Film #32 of Project 40

”Some lies are just kindness.”

What would an Alfred Hitchcock film featuring a kid as its protagonist look like? Probably like this. Carol Reed takes a complex story of lies, betrayals and secrets and narrates its through the eyes of an innocent child who believes everything that he is told and everything that he sees. The Fallen Idol has a brilliant concept and Carol Reed unleashes the potential of Graham Greene’s story with the help of his talented actors and gives us something that is thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time. This is basically the story of a child who witnesses the moral deformities of adults’ world and decides to play the same game.…

93/100

Childhood innocence is a mysterious time in everyone's life that can't be fully explained. There's a simultaneous sense of trust and suspicion that goes along with everyone, and our actions determine which of the two factors ultimately comes out on top. Phillipe, the protagonist of Carol Reed's twisted mystery The Fallen Idol, only wants to help out. He believes his best friend and adventuring butler Baines has committed the unthinkable: murder. Naturally, he has an emotional attachment to Baines, and will do anything to prevent him from being taken from him. In a true "boy who cried wolf" fashion, he attempts to lure the police's beliefs away from murder suspicion to a simple accident of his own doing. But…

Part of my 5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films (13) challenge.

Oh yes, this was fun! It was director Carol Reed's first collaboration with scriptwriter Graham Greene, who also penned the short story upon which it was based, "The Basement Room" (1936). The duo would team up a year later to create "The Third Man" (1949) and then again a decade later for "Our Man in Havana."

This story is set in London at a foreign embassy, where seven-year-old Phillipe (Bobby Henrey) lives with his father the Ambassador (Gerard Heinz). We soon learn that the boy's mother has been away for quite some time, but is expected to return soon. In the meantime, embassy staff look after his well being,…

The Fallen Idol is the first of three films considered masterpieces to result from the legendary meeting of director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene. The two also colloborated on The Third Man and Our Man in Havana. This is the first of the three films that I've seen, and I must say I'm quite impressed. It's an elegant balance of suspense and farce that I thoroughly enjoyed.

This is the tale of a fraught relationship between a boy named Phillipe (Bobby Henrey) and the beloved butler Mr. Baines (Ralph Richardson), whom he suspects may have commited murder.

I think the most noticeable quality of The Fallen Idol is the writing. The dialogue is excellent throughout, and it's delivered well…

[59]

A bunch of little things taint the overall effect of this “could-have-been” masterpiece, things that I must assume to be largely personal objections seeing as how they hardly seem to bother anyone else, nevertheless planting this firmly into like-but-don’t-love territory. Outward craftsmanship is top notch, wouldn’t expect anything less from Reed, but the abutment of thriller/murder-mystery against childhood-innocence/ignorance is dreadfully aslant towards the latter -- somewhat understandable, to a degree, seeing as how “Through the Eyes of a Spoilt, Imaginative, Young Boy” is clearly the paramount thesis here, but Reed places so much formal affirmation on the former that we’re inclined to—at least partially—evaluate this under the hood of its aggregated “suspense,” too, which frankly comes off feeling like…

I think this went into my top3 films with the view point of children.
Henrey is pretty great as the ambassador's son, he even pulls of an accent. Impressive. The final scene might rub some people the wrong way, but hey, kids are annoying from time to time, that's just the way it is. I think he handled it well, especially that final line.
Having kids look up to you, or even glorify you, can be a tough burden to bear. Most grown-ups aren't perfect to begin with, and if you then find yourself in a situation where you find you're having to lie, well then it will unravel. Fast.

The Fallen Idol was a bit different than I had…

[59]

A bunch of little things taint the overall effect of this “could-have-been” masterpiece, things that I must assume to be largely personal objections seeing as how they hardly seem to bother anyone else, nevertheless planting this firmly into like-but-don’t-love territory. Outward craftsmanship is top notch, wouldn’t expect anything less from Reed, but the abutment of thriller/murder-mystery against childhood-innocence/ignorance is dreadfully aslant towards the latter -- somewhat understandable, to a degree, seeing as how “Through the Eyes of a Spoilt, Imaginative, Young Boy” is clearly the paramount thesis here, but Reed places so much formal affirmation on the former that we’re inclined to—at least partially—evaluate this under the hood of its aggregated “suspense,” too, which frankly comes off feeling like…

Ignoring the old advice to never work with children or animals, Carol Reed (The Third Man throws caution to the wind and includes both in this film noir. Not only that, but the boy, whose name is Phillipe and who is played by Bobby Henrey, is practically the main character. He in his naiveté is our window to the complicated adult relationships at the center of the plot, namely the love triangle between the butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), who is his hero, the butler's wife (Sonia Dresdel), who is bitterly unhappy, and the butler's girlfriend Julie (Michèle Morgan). Considering Bobby's young age and that this was his film debut, he manages quite well with the role, having to manage a…

This movie where Carol Reed frames the story from the innocent and naive perspective of a child is admirable because it doesn't consider this innocence to be at all a positive thing. Rather, the child is incredibly annoying - his naivety is the source of all of the suspense, because the fate of the story is in his unsullied, rather unintelligent hands. It's a frustrating experience, by design, and one that works nicely. I like that the kid is brutally annoying, because that's what most children would be like if placed in this exact scenario. Not to imply that this movie hates kids, or hates child-like innocence - his naivety is charming when applied only to tall tales - but…

The chiaroscuro lighting, severely canted angles, and deep-focus cinematography recognizable from Reed's chilly noirs give a haunting cavernousness to the expertly designed embassy that houses the majority of the film's events, Reed and cinematographer Périnal weaving a delirious, paranoid atmosphere with their use of shadows and forced perspective compositions that make the house and its doorways, banisters, windows, and staircases an essential element of the drama. Greene's screenplay cannily evokes the confusion and dazed timidity of childhood innocence--Phillipe irritating to the adults, yet understandably unsettled to us--and Reed sets the tone deftly, Phillipe's initial cluelessness leading to a bewilderment while the strained tensions of the Rance build beneath the surface before finally keying into Phillipe's now frightened bewilderment with the…