UK suspense
1948
bw 94 min.
Director: Carol Reed
CLV: $29.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1307L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
At first blush, The
Fallen Idol might seem to be an ambered treasure, duly noted in the
guidebooks as "worth a special visit." It has, after all, a script by noted
litteacuterateur Graham Greene; it plays upon the classic themes of trust,
innocence, betrayal, truth; its story is one of passion among the servant
classes, as perceived (and misperceived) by Master Phillippe, the obligatorily
precocious eight-year-old. In short, you might be tempted to see The Fallen
Idol as ur-Masterpiece Theatre -- the kind of ostentatiously
understated thing the British do so terribly well, as what's been
referred to as "the Laura Ashley school of filmmaking."And you'd be dead
wrong.
Because what all this honeyed veneration fails to describe is just how
damn much fun the The Fallen Idol is. And, for all its quality and
craft, how little it has lost its power to disturb -- and to haunt.
Chalk
some of this up to Mr. Greene, who, when slumming from his official
masterpieces and meditations on lapsed faith, churned out a string of what he
termed "entertainments" -- including The Third Man, Ashenden, and
the short story The Basement Room, which he here (with "additional
dialogue" by Lesley Storm and William Templeton) adapted for the screen.
And,
without doubt, chalk some of this up to Carol Reed, perhaps best known for
The Third Man, which he filmed later the same year. Here Reed takes what
will become a trademark visual style -- Dutch tilts, chiaroscuro lighting,
deep-focus tableaux -- and deploys it in service of a script set largely within
the interior of one house. As we watch, that house becomes a city, and the
entry hall, with its wrought-iron-and-marble central staircase, every bit as
evocative as the gleaming cobblestones of Harry Lime's Vienna.
The plot of
The Fallen Idol is simple. Young, innocent, towheaded Phillippe (Bobby
Henrey), son of the French ambassador, finds in his butler Baines (Ralph
Richardson) the attention and warmth that his somewhat distant father has
failed to supply. Baines tells him stories, takes him for walks, and helps him
circumvent the Draconian household order imposed by Mrs. Baines (Sonia
Dresdel).
The ambassador departs, to retrieve his long-hospitalized wife, and
Phillippe is left to the charge of his servants. Confined to his room by Mrs.
Baines, the boy of course escapes and, spotting Baines, follows him to a
teashop -- where Baines is in the middle of a difficult, tearful conversation
with the attractive Julie (Michele Morgan), whom Baines stammeringly introduces
as his niece. Phillippe accompanies the lovers on a walk through town, a trip
to the zoo -- a romantic crisis for the adults, a family romance for the child.
He is told by Baines to keep the events of the day a deep, deep secret.
But
the normally tyrannical Mrs. Baines, in a spasm of tenderness, draws the story
out of him. She spies on her husband, catching him in flagrante .Ê.Ê.
And moments later, with a thump and a scream, there's a body, arms and legs
splayed at impossible angles, at the foot of the ornate marble stairs, and a
boy who thinks he's witnessed a murder committed by the only person in the
world he really loves.
Following his 1946 classic Odd Man Out, which
proved to be both a succegraves d'estime and a box-office hit, Sir Carol Reed
found himself wooed by mogul Alexander Korda, who wanted Reed to work under
Korda's London Films banner. To this end, Korda introduced Reed to Graham
Greene. The introduction proved to be more congenial than perhaps even Korda
had imagined, and the subsequent collaboration resulted in both The Fallen
Idol and The Third Man. Greene later described Reed as "the only
director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the
extraordinary feeling of the right face for the right part, the exactitude of
cutting and not least important the power of sympathizing with an author's
worries..."
The faces here are, without doubt, the right ones. As Baines
-- at once the clumsy, frightened adulterer and the intrepid surrogate father
-- Ralph Richardson rules. His deep, insinuating voice never seems more certain
than when he's telling a lie -- or more tentative than when speaking, finally,
the truth. Sonia Dresdel attacks her role fearlessly, certainly not a
sympathetic figure, but never merely a harridan. Michele Morgan is lucid as
Julie; and the supporting cast includes the great Jack Hawkins as well as
Bernard Lee, perhaps better known as "M" -- James Bond's crusty boss. But it is
the remarkably unmannered Bobby Henrey who occupies the center of this
narrative. It's through his eyes that the action is observed, and through his
actions that the drama, within and without, relentlessly unfolds.
But it
detracts neither from the performances nor from Greene's crafty, allusive
script -- Pinter avant le lettre -- to say that the real star of The
Fallen Idol is the embassy itself: its marble checkerboard receiving
parlor, its outsized catenary staircase. From the film's opening, when Henrey
stares poignantly through the newel posts at his father's departing entourage,
to the final bit of detective work at the end, it is the physical space of the
film that ultimately remains. For all its other virtues, The Fallen Idol
leaves us with a dark, splendid moral ambiguity -- and with that set of stairs,
massive, curvilinear, indelible. It is a staircase as poignant as the one in
Letter from an Unknown Woman, as full of drama as the one in The
Magnificent Ambersons, as riveting as the one in Suspicion.
And,
perhaps, as deadly as he one in Psycho.
Or perhaps not.
-- Howard
A. Rodman
Credits
Produced & Directed by: Carol Reed
Based on a
short story by: Graham Greene
Screenplay by: Graham Greene
Additional
Dialogue by: Lesley Storm and William Templeton
Photography by: Georges
Perinal
Sets Designed by: Alexander Korda
Editor: Oswald
Hafenrichter
Music Composed by: William Alwyn
Associate Producer: Phil
Brandon