Girls in
Cul-de-sac (1966)

Severin Films brings mind-and-lap-blowing skinema faves such as Gwendoline and The Sinful Dwarf to DVD. Get the skinny from one of the brains behind the awesome outfit.

Roman Polanski's life has, appropriately, been like something out of a movie. When he was a child, Roman's parents were sent to Nazi concentration camps and he was forced into the Krakow Ghetto. But Roman escaped and was hidden from the Nazis by a Catholic farmer who let him sleep in his barn. After the war, Roman went to film school and quickly made a name for himself as an arthouse director in Poland. In the 1960's, he went to England and made three of his most famous films, Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-Sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), where he met his future wife Sharon Tate. Then Roman moved to America and made the critically acclaimed horror movie Rosemary's Baby (1968). One year later, tragedy struck in the midst of success when Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family while eight months pregnant with his child. Roman continued making movies and directed his masterpiece, Chinatown, in 1976. But in 1979, Roman ran into scandal in the US when he pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor following an alleged champagne-and-quaalude-fueled sodomy session with 13-year old Samantha Gailey. To escape prison, the director returned to Paris, the city of his birth, and has never set foot on US soil again, not even when we won an Oscar for The Pianist (2002). But now, Samantha Gailey, his statutory rape victim, wants the whole thing over, saying of Polanski's flight from the States, "He did the right thing under the circumstances. He wasn't getting a fair shake." Roman's life has been ups and downs, but he's consistently provided us with incredible nudity in movies like Bitter Moon (1994), which features a fully nude Emmanuelle Seigner in bed with her les-be-friend Kristin Scott Thomas! When it comes to nudity, you can't keep a good Pole down!