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Here in the UK the BBC have been running a handsome new TV serial version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles, which is a perfectly natural and interesting thing for them to do given the British public's liking for grand old books well-mounted over several nights of telly, and for this sorry tale of Hardy's in particular. Gemma Arterton, about to take her bow as this year's Ill-Fated Bond Girl (as well as the face of a new Bond Girl perfume) takes the lead role. I caught a few minutes the other night and it all looked fine and affecting enough. But the age that you are counts when you first come to these things, doesn't it? Back in 1979, aged 9, I was desperate to see Roman Polanski's big-screen version of Tess, just because of the utterly indelible impression made on me by its lobby poster featuring Nastassja Kinski, who definitely at that time seemed to me the definition of an angel on earth. I eventually got to see the film a couple of years later, on good old VHS videocassette, and found it just as bewitching and awfully sad as I'd imagined. I only had an idea, albeit a fascinated one, of who Roman Polanski was, but he was about to become the first 'film director' I was properly aware of, having seen and admired several movies that bore his name. It took me another year or so to get hold of his memoir 'Roman' and learn that Hardy's Tess was a book that Sharon Tate had kept by their bedside and urged upon her late husband as film material; and that Polanski's version was thus a form of uxuriousness, a debt of love ten years after Sharon Tate's appalling murder at the hands of the loathsome Charles Manson's ratbag devotees; and that per the forbidding bleakness of Tess's fate, Polanski never needed to be told that the world can be unspeakably cruel. So yes, Kinski's great beauty was a big factor in luring me to 'Tess' the movie, and I became her dogged fan over the next 5 years as she appeared in about 43 different movies, of variable distinction. But 'Tess' was also the start of a big passion of mine for Polanski, and the very affecting, near-ancient sense of fatalism and melancholy that underlies his work. He was the right man for 'Tess', whatever they said at the time.