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,…

A boy idolizes his father’s butler but once the boy learns about his idol’s lies he then changes his perception. 

While the film has a somewhat Hitchcock-like feel to the movie especially near the last act and while also having strong performances from each cast member, I still found the film more tough to get through due to this child that the whole film focuses around because he is about as annoying, spoiled, and forgive me for saying this but stupid as a kid can get. It was hard to care about the film’s mystery since the characters are pretty one dimensional or more of pain to follow because they lack common characteristics that makes a human likable but not…

[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…

The second in what was an astonishing successive trio of films in the late 1940s, Carol Reed's first adaptation of a Graham Greene story is a marvelous exercise in storytelling from a child's perspective and a captivating tale about the inevitable loss of innocence, as the adult world invades and corrupts the young mind.

What makes The Fallen Idol so effective is the friction between child and adult—the perennial need for subtext, translation and in the case of Ralph Richardson's character (a predictably sublime performance), projecting a false persona as a means both to befriend the boy Felipe but also to escape the woes of his crumbling marriage. The film, which in the latter stages turns into a riveting murder…

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…

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…

The common criticism running through crime films like The Fallen Idol, where the story is told from the point-of-view of a child, is that the child in question is annoying.

Surely that's meant to be the point though? If he or she wasn't sticking their nose into other people's business then you wouldn't really have a great deal to work with, by all accounts.

It's not even close to being the whole point with The Fallen Idol anyway, as you'd expect from a Carol Reed film. It's really Ralph Richardson's character that carries this film into some most unexpected places, touching on themes of familial displacement and assuming a father figure role with a lot of patience and deftness.

Because…

"What kind of man is he?"

A naive boy must navigate a world of dangerous secrets to protect his keeper.

It would be easy to overlook The Fallen Idol on the basis that it's so Hitchcockian, so why not just watch Hitchcock instead? While I'd never advise against the master of suspense, Carol Reed's ingenious thriller from 1948 deserves its own due. For though Hitchcock's influence is pervasive (e.g., the high-angled shots looking down from the balcony which recall Notorious, the noticeable foregrounding of the paper plane and footprint, the underlying air of embedded misogyny), Reed's film certainly has its own distinctive pleasures to boast.

Firstly Hitchcock never had a writer half as sharp as the esteemed British novelist Graham…

I mean, yes, the child in this film is annoying, but he's a child, and it's his point-of-view, however flawed and naive, that the film is built around. He is the son of an ambassador in London's posh but boring Belgravia (there's even a scene in the Star Tavern, making me already miss the place) whose parents are off away, so he's in the care of the butler Baines (Ralph Richardson) and Mrs Baines, the latter of whom is best understood as a woman wronged, though she is a little bit one note. Which is to say that in his childish enthusiasm for the people around him, he happens onto some secrets and lies, and the rest of the film…