SOURCE: Fierz, Charles L. “Polanski Misses: A Critical Essay Concerning Polanski's Reading of Hardy's Tess.” Literature/Film Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1999): 103-09.

In the following essay, Fierz argues that Tess, Polanski's cinematic adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is based on a misreading of Tess's character and a failure to understand the influences that shaped her character.

William Costanzo commented in Literature/Film Quarterly in 1981 on Roman Polanski and his Tess film rendition of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles:

Tess has crossed the Atlantic as a kind of emissary from Polanski. The romantic story of a victim of society, it comes unchaperoned to a land where the director is himself a fugitive from justice. … After the brutal murder of Sharon Tate in 1969 … after his flight from the United States and a prison sentence for illegal sexual intercourse with a minor, he has chosen as...