Gene Gutowski Movies

Filmmaker Roman Polanski, who as a boy growing up in Poland watched while the Nazis devastated his country during World War II, directed this downbeat drama based on the true story of a privileged musician who spent five years struggling against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a gifted classical pianist born to a wealthy Jewish family in Poland. The Szpilmans have a large and comfortable flat in Warsaw which Wladyslaw shares with his mother and father (Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay), his sisters Halina and Regina (Jessica Kate Meyer and Julia Rayner), and his brother, Henryk (Ed Stoppard). While Wladyslaw and his family are aware of the looming presence of German forces and Hitler's designs on Poland, they're convinced that the Nazis are a menace which will pass, and that England and France will step forward to aid Poland in the event of a real crisis. Wladyslaw's naïveté is shattered when a German bomb rips through a radio studio while he performs a recital for broadcast. During the early stages of the Nazi occupation, as a respected artist, he still imagines himself above the danger, using his pull to obtain employment papers for his father and landing a supposedly safe job playing piano in a restaurant. But as the German grip tightens upon Poland, Wladyslaw and his family are selected for deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. Refusing to face a certain death, Wladyslaw goes into hiding in a comfortable apartment provided by a friend. However, when his benefactor goes missing, Wladyslaw is left to fend for himself and he spends the next several years dashing from one abandoned home to another, desperate to avoid capture by German occupation troops. The Pianist was based on the memoir of the same name by the real-life Wladyslaw Szpilman; the book was first published in 1946 as Death of a City, but was banned by Polish Communist officials and went out of print until 1998, when a new edition was issued as The Pianist. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Roman Polanski wrote the screenplay for this decidedly offbeat drama. Bernie (Mark Burns) plays a rootless wanderer with a fondness for alcohol and no clear goals in life. Bernie stumbles into a seaside resort community with Winnie (Beatrice Edney), a young girl in leg braces, in tow. As Bernie starts hitting the bottle, his physical and emotional stability starts to crumble, and Winnie begins to worry for his safety, until he finally collapses and Winnie panics, with no one left to look after her. Peter Sellers makes a brief cameo appearance as a gay shopkeeper who sets up a booth to take advantage of the beach traffic. While Polanski originally intended to direct A Day At The Beach, he later turned over the reigns to filmmaker Simon Hesera; it was his first dramatic feature, and his last. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A pair of bumbling vampire-hunters attempts to destroy an undead nobleman and his cronies and rescue a buxom maiden in actor/director Roman Polanski's playful update of the venerable vampire genre. Bat expert and vampire obsessive Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) barely survives his journey through the Alps into snowy Slovenia to continue his oft-maligned research into the undead. Thawed out by his hapless assistant, Alfred (Polanski), and the frisky local innkeeper, Shagal (Alfie Bass), Abronsius quickly notices the overabundance of raw garlic as a decorating motif in the inn and its environs. Too ineffectual to save Shagal from having his blood sucked, the professor and Alfred miss the boat again when the mysterious Count Von Krolock (Ferdinand Mayne) kidnaps Shagal's built, beautiful daughter, Sarah (Sharon Tate). The itinerant vampire hunters must travel through the icy wilderness to Von Krolock's abode and evade his manservant and his effete son Herbert (Iain Quarrier) before Sarah joins the ranks of the ghouls. They soon learn, however, that the luxury-starved lass actually enjoys her captors' lavish attentions. The action climaxes during a costume ball attended by a phalanx of blood-suckers, although the laughs and surprises continue until the very end. Sixteen minutes of unauthorized cuts have been restored in some video editions of The Fearless Vampire Hunters, although the animated credits sequence that replaced them is also retained. The film marks the feature debut of Tate, who replaced Polanski's original choice, Jill St. John, on the advice of producer Martin Ransohoff. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

The first English-language film of director Roman Polanski is a psychological thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and his own later film Rosemary's Baby (1968). Catherine Deneuve stars as Carol Ledoux, a Belgian manicurist living with her sister, Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), in a London flat. Simultaneously attracted and repulsed by sex, Carol is a virgin who finds her sister's relationship with a married man, Michael (Ian Hendry), extremely disturbing. When her sister and Michael go on holiday, Carol begins to disintegrate mentally, hallucinating bizarre encounters, being forced into taking a sabbatical from her job and ultimately committing a pair of murders in her deranged state. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide