Roman, lend us your ears: if only Polanski could take part in a Q&A during the Barbican's season. Photograph: Alik Keplicz/AP
The new mini-season of Roman Polanski movies at the Barbican comes at a time when his reputation, both creative and personal, has been fortified - for the time being. In a Blair-ish sense, he can be as assured as any seventysomething director can be of having secured a "legacy". Polanski won the Cannes Palme D'Or and an Oscar for his 2002 movie The Pianist. And in 2005, he won what might have been a sweeter victory yet: in the libel courts over Vanity Fair, over a false accusation that he tried to seduce a woman in a New York restaurant at the time of the funeral of his wife Sharon Tate, murdered by the Manson gang.
That libel trial was made sensational because Polanski had sued in the British courts - traditionally far more amenable to the plaintiff than the Americans - and because the British courts had granted Polanski permission to testify via video link from Paris, to avoid extradition over his notorious and unexpired charge of sex with an underage girl in the US. That initial permission, and his ultimate victory, was a double triumph - and a remarkable underscoring of Polanski's status.
As recently as 2004, London's National Film Theatre (as it was then called, before its rebranding as BFI Southbank) unveiled a complete Roman Polanski season. The Barbican's edited seasonette looks a bit thin in comparison, but it's as good a way as any to catch up with some classics that you might not have seen. The problem is: Polanski's greatest film isn't featured. We have Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, Chinatown and The Pianist. But where, oh where, is his Satanism extravaganza Rosemary's Baby?
This is surely Polanski's masterpiece, a blood-chilling and uncompromising evocation of evil, which in my opinion has the edge on The Exorcist as the greatest horror movie ever made. Did copyright problems mean that the Barbican couldn't use it? Or did it, in a misguided attempt to show Polanski as an all-round Euro-American auteur, wish to de-emphasise the horror in favour of showing a career of stately maturity, culminating in his much-garlanded but far inferior late work The Pianist?
I wonder. Any of the films here is worth checking out. Knife in the Water is his fascinating psychodrama, and Repulsion is a gloriously unpleasant nightmare. Cul-de-Sac showcases his tendency towards black comedy, again much admired - though I think comedy of any sort is not his forte. Chinatown is the movie which is traditionally lauded as his greatest work, and it is indeed great, though I am very agnostic about the famous shrugging ending, in which Jake is told "Forget it, Jake - it's Chinatown". I can never rid myself of the suspicion that a satisfying ending had simply eluded screenwriter Robert Towne at the last.
Perhaps Polanski was never precisely the auteur that he seemed: rather a brilliant and efficient director of different sorts of material, who found his greatest work in a relatively brief period of horror and macabre - around which his reputation has gelled, and been elevated into myth because of his tragic private life.
If I was curating a five-movie Polanski season, I would give The Pianist the shove in favour of Rosemary's Baby or even The Tenant, that very interesting 1976 Kafkaesque drama which showcases Polanski's abilities as an actor. And I would try to persuade the great man to give an introduction, and even take some Q&A - via video link of course.
