Film director Roman Polanski was arrested on a 1978 US arrest warrant for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, Swiss police confirmed today.

Fugitive film director Roman Polanski has taken his bid to have a decades-old sex case thrown out to the US appeals court.

A Los Angeles judge has formally rejected an attempt by fugitive film director Roman Polanski to have a 1978 sex case against him dismissed because of misconduct by prosecutors.

His looks are grizzled and the signature of evil carved low on his forehead – a jagged swastika – has begun to fade, but the new photograph of Charles Manson reminds us that America’s most infamous mass murderer is still alive as the 40th anniversary of the killing spree that shocked the world approaches.

Hercules Bellville devoted his life to the cultivation of friendship and the making of films. He was a very considerable film scholar and in terms of intellectual history he should be classed with his Oxford contemporaries and great friends Laura Mulvey, Jon Halliday and Peter Wollen as among the first in England to register the full impact of that French cinephilia which was to give birth to the New Wave. But Bellville’s scholarship was from the very first to be devoted to the making of films. A list of the directors with whom he worked is also a list of some of the finest directors of the past 40 years.

Living and working in Hollywood can be a strange, rarefied existence, so it should come as no surprise when chums end up making movies about each other.