With the possible exception of the O.J. Simpson trial, it would be hard to think of a tabloid-ready celebrity scandal from the past 30 years that provokes a more purely, intensely, overheatedly emotional response than the Roman Polanski rape case of 1977. (He fled the country early in 1978.) It’s a safe bet that a lot of people, upon reading the headline that Polanski had been arrested in Zurich, with the possibility of extradition to the U.S. to stand trial on that charge, greeted the news with more or less the following sentiment: “Good! It’s about time that the authorities caught up with him. He can’t dodge the consequences of his crime forever. In a just world, there is no statute of limitations on what Roman Polanski did.”

About two years ago, I would have felt more or less the same way. But then, early in 2008, I saw the revelatory documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which takes on the full and fascinatingly complex legal and moral drama of the case. Not just the emotions, but the facts. Not just the issue of whether Polanski committed an unspeakable crime (something that the film never disputes), but how it all played out, within the U.S. legal system, at the time. [...]