The Fallen Idol
Carol Reed (1948)
Carol Reed made some good films before and during the Second World War (Bank Holiday (1938), Kipps (1941)) but the early post-war years were his heyday. Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man arrived in consecutive years (1947-49), The Man Between just a few years later (1953). (I’ve not seen Reed’s only intervening film, the 1952 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands.) He worked twice running with Graham Greene as screenwriter. Although The Third Man is their more famous collaboration, I prefer The Fallen Idol – the standout in BFI’s selection for this month’s ‘Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema 1945-1960’ season.
The action takes place, over the course of one weekend, in and around an embassy in London’s Belgravia (the French embassy in all but name, certainly the embassy of a French-speaking country). At the start of the film, the ambassador (Gerard Heinz) is about to leave for the airport, hoping to bring back to London his wife, who has been having hospital treatment abroad for several months. The couple have an eight-year-old son, Philippe (Bobby Henrey), known as Phile, who is left for the weekend in the care of the embassy’s butler and housekeeper, a married couple. Phile likes and admires affable, entertaining Baines (Ralph Richardson), loathes his killjoy wife (Sonia Dresdel). Shortly after his father’s departure, and despite being confined to the nursery after incurring the wrath of Mrs Baines, Phile slips out of the embassy via the fire escape. In a nearby street, he stops outside a teashop. He sees through the window that Baines is inside, in urgent conversation with a young woman. Phile calls out the butler’s name. Startled, Baines hastily explains that his companion, Julie (Michèle Morgan), is his niece.
Phile recognises Julie from the embassy, where she works as a typist. He doesn’t know that she isn’t Baines’ niece or the real nature of their relationship. Baines asks Phile not to mention the teashop meeting to Mrs Baines. These are early instances of what will be The Fallen Idol‘s central pattern – of things the boy doesn’t understand, of lies that the grown-ups tell him and secrets they urge him to keep. The film’s audience can see immediately that Baines and Julie are having an affair: a scene between them, just after Phile has taken them by surprise, makes clear that Julie has regretfully decided their relationship has no future, and is planning to sail abroad before the weekend’s out. To try and change Julie’s mind, Baines that evening tells his wife he wants to end their marriage, but to no avail. Soon afterwards, Mrs Baines prises out of Phile the information that her husband was in a teashop with his ‘niece’ – but Phile mustn’t let Baines know that she knows. If he keeps this secret between them, says the housekeeper, she’ll buy Phile the new Meccano set he has his eye on.
By next morning, Mrs Baines has left the embassy, supposedly to visit a relative, and Phile spends the day with Baines and Julie at London Zoo. On their return to Belgrave Square, a telegram is waiting: Mrs Baines will be staying two more days with her ailing aunt. In fact, she’s secretly in the embassy, where she spies on the trio’s ‘picnic’ evening meal, and game of hide-and-seek. She first appears to Phile, waking him up in the nursery. Once the boy alerts Baines, the latter tries to calm his furious wife, telling her to go downstairs so that they can talk. Mrs Baines demands to know, from Phile then from her husband, where Julie is. Getting no answer, she steps onto a ledge above the embassy staircase, to peer over a terrace and into the guest room she suspects Julie is sharing with her husband. Mrs Baines leans against a window, which opens outwards at the top, taking her off her feet: she plunges to her death, at the foot of the staircase. Phile, who witnessed the couple’s argument on the landing, sees the result of the fall, but not how it happened.
Graham Greene’s screenplay is a masterly construction, in which nothing goes to waste. For example, Phile adores hearing Baines’ stories of his days in Africa, where he shot elephants, even once shot a man dead, in self-defence: putting two and two together, Phile thinks that Baines pushed his wife down the stairs, also in self-defence. Yet the stories of Africa are just that – fictions, part of The Fallen Idol’s tissue of lies. Once Scotland Yard and officers arrive at the embassy to investigate Mrs Baines’ death, it’s revealed that Baines has never been further abroad than Ostend. His tales of Africa, a big part of why Phile heroises Baines, will also be part of how the child, finding out that the tales are inventions, discovers Baines’ feet of clay. One of the three Scotland Yard men – along with Chief Inspector Crowe (Denis O’Dea) and Inspector Ames (Jack Hawkins) – is Inspector Hart (Bernard Lee), whose main job is to act as French interpreter in interviews with Phile and Julie. Although Hart’s basic schoolboy French is played for comedy at first, it’s no laughing matter when, in the drama’s climax, Phile desperately blurts out to him what really happened. Falsehoods and obfuscations abound during the police investigation. At first, Baines omits any mention of Julie in his account of the previous evening – as does Phile, though Julie, when she hears the boy’s lies, begs him to tell the truth. By the time Phile does so, in English, Chief Inspector Crowe, with a weary sigh, dismisses this latest account as more of Phile’s fibs. Crowe then says to Phile, in a more casual and indulgent tone, ‘Shall I tell you a secret?’ Phile’s instant, impassioned ‘No!’ in response is funny and poignant.
Bobby Henrey’s Phile is among the most memorable of all screen children – Henrey’s highly individual, eccentric delivery and movement are magnetic, yet completely natural (not least in the London Zoo episode, where the child keeps interrupting Baines and Julie’s private moments together but they of course can’t object). Carol Reed directs him with great skill and sensitivity. Henrey, who really was only eight years old at the time, has the main part – certainly the main point of view – in The Fallen Idol, but seems wonderfully oblivious to the weight he’s being asked to carry. It helps, of course, that there are substantial adult characters, too, and gifted actors playing them – especially Ralph Richardson. In the early stages, he invests Baines’ formal carriage and gestures, and his confidential glances at Phile, with a lovely humour that makes it easy to see why the boy is entranced by the butler – and that these gestures and glances, like the Africa memories, have become part of a mutually enjoyed routine. (Richardson gave his two finest cinema performances in the space of little more than a year in The Fallen Idol and William Wyler’s The Heiress.) Playing malignant Mrs Baines was an unenviable task, and Sonia Dresdel occasionally seems too much – excessively crafty in her keeping-a-secret scene with Phile. It’s an impressive performance, even so: when her husband tells Mrs Baines he wants out, her shock that her life, unhappy as it makes her, is about to fall apart, is powerfully conveyed. Dresdel’s final desperation is in two ways frightening.
Michèle Morgan and the three detectives all do well but an array of British character actors in cameos make a stronger impact. Bewildered and frightened when he sees what has happened to Mrs Baines, Phil, in his pyjamas, heads back to the fire escape and down into the street: in the dead of night and pouring rain, he keeps running until he runs into a bobby on the beat, who takes Phile to the nearest police station. George Woodbridge is the sergeant on duty there and Dora Bryan does a splendid turn as a local lady of the night, evidently a station regular. Dandy Nichols and Joan Young, two cleaners at the embassy, who hated Mrs Baines, enjoy a gruesome exchange the morning after the night before: ‘Poor Mrs Baines. Down these very stairs. I can almost see her. Can’t you?’ ‘Yes, I expect her neck was snapped like a matchstick.’ ‘D’you see any blood?’ ‘There wouldn’t be any blood if her neck was broken, would there?’ ‘Might be a little if the bone came through …’ This isn’t the only first-rate macabre dialogue in Greene’s script. Phile has a pet snake, Macgregor, whom cruel Mrs Baines incinerates. Baines tries to console the boy:
Baines Well, tomorrow we’ll – we’ll put up a little stone in the garden …
Phile And we’ll write his name on it: ‘Macgregor, killed by Mrs. Baines’. And the date-
Baines No, no – not that. Something like ’My Macgregor. Very lovely he was in his life …’
There’s a visual highlight so exceedingly suspenseful that it’s nearly a comic highlight, too. Soon after the arrival of Scotland Yard, Phile is playing with the paper plane that he’s made of Mrs Baines’ cunning telegram and launches it from the top of the staircase. It loops the loop endlessly before landing at Jack Hawkins’ feet. There’s so much more to admire than this, though, in Georges Périnal’s black-and-white cinematography, and Carol Reed’s overall visual scheme. Phile repeatedly watches what’s going on from high on the staircase or through windows of upstairs rooms – Périnal makes the embassy’s entrance hall and the street outside, seem miles below Phile’s viewpoint. The Fallen Idol isn’t usually termed a film noir, yet its distorted camera angles are an excellent expression of the secrets-and-lies texture.
The source material is a short story by Graham Greene, first published in 1936. He supposedly hated the change in its title, though you can see why London Films thought The Basement Room unappealing. Greene’s script itself makes huge changes to the short story, in which Baines does kill his wife and is convicted of her murder. Philip Kemp’s Sight and Sound (August 2006) piece, which BFI used as their handout for The Fallen Idol, points out that Greene misremembered his original when he wrote, presumably in retrospect, that:
‘The [film’s] subject no longer concerned a small boy who unwittingly betrayed his best friend to the police, but dealt instead with a small boy who believed that his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence.’
According to Kemp, the boy in The Basement Room ‘tired of all the lies and secrets, deliberately betrays his friend. … By doing so, Greene implies, he blights his own life for ever, “extricate[ing] himself from life, from love, from Baines with a merciless egotism”. (That ‘blights his own life for ever’, in combination with the theme of a boy’s disillusionment, seems to anticipate L P Hartley’s The Go-Between, first published in 1953. By the way, The Fallen Idol makes a bit too much use of Richard Addinsell’s music but it’s not as intrusive as Michel Legrand’s for Joseph Losey’s 1971 film of The Go-Between!) Philip Kemp nevertheless thinks ‘the alternative tragic irony towards which the film’s narrative logic seems to be heading – Baines arrested for murder as a result of the boy’s well-meant lies – would surely have worked better than the fudge we get’.
The film’s closing stages – or, at least, the detectives’ conclusion that Mrs Baines’ death was, as Baines has claimed, accidental – are too hurried. Despite his African inventions, Baines does have a gun, which he keeps with other effects in the basement room that is his private domain. As he contemplates suicide there, police investigators find a woman’s footprint in soil on the window ledge – soil that, earlier in the weekend, was spilt from a potted plant, knocked over on the landing above the staircase when Mrs Baines was remonstrating with Phile. Hey presto: Baines is cleared (even though DI Crowe disbelieves Phile when he confirms that he argued with Mrs Baines and upset the plant). Yet Carol Reed redeems Baines’ rushed redemption in the closing scene, thanks to his young lead. Phile is in his usual place on the staircase when his parents arrive home. The boy hasn’t seen his mother for what, in eight-year-old’s time, must seem ages. Bobby Henrey’s face makes you wonder for a moment if Phile doesn’t even recognise her then shifts into a kind of affectionate, eager curiosity about this quasi-stranger. The Fallen Idol‘s ending represents, to be sure, a softening of Graham Greene’s original (no doubt with an eye to the box office, where the film, in Britain anyway, fared very well). But it’s emotionally expressive and effective, too.
4 May 2026