She was so lonely, she said, she missed Roman and she was so tired. She decided not to come.

"The next morning my phone rang.

"It was a girlfriend of mine named Mary Ann Gordon calling. She had met Sharon and she knew how close we were. She just said, 'How are you?' But I could tell she had been crying. I said, 'I'm fine. What's the matter?' She couldn't talk. She handed the phone to her boyfriend. And he told me.

"I couldn't believe it. I just hung up and I was totally in shock.

"Fred and I went to the funeral together. When the day was over, we talked about our problems and discovered that they were nothing compared with our love for each other. Without saying it in so many words, both of us realized how precious life together was. And how precious our baby was to us. It was Sharon's death which brought us closer. It was almost as if, in death, she was telling us all how much it meant to be able to live.

"I never really stopped to think about it until now, but for the past six years so many good things have happened to me were because of my friendship with Sharon. She was always there. When I went to the hospital to have the baby, Sharon was the first person to come see me. She was so thrilled when I asked her to be the godmother and when she knew the baby's middle name was for her.

"And when I got home, Sharon sent so many things for the baby. Come, I'll show you." Sheliah took me into Amanda Tate's nursery. She pointed to the mobile over the crib, a big candy clown standing on a tiny white table, a stuffed dog. "There's just so much of Sharon here." She opened the bottom drawer of the baby's dresser and pulled out a tiny yellow-flowered outfit. She took it. 'See it has bells on it that jingle. Sharon brought that over just two weeks ago. She got it for the baby in Europe.

"The same day she brought the baby's dress, she came loaded down with swatches of fabrics. She was decorating her own baby's nursery. She wanted me to look at the colors she had picked out. She had selected red, white and blue.

"She was just so anxious that everything be right for her baby. That's all she talked about. She used to kid about it. She's say, 'Won't it be terrible if the baby is born with my brains and Roman's looks!' Then we'd giggle"

The red, white and blue nursery colors reminded this reporter of reading about the murder scene and how there was an American flag draped over Sharon's sofa. I asked about it. Sheliah nodded. "Yes, it's true, there was a flag draped over the back of the sofa. It had been there ever since Voityck and Gibby (Abigail Folger) moved in. It belonged to them. Whenever I went over to Sharon's and I'd see the flag there, I'd tell her it wasn't right. She'd nod and say she knew, but that Gibby and Voityck thought it was funny.

"That was Sharon. She knew that the others were making fun of the flag, of the establishment. She didn't go along with it, but felt she might hurt them if she took it away.

"That's what I mean about Sharon being so impressionable, so vulnerable, so easily swayed. She'd just accept people for what they were. She got involved with some very odd types because she thought she could help them. But all the while it was Sharon herself who needed the help.

"You know, in just the last few months Sharon was beginning to come into her own. She never cared about being beautiful. She never even really cared about acting. She just wanted to love and be loved. And have her baby.

"I know that if she'd lived and had the baby everything would have been different for her. Because that is what Sharon really wanted. She was just a little girl from Texas who was so incredibly beautiful that she got swept up in all of the Hollywood nonsense. But all she ever wanted was what every woman wants - a man to love and a baby of her own.

"I can't believe that the murderers knew her. To know Sharon, to really know her, was to love her. There is just no way that anyone who knew her could have hurt her so."

Sheliah picked up little Amanda Tate and walked me to the door. She hugged her baby tight. "You know, Wende Mitchum has a little baby, and I have Amanda, and all Sharon was waiting for was the day when the three of us could bring our babies up together. They would have been friends, close friends. Just like we were."

The Conversations: Michael Mann

I'm pumped to announce that the seventh edition of The Conversations is live at The House Next Door. In this installment, Ed Howard and I discuss the nine signature films of Michael Mann: Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), Miami Vice (2006) and Public Enemies (2009). We exclude 1983's The Keep for reasons mentioned in the discussion.

If you've read any of the Conversations pieces to this point, you know they're not the kind of thing you can easily digest in the 15 minutes when your boss leaves to go get Starbucks. So, fair warning, this is the longest conversation yet. (Sorry!) However, since we go through Mann's career film by film, it's the kind of thing you should be able to enjoy in installments. I realize we're testing the limits of how much people will read online, but I hope you'll take the time to go through the entire piece, or at least read about the films that interest you. I think it's worth it.

As always, Ed and I hope that our conversation at The House Next Door is the starting point for a larger discussion. So please check out our Michael Mann piece and add to the conversation by leaving comments at The House Next Door. Tell us what we missed.

Previous Editions of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)
Overlooked - Part I: Undertow (March 2009)
Overlooked - Part II: Solaris (March 2009)
Star Trek (May 2009)
Werner Herzog (May 2009)
Errol Morris (July 2009)

The London Sunday Times Article...

This is a great article written by Peter Evans who knew both Sharon and Roman.

Sufferings of the great seducer

He may have been an obsessive womaniser, but morality drove Polanski into a libel suit, says Peter Evans

July 24, 2005

‘Deep down I regard myself as a moral man,” the film director Roman Polanski once told me. “But morality is too boring unless you also have a capacity for recklessness in your makeup; morality is only bearable if people believe that it could fly out of the window at any moment. Perhaps that is why I always sleep with the windows open.”

It is this deliberate sense of provocation, this risqué, self-incriminating humour, that has got the diminutive 71-year-old into so much trouble down the years — and led him to the High Court in London last week to sue Vanity Fair, the glossy US magazine, for libel. In July 2002 it had printed a “quite monstrous” allegation about how he had attempted to seduce the Scandinavian model Beatte Telle on his way to the funeral of Sharon Tate, his eight-month-pregnant wife who was murdered by the Charles Manson “family” in 1969.

The murder was a cause celebre then and remains one of America’s most notorious crimes. The sense of shock and grief at her killing, and the murder of four of her friends who were partying at the Polanski’s Bel Air home (Polanski was in Europe), sent shock waves through Hollywood in that last year of the Swinging Sixties.

Nobody was more shocked than Polanski.

A few weeks earlier I had had dinner with him and Tate at Mario and Franco’s Tiberio restaurant in London. The following day Tate was to fly to Los Angeles, where she was to have the baby, while Polanski headed for Paris to discuss a new movie. They were the Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford of their time. Cool, nomadic, talented and nicely shocking. I had written a profile of them for Goodbye Baby & Amen, the book I had written on London in the Sixties, with pictures by David Bailey.

Tate wanted to know what I had written; I told her that she would have to wait until the book was published that December. Bailey had photographed them in a fond embrace, both naked to the waist. It was a daring picture for its time, and Polanski’s idea.

“Anyone who is interested in the history of the Sixties and the permissive society must consider the Polanskis,” I had written. “They knew very well the excitement, the miseries, the happiness and the fear of the times.”

They helped to demolish the Hollywood image of what movie stardom was about. They had pursued the panaceas of the era from marijuana to LSD and knew the score. Polanski took three trips, two of them bad. Tate said that it had “opened the world to me. I was like a very tight knot, too embarrassed to dance, to speak even. But I could never touch it again. Now I think it would destroy me”.

There was an honesty that was almost naive about them. Together they believed they were challenging the citadels of censorship and cant. From Poland — his mother had died in Auschwitz — Polanski was especially sensitive about a person’s right to freedom.

Tate wanted to be like him. “I wish I had the tolerance to let everybody have complete freedom,” she said. “To be able to take a man home and make love and enjoy it without some lurking puritanical guilt interrupting the pleasure . . . Mentally it’s what I want, but emotionally it is more difficult to take.”

If she was under her husband’s spell, it was where she wanted to be. It was also plain that Polanski was totally in love with his wife.

It is also true that he was, and would always be, as unfaithful to her as she would never be unfaithful to him. Yet it was a happy marriage. “We have a good arrangement,” Tate once told me solemnly. “Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him.”

Laurence Harvey, the actor, told me the night after Tate was murdered: “This could destroy Roman. Marriage vows mean nothing to him but few men have adored a woman as much as he adored Sharon.”

The truth was, Polanski loved seducing women — air stewardesses, actresses, models, pretty waitresses — but he loved Tate. He loved her beauty, her American style, her sense of fun and enthusiasm for life and her eagerness to follow his lead. His power over women was something others had noticed; Kenneth Tynan, the critic, saw in Polanski’s films this ability to “impose” his will on others.

He saw nothing wrong in making love in the afternoon to a woman he had just met — although “making love” is a term he would have considered dishonest — and going home to Tate that evening. “She is the best wife and the best lover a man could ever have,” he told a friend, explaining his decision to become a father in the summer of 1969. This moral dichotomy was, and probably still is, at the root of his perplexing personality. He once told me that he had never deceived a woman in his life; women are too good at deceiving themselves, he said.

There is no doubt that Polanski, a puckish-looking man with a quick smile and a quicker mind, has always known how to get a woman into bed — and never regretted doing so. It is a trait that many people condemn although their criticism never bothered him. “I do what I do, I don’t have time for what others think,” he said. “If my honesty upsets some people, that is their problem, not mine.”

In court last week extracts were played from a lie-detector test that Polanski gave to police after his wife’s murder. He had been asked if he had since dated any airline stewardesses. “Not dated, I have seen a couple,” he replied. “I would not call it dating.” Asked if he had “taken them to lunch or something like that”, he answered bluntly: “I f***** them.”

Yet I was not surprised when he decided, against all apparent odds and all rational reason, to sue Vanity Fair for suggesting that he had tried to seduce a woman en route to Tate’s funeral. For according to his own curious code of honour, it was not his reputation that he was defending: it was the integrity of his memory of Tate.

Only those close to Polanski at the time understand how distraught he was at his wife’s death. In court Mia Farrow, who starred in his biggest commercial success, Rosemary’s Baby, a film about the resonance of evil, testified to his frame of mind the night he allegedly tried to seduce Telle in Elaine’s, a fashionable New York restaurant, only days after Tate and their unborn son were murdered.

“Of this I can be sure — of his frame of mind when we were there, of what we talked about, of his utter sense of loss, of despair and bewilderment and shock and love — a love that he had lost,” said Farrow. John Kelsey-Fry, his QC, spoke of his “utter grief . . . a man unravelled with grief”.

In 1978, nine years after her death and at the peak of his success following the acclaim of Chinatown, he jumped bail and fled abroad from the charge of having seduced a 13-year-old girl. He has never returned. Now living in Paris and remarried, he won the right to give evidence via video link because of his fear that setting foot in London could result in extradition to the United States. They have not always been happy years or even successful ones. But it is hard to feel pity for a man who has no self-pity, a man who is as cynical and driven as Polanski.

I do feel we should try to understand why he was compelled to put himself through the wringer of an English court of law where his morals would be exposed for all the world to witness. His morals — judged by ordinary standards — were, he knew only too well, going into court, where he was most vulnerable and where Tom Shields, QC, counsel for the magazine, would go for him hard.

And he did. “This law knows of no rules — only violations of civilised conduct which, it appears, can be readily excused,” Shields told the court. “As to whether Mr Polanski’s reputation is capable of being damaged, sadly, we would say, it is beyond repair.” Moreover, Polanski should not receive damages because his reputation had been ruined by his promiscuous past. It must have been painful even for Polanski to hear the truth about his promiscuous past expressed so brutally and frankly. But he did not flinch, at least not outwardly. For this, he knew, was the story of his life. A life he had always lived by his own rules.

“The thing you have to know about me is that I am a survivor first — a film-maker second,” I remember him telling me that night he, Tate and I had dinner, not long before her murder.

He has won his case and he is walking away with £50,000, but the money was never the point. As he said in a statement after Friday’s verdict, “The memory of my late wife Sharon Tate was at the forefront of my mind in bringing this action.”

Cynics may doubt this. Those who know him know that he was speaking nothing but the truth.

Running to Stand Still: The Hurt Locker

“War is a drug.” This is the boldface quote that precedes our journey into The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s film about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team working in Iraq in 2004. As generalizations about the psychological effects of combat go, this observation, from former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, might not be a truism exactly, but it’s close; it passes the sniff test even before Bigelow spends 130 minutes establishing its accuracy. Alas, tacked onto the end of Hedges’ larger analysis that “the rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction,” the comparison is perhaps misleading, suggestive that war is a singular drug – like cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine – and thus creates a singular effect. It isn’t and it doesn’t. For one soldier, war is as psychedelic and disorienting as a hit of LSD. For another soldier, it’s as calming and stabilizing as Prozac.

Both effects are on display in The Hurt Locker, but it takes careful examination to spot the difference. The film’s key figure is Jeremy Renner’s Staff Sergeant James, a Michelangelo of bomb defusing who could be easily mistaken for the war genre’s archetypal adrenaline junkie. Wouldn’t that explain why James prefers to dismantle IEDs by hand instead of by remote-controlled robot? Wouldn’t that explain why he sheds his bulky semi-protective blast suit when trying to find the switch on a car bomb? Wouldn’t that explain why he continues to work tirelessly and obsessively even when he’s been given the all-clear to leave the scene? Sure, it could. But look closer. James doesn’t go on missions with the itchy, maniacal cravings of a tweaker in need of a fix. Nor does he seem to have a death wish. Risking his life is just a job requirement in a field in which fear is counterproductive and in which suits of armor provide nothing more than the illusion of security. By accepting that each mission will result in either survival or death, James boils his life down to its essence. War doesn’t give him thrills. It gives him simplicity and clarity.

If this makes James sound different than any character you’ve ever come across in a war movie, that’s because he is, both in action and personality. He’s an enigma. His cocksure I’ll-handle-it swagger at a bomb scene contrasts with his team spirit when his company is pinned down by sniper fire, while his “wild man” reputation suggests a thrill-seeker persona that belies his cool indifference. Fittingly enough, this expert in dismantling bombs turns out to be wired differently than the rest of us, and even James can’t explain what makes him tick. And so it is that The Hurt Locker is never more compelling than when it offers up James for examination. Renner’s performance is appropriately elusive and yet fully formed. We don’t understand James so much as we feel his energy. Renner’s performance lacks the circus style antics (think: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman) and the highlight reel monologue (think: Robert De Niro in Raging Bull) that usually draws Oscar consideration, but his performance is so unwaveringly captivating that for now he’s the frontrunner in the still developing race for Best Actor.

Renner isn’t without strong support. Anthony Mackie, whose performance in Half Nelson defied all the drug-dealer stereotypes, is once again solid as Sergeant Sanborn, the by-the-book soldier irritated by James’ lack of caution. Brian Geraghty, who in Jarhead played a sensitive soldier not cut out for the emotional trauma of combat, plays a similar role here as Specialist Eldridge. (It’s Eldridge who trips on war like it’s a psychedelic, coming away both terrified and, eventually, aroused.) Mixed throughout are some fantastic cameo performances by Guy Pearce, David Morse and Ralph Fiennes; each of them delivering as a cameo should, capitalizing on the audience’s understanding of the actor’s fame to give their character immediate weight. But there’s no question that this is Renner’s movie. Recognizable as a bit player from films like The Assassination of Jesse James and North Country, Renner takes the reins and handles them with the confidence of John Wayne. Like his character, he doesn’t blink at the magnitude of his assignment.

Equally self-assured is Bigelow’s filmmaking. Her steadicam compositions wobble and sway (less in the stomach-turning style of Paul Greengrass than in the increasingly ungrounded manner of Michael Mann), and yet they result in scenes that are strangely serene and focused. The Hurt Locker scores an A for cinematic geography. We always know exactly where the bomb is in relation to the soldiers, allowing us to understand who is in harm’s way and who is protected. The film’s most gripping scene, a standoff with far-away snipers, is remarkable precisely because of our sense of the surroundings; it’s the rare shootout in which we can tell our heroes are being flanked without someone coming right out and saying so. In the scene, which is notable for its patience, Bigelow establishes both the great distance between the shooters (bullets arrive faster than the sounds of gunfire) and the intimacy of the duel (armed with powerful rifles and scopes, the combatants might as well be standing 10 paces apart). More than any film yet about the war in Iraq, this one provides the sharpest sense of “being there,” evoking the relentless heat of the desert, the peril of IED-camouflaging litter and the paranoia of being videotaped by strangers.

But The Hurt Locker isn’t an Iraq War Movie, not in a political sense. There’s no talk here about how these men got to Iraq or whether they should still be there. The film’s focus, like the soldier’s, is on survival alone. This is a personal tale, not an ideological or historical one. Thus, in the final third of the film, when James, driven by rage, goes on two vigilante missions that defy his character’s professionalism, it feels like a betrayal of the film’s very essence. Renner is so assured as James that he makes the scenes work well enough that they are momentarily convincing, but in the big picture they don’t fit, and the film’s otherwise powerful authenticity takes an unnecessary hit as a result. One could reason, of course, that James’ out-of-character behavior is a sign that he’s lost himself to his combat addiction, but that generous reading ignores that James always gets his adrenaline fix in dependable supply. He never has time to develop an itch that needs scratching.

Instead, the drug-like effect of combat explains why James would want to go back to Iraq after his tour is complete. Within the war, James is a “wild man” living by a simple code: to try and dismantle bombs in the way that doesn’t lead to his death. Outside of the war he is anonymous and listless, faced with mundane tasks like shopping for breakfast cereal that provide more complicated arithmetic than the yellow-or-green wire-cutting choices of defusing a bomb, albeit with less consequential results. It’s a credit to Bigelow and Renner that we understand that James finds comfort in the blast zone and chaos outside of it. Alas, this atypical makeup makes it difficult to truly identify with James. If taking the emotion out of his work is the thing that allows James to cozy up to danger, it’s also the thing that makes this film difficult to wrap one’s arms around. Suspenseful, action-packed and thought-provoking, The Hurt Locker is an excellently crafted film that is unfailingly intriguing but somehow a little hollow at the core. War is a drug. I believe that. And this one left me feeling inexplicably numb.

"Sharon... was always there, with him."

I found this wonderful review by Jeremy Richey who is a big Nastassja Kinski fan and wanted to share it with Sharon's fans as it says so much about this great film:

Sharon Tate loved Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the Dubervilles dearly, and related to Hardy’s doomed heroine in an extremely personal way. Shortly before her horrific murder in 1969, Sharon gave her husband, famed director Roman Polanski, a copy of the novel in the hopes that he would film it one day. Ten years after she was the victim of one of the most brutal and senseless crimes of the century, Polanski (who was in the shadow of yet another personal tragedy) released his version of the work his beloved late wife had felt so completely connected to. He would indeed set the mood of the entire film just after the opening credits with the stirring and sweet, "To Sharon", and Tess remains one of the most personal works from one of the world’s great directors.

Polanski had kept Thomas Hardy's influential and important book with him throughout the seventies. After Tate's murder he knew that he had to film the novel in tribute to her memory and spirit, but the trick was finding an actress that would be able to portray the difficult and heartbreaking role of Hardy's most iconic character with the grace and passion it called for.

Polanski first caught a look at young Nastassja Kinski in the mid seventies and befriended her and her mother. Throughout the seventies he was Kinski's mentor, friend and among the most influential people in her life.

There is no question that Tess was Kinski’s big break though and she knew it. She also knew that in accepting the part she would be fulfilling a very personal vision for Polanski.

The young German actress knew that Polanski, “had wanted to do it with his wife”, and that indeed in many ways, “Sharon was Tess (and) she was always there, anyway, with him.

“Roman came along and gave me Tess, it was like…it gave me such dignity, you know what I mean? He would be very strict with me and send me to school. And then when we did the movie he said, ‘I really want you to do this for me, because I wanted to do it for my wife and it means so much to me. But the only way you can do the film is to show you’ll learn the accent, So I’m going to send you to England for four, five, six months and when you come back we’ll do the test.’ He gave me a lot of respect. It was all very serious. He was a very severe person, in the best sense.”

Filmed on location in France throughout a nine-month period just after his masterfully intense and terrifying The Tenant, Polanksi's Tess is his most delicate and hauntingly beautiful work. It is also his most human work and, even though Polanski is still someone recognized as a master of thrillers and the macabre, he brings an incredibly warm and decent aura to Hardy’s monumental novel.

Kinski fell into the difficult role with a remarkable grace. She later said, “I’ve always dreamed of being a person like her. She’s not spoiled by the society she moves through. She still stays untouched. She goes through everything for love.”

The entire project can indeed be viewed as a work of love,told by a director who by all accounts should have been totally shattered personally and professionally by 1979.

It is the story on screen that remains the most endearing aspect of Tess. For those who might not be familiar with Hardy’s book or any of the filmed adaptations, Tess tells the story of the young Tess Durbeyfield whose drunken father finds out that their poverty stricken family is actually descended from the wealthy and proper D'Urbervilles. Tess is sent to claim kin to, what is thought, to be among the other final remaining D'Ubervilles, and her life after is systematically and tragically torn apart by virtually every man she meets, and the society that she was unfortunate enough to have been born in.

At the core of Tess are the ideas of fate and destiny. A particularly long shot early in the film of Kinski wandering down a seemingly endless path points to the film’s key preoccupations. The beautifully rendered shot is one of the most impressive and ominous in all of Polanski's awe-inspiring canon and there isn't any question, for Tess or the audience, that she is walking into another world and there won't be any turning back. Throughout the film's running time we are continually presented with the idea that Tess is being led by some sort of unspoken destiny, and that no matter how hard she fights it there is finally not going to be an escape for her.

Tess is also one of the most masterful films ever made in dealing with the problems of class. One of the great qualities of the screenplay, credited to Polanski, Gerard Brach and John Brownjohn, is that our leading character is ultimately somebody who doesn't care about position, only respect. Everyone around Tess on the other hand is very much obsessed by his or her position. Her family is jealous of the higher-ups and want nothing more than to be among them, no matter if it costs them their daughter. The higher-ups in the film are all portrayed as cold and obsessed with their status, and how much it means to be able to have their way over the lower classes that surround them. Tess is caught in the middle of this struggle, but as a character all she wants is to love and be loved. Tess is the one truly honorable character in the film, and she is the one character who is constantly getting run over by the harsh system her life has been destined to.

Along with the question of class that is repeatedly brought up, Tess also centers on the treatment of women in society as something less than even second rate. Almost without exception, every villain in Tess is a man, and Polanski shows us a harsh world where it isn't just that women are looked down upon, but there isn't even the slightest hint that the men in it have any feeling for them, other than how they make them feel as men. Peter Firth's Angel is the darkest character in the film mainly because he claims goodness and caring, but even towards the end when he takes Tess back we are still given the feeling that his act is ultimately a selfish one. Angel, like every other man in the film, ultimately can't understand what Tess means when she explains, "What all women say, some may feel." The only person who says exactly what she feels, and who genuinely loves in this film, is Tess herself. The role would prove life altering for Kinski who said of it, “I’ve changed so much with this part…Tess is such a rich complex character…you find yourself taking on her patience and strength and courage…I’ve always dreamed of being a person like her.” Kinski also recognized how much of Polanski himself could be found in the film, “Roman is a true poet. He is very cruel sometimes too. He just wants the inner part of you. He is every character in the movie. He is Tess and Angel and the countryside and everything.” She summed up the film with, “Tess is about the evilness of a mass people. It is the story of how laws and society can only destroy the purest people, how the truest and purest are trapped by the spiders…Tess is much deeper than revenge. She is always the same, knowing she would die again and again for the same thing.” She finally admitted that, “Tess was my first real confrontation with myself, my own thoughts and feelings…the book (and film) became like a drug to me.”

Nowhere in the film are these issues of class, confrontation, and the split between men and women more noticeable than in the gut wrenching sequence where Tess takes her dead child to the town's priest asking for a church burial. After explaining that she had baptized the baby by herself, and having the priest tell her that she was right in the eyes of God, she is still turned away from the church because the father is afraid of the town's reaction. Here Polanski presents us with a so-called holy man who cowers more towards the very man made rules of class and sexism rather than the wishes of the God he proclaims to serve. Kinski is stunning in this sequence and Polanksi's unnerving closeup of her face is among the greatest moments in either one of their careers.

Tess is also very much a film about nature and our relation to it, specifically how Tess remains part of her God made surroundings while society slips further away. Kinski is often photographed as not only a character on a landscape but as essentially belonging to it. It is no coincidence that the first close up of her in the film is a shot of her in front of a sunset. The rising and setting sun will play a part throughout the film and it is almost always shot with Kinski somewhere in the frame. There is something almost mystical about Tess in these moments, and whether she is speaking about laying in the grass and transporting herself to the sky to a table full of confused onlookers, or having a wild deer approach her in the words, Tess is very much in tune with the world that the men around her are only looking to pillage. Of course one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the film is that, much like the land that the men will ultimately destroy, Tess is equally savaged and finally left very much behind to pay for the men’s crimes against nature and humanity.

Polanski's direction of the film is flawless. This doesn't feel like a film about the past, this feels like a film actually filmed in this past. Tess is filled with some of the most beautifully composed shots of his career, from the close ups of Kinski whistling to a group of caged birds, to her staring through a window (both of which recall Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers) to the final shots of the vast and foggy landscape surrounding Kinski as she sleeps atop Stonehenge. Tess might not be the greatest film Polanski ever made, but it is without question the most beautiful.

The film made its debut on VHS in the mid eighties in a full screen transfer and, outside of a Japanese widescreen disc, this was the only way to see it for two decades. Thankfully it finally got its due several years in a gorgeous widescreen special edition dvd that features an engrossing ninety minute documentary on the making of the film.

Tess, outside of being one of the most powerful and moving films in modern cinema, stands as a great tribute to the still much missed Sharon Tate. For those who are aware of the film and Polanski’s history, it is hard to watch Tess today without occasionally flashing on those oh so haunting home movies the staggeringly beautiful Tate looking so unbelievably happy with what should have been a wonderful life still in front of her…the work of Polanski, Kinski, Sarde and everyone involved with Tess begins with these images of Sharon Tate, and the film remains a breathtaking and haunting tribute to her.

Catch his blog at: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/nostalgia-kinky-the-career-of-nastassja-kinski.html