Action man Manoel, 104
QUESTION Who is the oldest director of a major motion picture?
LAST year, Clint Eastwood was 91 when he directed and starred in Cry Macho, the story of a one-time rodeo star and washed-up horse breeder. He takes a job to rescue a rancher’s troubled son from his alcoholic mother in Mexico.
Amid all the Hollywood wokery, Eastwood is the only man who could make a movie as old- fashioned, straightforward and ultimately uplifting as Cry Macho. The old horseman finds redemption through teaching the boy what it means to be a good man.
However, Clint is not the oldest ever director. That title goes to Manoel de Oliveira, whose period chamber drama Gebo And The Shadow was released in 2012, when he was 104 (he died in 2015).
It tells the story of an honoured but impoverished patriarch who sacrifices himself to protect his fugitive son. There are first-rate performances from Jeanne Moreau, Michael Lonsdale and Claudia Cardinale.
Another ageing director who shows no sign of retiring is Roman Polanski. He is one of the most celebrated and controversial directors, after fleeing the U.S. in 1978 while awaiting sentencing for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
In 2019, aged 86, he released the critically acclaimed An Officer And A Spy, the story of the Dreyfus affair — a famous French miscarriage of justice in the 1890s.
His latest film, The Palace, a drama set in a Swiss hotel on the eve of the millennium and starring an eclectic mix of actors including Mickey Rourke and John Cleese, is awaiting cinematic release.
Sally Potter, Clitheroe, Lancs.
QUESTION Was a German serial killer known as the Phantom of Heilbronn an elaborate hoax?
IT wasn’t a hoax, but a problem with DNA processing.
In 1993, a 62-year-old woman was found dead in her house in the town of IdarOberstein in the Rhineland. She had been strangled by wire from a bouquet of flowers discovered near her body.
DNA found at the scene indicated a female killer.
The case went cold until 2001 when a 61-year- old man was found dead in his kitchen in Freiburg, Germany. Again, he had been strangled — and the same woman’s DNA was swabbed on a kitchen drawer.
The modus operandi and exact match for DNA meant the police believed there was a female serial killer on the loose, which caused a media sensation.
Subsequently, the DNA of ‘the woman without a face’ was discovered at 40 crime scenes, including armed robberies and murders, in Austria, southern Germany and France.
In 2007, in the German city of Heilbronn, 22- year- old police officer Michele Kiesewetter was in her patrol car, having lunch with her colleague, when two people climbed into the back seat and shot both officers in the back, killing Kiesewetter and injuring her partner.
After finding the mystery woman’s DNA at the scene, police offered a ¤300,000 reward for information leading to her arrest and the nickname Phantom of Heilbronn was coined.
Two years later, the police had an apparent breakthrough. While trying to identify a corpse, they found the suspicious DNA on fingerprints on an asylum application.
This was problematic, as not only did the death predate the Phantom’s murders, but the asylum-seeker was male.
Investigators repeated the test using another cotton swab and this time there was no DNA.
It turned out the Phantom of Heilbronn’s DNA did not come from evidence taken at all the crime scenes, but instead from contaminated cotton swabs the police had used for collecting samples.
It was in fact the DNA of a woman who worked at the factory where the swabs were made.
A neo-Nazi group was later implicated in Officer Kiesewetter’s murder, with the probable murderers committing suicide in 2011 before they could be arrested.
Rebecca Yeats, Salisbury, Wilts.
QUESTION Sussex was once split into six districts called rapes. What is the origin of this term?
A RAPE is a territorial division peculiar to the county of Sussex. It was formerly used for various administrative purposes. There were six rapes: Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel and Chichester. The last two were a single rape at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086.
The origin of the word is uncertain. It has been argued that it is related to the Icelandic hrepp, meaning district or tract of land, and may have Viking origins, but this is disputed by the English PlaceName Society.
Iceland was historically divided into quarters, each one of which was partitioned into prefectures or sheriffdoms. These were then subdivided into small districts called hrepps, equivalent to parishes.
From this it would appear the Icelandic hrepp was a much less important territory than the Sussex rape.
Writing in the 17th century, the antiquarian William Somner suggested the word was derived from the Old English rap, meaning rope, suggesting the territories were physically marked out.
The idea that such a large rope existed was ridiculed by historian J. H. Round.
However, historian Heinrich Brunner explained the Old German custom of defining the limits of popular open-air courts with stakes and ropes.
The name rope was first given to the court and then to the area of jurisdiction. The parish of Rope in Cheshire is a placename derived from the word rap.
Neighbouring Kent has a unique territorial division called a lathe, thought to date from the 6th century. It may derive from a Germanic root meaning land or landed possession.
Clive Heath, Benenden, Kent.
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