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The Fallen Idol

Mon., February 20, 2006

Poster for 'The Fallen Idol.'Carol Reed directed the famous The Third Man in 1949, but the year before released a drama, The Fallen Idol, that has become lost in those looming film noir shadows. Although Fallen Idol was Oscar-nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay (by Graham Greene, no less, the novelist who also wrote Third Man), it’s still unavailable anywhere on video or DVD.

I saw it at Film Forum tonight and the plot is very like something Hitchcock would have been proud of. A French ambassador’s nine-year-old son, Phillipe, living in an sprawling embassy in Chelsea, London, befriends a butler, Baines, and unwittingly learns of an affair he’s been having with another member of the staff. Late one night, Phillipe witnesses a murder, and flees in terror, running barefoot in his pajamas down the streets of Chelsea in an image that closely prefigures Joseph Cotten’s famous chase of Orson Welles down the wet cobblestones of Vienna in The Third Man.

One of the most startling images I’ve seen on film occurs during a scene in which the child is awakened by Mrs. Baines, the butler’s spiteful wife, hovering over him with a crazed stare—one of her bobby pins drops to his pillow with a dead plop.

The second half of the film is the murder investigation that involves misplaced suspicion, lies and ends in the child nearly getting the wrong suspect convicted. I’m no fan of precocious child actors, but Bobby Henrey does a first rate job as a free-spirited, nosy child that is annoying only when his character is supposed to be, which unfortunately or not is for a lot of the script, as he unwittingly blurts out secrets he shouldn’t have and poses questions better left unasked. He can’t even really be considered a child actor as he was only ever in one other film, which may have something to do with his fine, unactorly performance.

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