VENICE, Aug. 30 – Sensational crimes that rate world headlines have one thing in common: they make money for those entrepreneurs quick enough and businesslike enough to cash in on the public’s horror, fascination or prurience.

A particularly ugly relic of the Sharon Tate murders of 1969 has just surfaced at the Venice Film Festival presented in a section devoted to Documents of Our Time.

It is a full-length movie called Manson, subtitled Family Ritual.

Although I rate as nil its chances of getting a censor certificate in Britain — and rather higher its chances of drawing the attention of the DPP if it goes into a cinema club — I think it worth relating some of its more printable details to show with what ruthlessness a human being’s fate becomes somebody else’s profit.

Manson doesn’t recreate the actual slaying of Mrs. Roman Polanski and her friends by the drugged and mesmerised slaves of the Californian drop-out Charles Manson.

The most we get are shots of the inscriptions left by the killers in their victim’s blood on the walls, doors and refrigerators of the Hollywood home — as well as a pathetic shot of the double grave in which are buried Sharon Tate and the baby with which she was pregnant.

The film ekes out its running time with first-person testimony by those members of Manson’s commune who quit before the slayings or didn’t participate in them often for reasons no more moral than the fact that there was no room in the cars bound for the Tate house. Their jail cell companions also speak fluently.

Particularly appalling are the three drop-out girls, shorn to Peter Pan cuts and caressing riffles and machets like love objects, as they speak to us with unshaken convictions in their erstwhile Messiah, now in Death Row and still propagating his philosophy that “anybody can kill anybody.”

We see the vest that Manson’s hippy harem embroidered for him with pictures of their pornographic fantasies and further bedecked with “scalps” in the shape of the long locks that the girls cut off when they left behind their middle-class homes, campus colleges or safe jobs to live like animals and feed out of trash cans but only on greens, since they were all vegetarians.

Manson’s ex-followers describe their random procreation – umbilical cords being tied of with guitar strings once the babies have been delivered – and dwell on necrophiliac perversions like having intercourse with a suicide, which are probably by now their own personal elaborated fantasies stimulated by the media interviewers.

As well as the glorification of murder there is the justification of it hurled out at the audience by the Mansonites on the grounds that such people as the Polanskis made films that were invitations to be killed and in any case they are simply reflecting back on society the violent fantasies out of the commercial advertising and TV serials on which they were weaned.

The film has undoubtedly some sociologically valid material. But how can it be justified on any grounds but commercial that it makes this available in the form of entertainment for general audiences, rendered even more palatable by glossy production values ranging from an insidiously mellow commentator like the Robot Hall 9000 in the movie 2001, to split screen and double image photography more appropriate for TV folk singers and even to the inclusion of six or seven melting ballads punctuating the grisly events at regular intervals and, I suppose, soon available on an LP?

The glib interpretations offered — the Mansonites were all people with grudges against society; he had an incomplete personality like Hitler’s — are not enough to justify this stylish wallowing in other people’s blood.

I wonder what sort of world I live in when I see a billboard advertising this film made by all obscure American across the road from the Festival Palace where Roman Polanski’s own movies were once acclaimed and honoured.

Its inclusion in the same festival is a dubious honour I should have been happier to see omitted.

By ALEXANDER WALKER