The Fallen Idol

Rating NR Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Ralph Richardson, Michele Morgan, Sonia Dresdel, Bobby Henrey, Denis O'Dea Directed by Carol Reed Publisher Criterion Collection External Links Official Criterion Collection Website

Each year, the Cannes International Film Festival stages a retrospective of a classic film director. This year's choice was both surprising and much-needed. British filmmaker Carol Reed has been mostly forgotten over the years. Although his career would include a number of exceptional films (The Stars Look Down, The Way Ahead, Outcast of the Islands) it would also be dotted by more than his fair share of misfires (The Key, Our Man in Havana, Flap). Even his Oscar-winning Oliver! seems little more than an overblown relic of the late 60's desperate flirtation with Broadway musicals. Even in the best of times, critics accused Reed of being little more than a brilliant technician, a man who could tell a good story but impose little of his own personality on the work.

So why the honor of a Cannes retrospective? Probably because his career also included three imperishable classics. What director couldn't call it a career if his credits included The Third Man (1950), Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948)?

The sad thing about falling into critical limbo is that frequently your best work is unnecessarily marginalized. When I was in film school in the late '70's it seemed as though no class was complete without a lengthy discussion of some aspect of The Third Man. Reed's use of camera angles, his brilliant employment of postwar Vienna, and his staging (including possibly the greatest entrance ever filmed) were all pointed to as hallmarks of the film's impact. Nowadays, most film schools treat The Third Man as a nice Hitchcock clone...if they treat it at all.

I was pleased that the Festival chose to honor Reed and doubly so that it offered me the chance to see Odd Man Out on the big screen for the first time in over thirty years. Like all screenings at Cannes, the film is preceded by an announcement asking the audience to "refrain from excessively loud or long phone calls." Unlike the other screenings, the audience didn't need the warning. The crowded house was silent, wrapped up in Reed's tale of a wounded IRA gunmen forced to make his way alone through the mean streets of British-occupied Dublin.

Of his three masterpieces, The Fallen Idol is probably the least seen. Certainly a hit in its day, its slowly building suspense probably seems a bit quaint to most audiences. Of course that would be to most audiences who haven't seen it. In its own quiet way, The Fallen Idol is first-rate thriller. It is also one of the cinema's great treatises on childhood and the search for family.

Philip (Bobby Henrey) is a more than precocious young boy. The son of an emotionally distant French ambassador and an absentee mother, he naturally gravitates toward the warmth of embassy butler Baines (Ralph Richardson). Unfortunately, part of this family package is Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel), a shrew whose idea of disciplining Philip is to throw his pet garter snake in the furnace. When the ambassador leaves to bring Philip's mother home from the hospital, Philip finds that his faux family is riven by sexual tensions and jealousies with which he is hopelessly ill-equipped to handle.

The Fallen Idol certainly demonstrates Reed's command of the plastics of cinema but, more importantly, his most interesting talent. Reed was one of a handful of directors who knew how to handle child actors. The old axiom in film is that for each child you cast you need to double your budget and triple your schedule. If they're well-trained, child actors come across as automatons; if they have no training they also probably have no ability to focus. Henrey was in the latter category. The stories of how many takes he needed and how rambunctious he was are near-legendary. Reed knew how to indulge his star, when to let him go and how to get his camera to capture the right moment. The result is a performance that moves away from the idea that cute children steal the picture from the stars. Henrey is so naturalistic, so human, that he becomes a part of the film's texture, the reason we believe the film to be a slice of realism when it is in fact a tightly constructed fantasy.

The real distinguishing characteristic of The Fallen Idol, though, is the way in which Reed uses the suspense to reveal his family theme. Confused by his indifferent parents, Philip seeks supplemental parents in all directions. When he unknowingly stumbles across Baines and his lover (Michele Morgan), he swiftly adopts her as a better maternal role model than either his real mother or Mrs Baines. When he believes that he has witnessed Baines in the act of murdering Mrs Baines, Philip runs away from the embassy and immediately shifts his affections to a police officer and his prisoner, a prostitute. Even the investigating officer at the scene of the supposed murder becomes one more possible parental figure. Soon, Philip doesn't know one emotional reality from another. The result is that he can no longer distinguish between helping Baines and hurting him, truth from lie. Reed portrays Philip with great sensitivity and without judgment. He is simply a confused young boy desperately seeking an emotional connection in an adult world he can't possibly hope to grasp.

Criterion Collection has outdone itself proud with a superlative black and white transfer, one which pays close attention to the ways in which the sunny world of London ironically parallel the dark undercurrents of the story. The disk also includes a fond and generally excellent short doc on the career of Carol Reed. Hopefully, this can help to interest people in once again checking out the other great works of this fascinating filmmaker.