The Fallen Idol
FESTIVALS:
1948 Venice
2006 Shanghai
Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948) is a tremendous child’s-eye-view thriller, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story, and presented at London’s National Film Theatre as part of the Reed centenary. The infant son of a foreign ambassador in London has the run of the lavish official residence while his parents are away for the weekend, and becomes embroiled in a grownup secret concerning the butler Baines, tremendously underplayed by Ralph Richardson. The movie has Hitchcockian elegance and suspense, particularly in its use of the giant stage-set for the embassy’s magnificent lobby area, much gazed at through the banisters by the little boy, banished upstairs at bedtime. Young Bobby Henrey’s performance looks a little quaint now, but it is still very likable. Dora Bryan has a hilarious cameo as the streetwalker who encounters the boy when he runs away.
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 28 July 2006.
Inside a two-year period, Carol Reed made Odd Man Out, this truly marvellous Graham Greene-scripted chamber drama and The Third Man. Reed wasn’t just on a roll, he was on fire. Somehow though, The Fallen Idol has always been the Cinderella title among this esteemed trio, perhaps lacking the pulse-quickening spectacle or thrilling baroque visuals of the other two.
However, the current carefully restored release makes a strong case that this story of dangerously unpredictable consequences when a diplomat’s innocent young son eavesdrops — uncomprehendingly — on a butler’s illicit affair remains the most perfect jewel in Reed’s entire filmography.
The director and Greene worked together to refashion the latter’s short story The Basement Room into a more complex scenario. Its palpable, anything-might-happen tension derives from the fact that Bobby Henrey’s junior protagonist ultimately holds sway over the fate of errant yet immensely sympathetic Ralph Richardson, but does so with the limited attention span, mood swings and partial comprehension of the adult world befitting any eight-year-old boy.
Key to the film’s holding power is the astute way that Reed’s direction establishes an effective double perspective, in which a child’s-eye camera placement makes the Belgravia embassy a daunting, mysterious, grown-up environment, while elsewhere micro-detailed attention to performance shows the subtlety with which Richardson portrays an ordinary man buckling under the weight of marital and class hierarchies.
Initially it seems such a small story, yet its significance grows as we’re immersed in it, contemplating a child’s first corrosive inkling of evil in the world and, indeed, a decent man’s growing realisation of the thin tissue of circumstance separating happiness from damnation.
Georges Perinal’s majestic black-and-white camerawork brings out the unsettling polarities of the setting, from serenely empty sunlit London squares to the sinister glint of rain-slicked backstreet mews under lamplight. Timeless and intoxicating, this newly buffed-up masterpiece positively demands your attention.
– Trevor Johnston, Sight & Sound, January 2016.