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The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed, 1948)  Graham Greene succinctly describes his screenplay for The Fallen Idol as “the story of a boy who believed his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence”. The boy, Phil, lives in a London embassy where his father is ambassador and the boy’s friend, Mr Baines, is the butler. As much as Phil (Bobby Henrey) adores and admires the kind and avuncular Mr Baines (Ralph Richardson), he loathes his wife, the domineering, jealous, and volatile housekeeper Mrs Baines (Sonia Dresdel). Left in the care of the Baines couple while his parents are both away, Phil stumbles on a dangerous secret. Mr Baines and a young typist, Julie (Michèle Morgan), are in love and meet surreptitiously. Baines has agreed to tell his wife of his affair and ask her to set him free to be with Julie, but he cannot bring himself to do so. Subsequent events lead to Mrs Baines accidentally falling to her death within the Embassy and the police suspecting Baines of killing her until they stumble upon evidence that clears him. The source short story, The Basement Room, was written by Greene twelve years and a World War before he worked on the screenplay for Carol Reed’s film and it is considerably more bleak, both in its characterisations and its conclusion. The upper class family mansion of The Basement Room is more claustrophobic than the mainly airy spaces of the large embassy building evoked by Vincent Korda's elegant sets for the film. And the Mr Baines of the short story actually does kill his wife instead of being wrongly suspected of doing so and then vindicated, as in the film. Furthermore, a few deft sentences in the short story predict an austere future and an eventual lonely and bewildered death for the adult Phil as a direct result of the childhood incident described. The Basement Room also has an inescapably misogynistic edge. The Julie character (Emmy) is a weak and passive figure identifiable by little more than her “thin and drawn figure” and her light raincoat. There is a nastily drawn female police officer, Rose, a minor character but described with relished disgust as having wrinkled stockings and discoloured teeth and, in Greene’s clinching expression of repulsion, resembling a male impersonator. In the film, the character called Rose becomes a flamboyant and resilient prostitute (Dora Bryan) who befriends the traumatised Phil at the police station and provides the film’s single bring-the-house-down laugh line: when the desk sergeant finally coaxes it from Phil that he’s the Ambassador’s son, Rose beams delightedly: “Ohoooo! I know your daddy!”  FINGER OF SUSPICION: George Woodbridge, Dora Bryan, Bobby Henrey Greene thought the film’s title, which he says was chosen by the distributors, “meaningless”. To a British filmgoer in 1949 who had not troubled to enquire otherwise, The Fallen Idol would probably have suggested that they were in for some tale of daring-do in the colonies featuring pith helmets, impenetrable creeper, dangerous animals, and drums in the night, which at least ties in with the entirely untrue stories about his past in colonial Africa with which Mr Baines entertains and diverts young Phil. A more accurate and intriguing title would have been Secrets and Lies, and Mike Leigh’s 1996 film of that name, although set in a very different time and social milieu, indeed explores similar themes of how we deceive ourselves and others to our own eventual cost. For the US release, David O Selznick re-titled Reed’s film as The Lost Illusion, which is perhaps more pertinent than The Fallen Idol, if more prosaic. But then if Selznick had got his way a couple of years later The Third Man would have been called “A Night in Vienna” and starred Noel Coward as Harry Lime. A major difference between the source story and the film stemming from the decision to relocate the action to an embassy is that Mr Baines' lover Julie (a secretarial worker on the staff} becomes a European, someone from a significantly different milieu and life experience to Baines, which in itself makes Baines a more complex, interesting, and sympathetic character. The dull and manipulative Mr Baines of The Basement Room would not have stood a chance with the film’s Julie. Although Julie’s background is not deeply explored in The Fallen Idol's dialogue, she represents an utterly different sensibility from the stuffy, sexually repressed, England of deferential servants and stale wasp-ravaged cakes in steamy café windows. As rounded out by the screenplay and played with quiet luminosity by Michèle Morgan, Julie becomes the central character most capable of recognising and dealing with the consequences of her own desires and of taking responsible action. Baines, on the other hand, takes refuge in denial and evasion and Mrs Baines in bitterness and retribution. When Baines concocts his naïvely reckless plan to spend the evening and night with Julie in the embassy, even in the improbable event of it remaining undetected it seems likely that he would have continued to postpone decisive action in relation to his marriage and would have lost Julie in the process.  FUNNY GAMES — Baines and Julie play late evening hide-and-seek with Phil. Phil’s sheltered but privileged seven year old lack of understanding and precocious sense of entitlement means that much of what he does and says makes things worse for his grown-up friend. A major strength of the film is that Phil is not a stereotypical cute kid or even a wholly sympathetic character. We may occasionally marvel at Baines patience or admit a shred of sympathy for Mrs Baines exasperation. As Geoffrey O’Brien points out in his essay for the Criterion Collection release, we may sometimes think that Phil ”begins to look quite odious, a little monster getting in the way of lovers desperate to be alone together.” There are a few moments, however, when Phil inadvertently aids the lovers’ enterprise. Just after the scene in which he has unexpectedly and highly inconveniently discovered Baines and Julie agonising over their affair in a cheap local café, the couple part, apparently conclusively. But as a bleakly disconsolate Baines walks away with Phil, the boy turns to investigate a parked car that interests him and notices, which Baines has not, that Julie has lingered longingly at a distance, Phil's distraction so precipitating an immediate reunion and the remainder of the plot. Doubtless for the avoidance of offence (and litigation), the country of the Embassy remains unspecified and when we briefly see a flag over the entrance it is a fictitious design. Both French and English, the languages of diplomacy, are spoken. Michèle Morgan is well known as a French film star and Bobby Henrey was cast from among hundreds of bilingual children to play Phil. The Ambassador and the First Secretary, played by the respectively German and Czech actors Gerald Hinze and Karel Stepanek, both speak English with a slight central European intonation, so probably there was a deliberate intention to muddy the waters and present the Embassy’s homeland to its 1949 British audience as a sort of all-purpose ‘abroad’. In which vein, comic potential is extracted from the figure of Detective Hart (Bernard Lee) who has been included in the police investigation team because of his evidently much overrated ability to understand French. In both the café scene and the police investigation, we can also infer that Baines understands at least some French, but we do not hear him speak it. But Julie, although her homeland is unspecified, is identifiably French both in accent and in her liberated attitude to sex, a characteristic that a French identity in a young woman would have instantly connoted to post-War British filmgoers. In a key exchange with Detective Crowe (Denis O’Dea), who is trying (largely with admirable patience) to unravel the events leading to Mrs Baines fatal fall, the Scotland Yard man questions Julie as to whether “intimacy” had ever taken place between herself and Baines. Standing right beside the bed on which this British A Certificate film indicates, but cannot show, that intimacy had indeed taken place, Julie responds that she and the police don’t talk the same language — and she doesn’t mean English. Further pressed by the tenacious detective, she angrily retorts: “Last night was the first time we were ever like this. Now, you, you take your photographs and fingerprints and everything. It’s love you’re photographing, not ‘intimacy’.” In the United States, the Breen Office censors requested that the scene was recut and additional dialogue inserted to indicate that Baines and Julie, rather than having sex at the time of Mrs Baines fatal fall, had been discussing terminating their relationship. Equally ludicrously, Breen asked for changes to the Police Station scene so that Dora Bryan’s brassy plastic-raincoated Rose became not an arrested prostitute but a local housewife who just happened to have dropped into the Station for a casual chat in the middle of the night. During Baines and Julie’s earlier rendezvous at the Zoo with Phil in tow, the scene’s dynamic is driven by the tension between Baines’ need to keep the ever-demanding Phil entertained and the more vital business of persuading Julie to give him one last chance to confirm his commitment by confessing the affair to his wife. Baines’ fantasies about his non-existent past career in colonial Africa are his own compensatory delusions as much as they are diversions for Phil. This also becomes evident in the Zoo scene. Baines and Phil are sitting on a bench in the Lion House at the start of what Phil had believed to be an excursion for the two of them. At first Baines is reminiscing distractedly to Phil, his eyes constantly darting away in anticipation of the arrival of Julie, whom we infer he has arranged to meet at this spot. Seeing a woman of superficially similar appearance in the distance Baines momentarily looks hopeful, but then becomes reabsorbed in his Africa fantasy and it is actually Phil who notices Julie approaching. To a modern audience, aware of animal welfare and conservation, the conditions of captivity of the animals in the Zoo scene will likely serve more powerfully than they did in the 1940s as a metaphor for the subjugation of the film’s human subjects within a rigid and censorious social order. If conditions in today’s major zoos have become more benign and scientifically informed, what we see of London Zoo in The Fallen Idol seems to be only a slight improvement on the royal menageries of earlier centuries. There is no establishing shot of Baines and Phil travelling to or entering the Zoo. Instead Reed delivers a perceptual jolt by cutting via a rapid dissolve from a bored Phil idly pacing the Embassy lobby to a close-up of the male Lion swiping his claws through the heavy steel bars of his brick cell and roaring aggressively. Later in the reptile house we see a provoked cobra lashing out at its glass and parrots chained to a line of outside perches having their tails thoughtlessly tweaked by Phil to produce squawks. Images suggestive of surveillance, entrapment, and captivity resonate through The Fallen Idol. The first image of the film is Phil crouching behind and peering through an iron balustrade, later we see the barred view of the feet of passers-by from Baines basement room, Rose under arrest, the detectives walking in a kind of ominous slow dance, like living prison bars, around their suspects. Phil’s pet snake, MacGregor, apart one brief wriggle across a balcony, is always confined — behind a loose brick in the wall, stuffed into Phil’s trouser pocket, in the tiny box supplied by Baines, and finally in Mrs Baines’ rag to be disposed of in the blazing stove, an image made more shocking by our ignorance as to whether she has first killed the animal using some swifter method. Towards the end of the Zoo visit Phil is fascinated by a cage of lively monkeys while Baines and Julie are in intense conversation a short distance away. As we hear an orgasmic screech from one of the monkeys, Phil turns and calls out “Oh look, Baines! Come and look at this. Baines! What are they doing?”. Rendered untypically speechless by one of Phil’s questions, Baines at first looks frozen by the same inhibition that threatens his love for Julie, while Julie smiles knowingly as they both turn their gaze away from Phil and towards each other.  PREPARING TO STRIKE: Phil's favourite Zoo exhibit; Mrs Baines interrogates. Bobby Henrey, Sonia Dresdel In Greene’s source story The Basement Room, the butler had actually served with Philip’s father in colonial Africa so his stories are at least notionally based on experience, whereas in the film they are wholly fantasies derived from the pulp adventure stories that for a century washed unhindered through the consciousness of the children of the British Empire. An audience today may find their sympathy with Baines checked when he invokes a vicious confrontation with rebellious “blackies” in which he casts himself as the fearless and solitary white hero. When eventually forced to confess the untruth of his fantasies, Baines murmurs resignedly “That was just a game, Phil”. The violence of his Africa tales is a symptom of the casual ubiquity of imperialist and racist attitudes in English popular culture (particularly that produced for boys) and is at odds with Baines’ gentle character and the decency and kindly humour that Julie and Phil both love him for. When Baines tells Phil that he left Africa because he wanted to marry and there were no white women available, Phil asks “Must they be white?”. Ralph Richardson’s face and the brief “err.. ah” sound that escapes him suggest that Phil has naively precipitated a small but effective breach in Baines defensive and circumscribed world view. In the final scenes Baines, having initially denied to the police that anyone was with him in the Embassy during the night of Mrs Baines’ death (thus denying Julie’s agency and their love), goes on to lie hopelessly over the inconsistencies in his earlier lies. The yarn he told Phil about the African rebellion culminated in him shooting the leader dead, supposedly in self-defence. Inconveniently, Phil mentions this boast in the presence of the police when Baines is already strongly suspected of murdering his wife, so obliging him to inflict further humiliation on himself by admitting in Phil’s hearing that he has never been out of the country, adding feebly: “Except once. To Ostend.” Phil, in spite of all he has witnessed, is no less baffled by the grown-up world at the end of the film than he was at the beginning. So maybe The Fallen Idol is a film about a boy beginning to grow up, but the boy is Baines who has at last begun to learn the difference between life and "just a game". Ralph Richardson excelled at portraying decent but flawed and conflicted men, and his Mr Baines is an outstanding picture of a good man trapped in a hopeless situation partly of his own making and partly the result of a censorious society. In Baines’ final quiet, confessional, exchange with the confused and tearful Phil, Richardson’s distinctive voice is resonant of the intimate recording of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence that the actor was to make in the 1950s. Richardson was well known to resist talking about his work, preferring to discuss cricket or motorbikes and regarding himself (like Carol Reed) as simply a technician in the service of good stories rather than an artist, remarking that actors are just “the jockeys of literature”.  PLAISIR D'AMOUR NE DURE QU'ON MOMENT Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan  CONFESSIONAL |
Ballooon, mein HerrAbout film, and other tricks of the light. ©BallooonMeinHerr, 2018; 2019;2020;2021;2022;2023;
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Le Quai des Brumes (1937)
Mädchen in Uniform
Little Dorrit on film
The Fallen Idol
Of Human Bondage (1964)
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Brief Encounter
Jean Marais' quiff
Portrait of Jennie
Prix de Beauté
Animals in film
Going to the Pictures in the 1920s
Alice in the Cities
Snowflake: alternative Christmas viewing
Shadow of a Vampire
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