Tom’s cops and robots

QUESTION What was the Sixties film featuring rebellious robots? In the opening scene, the hero overpowers a robot in a wheatfield. Towards the end, mechanical insects besiege a human in an elevator on a building site. IT WAS Runaway, a Tom Selleck sci-fi film released in 1984 between seasons of Magnum PI. Selleck plays a future cop specialising in retrieving runaway domestic and industrial robots, with the help of a new partner, played by dancer Cynthia Rhodes (Flashdance, Staying Alive, Dirty Dancing) as a rookie cop looking for a change from handing out parking tickets.

Selleck and Rhodes uncover a plot to turn robots into homicidal killers by evil genius Gene Simmons (Kiss lead singer) and his double-crossing partner Kirstie Alley (Cheers).

In the opening scene, Rhodes is barely introduced to Selleck when they are, indeed, called out to a wheatfield to retrieve an errant agricultural robot in a scene that could have been stolen from It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet, complete with amused farmers looking on.

Selleck’s final showdown with Simmons takes place at a construction site, trapped on an elevator by mechanical spiders spitting acid ‘venom’.

Written and directed by Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain, Westworld, Jurassic Park), it suffered at the box office against The Terminator and Star Trek III, but a good script and some unusual casting combined interesting ideas about our relationship with technology, plus some Partners: Selleck and Cynthia Rhodes entertaining humour. Jerry Goldsmith’s dated electronic soundtrack reminds me of earlier classics such as Logan’s Run and Silent Running from the Seventies, so I can understand someone thinking this was a Sixties film. With an updated soundtrack, Runaway would still stand up today. Dave Castrey, Cheltenham, Glos.

QUESTION In arguments about the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles, some commentators say ‘not until the Germans return the Greek bullion stolen by the Nazis’. Is there any evidence that the Germans still have Greek gold? THe Greek debt crisis of 2010 precipitated a major spat between Germany and Greece. The radical austerity measures imposed by the eu were a painful reminder of Greece’s occupation during World War II.

Greek deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos said Germany had failed to compensate Greece for the Nazi occupation of World War II, adding: ‘They took away the Greek gold that was in the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money, and they never gave it back.’

The Nazi occupation of Greece was appalling. By the time Hitler’s armies withdrew from mainland Greece in 1944, tens of thousands of Greeks had been killed, hundreds of thousands more had died of malnutrition, and Greek Jews had been deported to concentration camps and their property seized.

But the theft of the national gold reserve is one charge the Greeks can’t level at the Germans. According to Georgios Mantzavinos, deputy governor of the Bank of Greece between 1936 and 1946, when it became clear the Germans were to assist Mussolini following his failed invasion of Greece, in February 1941, the 19 tons of gold held in the Greek Bank were moved to Crete, then to Cairo and finally to South Africa. A Greek government in exile was set up in Johannesburg until September 1941 when the king, the government and the Bank of Greece moved to Britain. The gold was put in the vaults of the Bank of england. Between 1946 and 1956, it was returned to Greece.

West Germany paid DM115 million (then $67 million) to Greek victims of Nazi crimes in 1960, a figure many Greeks felt to be woefully inadequate reparation for its virtual economic destruction by the Nazis. Victims of the forced labour camps were compensated individually.

a. E. Sirus, Manchester.

QUESTION What is the story of Styllou Pantopiou, the second to last woman to be hanged in Britain? FuRTHeR to the earlier answer, the story of Styllou Pantopiou Christofi didn’t mention that Ruth ellis, the last woman to be hanged, shot her boyfriend outside a pub in Parliament Hill, Hampstead, North London — just a few hundred yards from Christofi’s murder of her daughter-in-law.

I was a police officer in Hampstead in 1961 and part of my beat was both these locations. Another coincidence is that the same uniformed officer happened to be first at the scene of both incidents and arrested both women.