[The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), an] absurdist spoof of Dracula, may still be as much ahead of its time as it was 13 years ago…. Whatever may be said about Polanski—and even his admirers have never mistaken him for Albert Schweitzer—he cannot be accused of hypocrisy….

Polanski's films have always contained too much undigested clinical material for my taste, and he has never seemed capable of fashioning a coherently absurdist vision of the world. Consequently, he has been commercially successful on the megabucks level only when he has been working with, around, and under genre conventions in Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. He has been modestly successful also with a pseudosociological exercise, Knife in the Water, and a pseudopsychoanalytical exercise, Repulsion. But when he has gone over the deep end with less conventionally structured efforts such as Cul-de-Sac, What? and The Tenant, critics and audiences, myself included, have forsaken...