To love a film by Mr. Polanski, though, as I know from other irate readers, is to guarantee that you will be accused of going easy on a criminal. Some of this anger can be blamed on avid Polanski supporters who assert that he did nothing wrong, or that he’s an old man now and has suffered enough. And, true, that Swiss chalet of his where he stayed after he was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 while waiting to hear if he would be deported to America sure looked as chilly as a medieval dungeon. Some Polanski apologists repellently portray his victim as a culpable seducer rather than a 13-year-old who was drugged and marinated in booze. Others trivialize statutory rape, never mind that their opinions are legally immaterial. Some detractors remain insistent that he should return to America to face judgment, as do I.

Mr. Polanski belongs to a long line of liars, adulterers, sadists and slaves, wife beaters, rapists, miscellaneous miscreants and even murderers who helped make Hollywood great. Charlie Chaplin liked young girls so much that three of his four wives were teenagers when they wed. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer may have had more stars than there are in heaven, as it proudly crowed, but in the 1930s it also had an opium den on the lot and Christmastime orgies. Walt Disney, as I said, played Hollywood host to Hitler’s favorite filmmaker. In 1952 Elia Kazan gave up old colleagues to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and then went off to direct a handful of movies about betrayal, including one about selling out your nearest and dearest: “On the Waterfront.” It’s a classic.

Judging filmmakers along with their films is a favorite critical pastime, and it was fascinating to wade through the confusion of responses to Mr. von Trier’s statement, in particular the struggle to reconcile a superb work like “Melancholia” with his words. The mistake was thinking that the two could be reconciled rather than admitting that some contradictions remain insoluble. And if the case against Mr. von Trier finally seems weak while the argument against Riefenstahl remains strong it’s because of the visible evidence offered by their films. In “Triumph of the Will” Riefenstahl, with Speer — whom Mr. von Trier, at Cannes, unforgivably called “maybe one of God’s best children” — put her talents to propagandistic use for a cinematic lie in which her guilt is inscribed on every frame.