The Fallen Idol - Criterion Collection |  | Directors: Andy Kelleher, Carol Reed
Actors: Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan, John Boorman, Joseph Cotten, Bryan Forbes
Studio: Criterion
Category: DVD
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Rating:  31 reviews
Format: Black & White, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 95 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: CC1655DDVD
UPC: 715515020527
EAN: 0715515020527
Theatrical Release Date: November 7, 2006
Release Date: November 7, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | The Fallen Idol was the first of three collaborations between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, who would later team up on the legendary The Third Man, and is a small masterpiece itself. An elegant, thrilling balancing act of suspense and farce, this tale of the fraught relationship between a boy and his beloved butler, whom the child eventually believes might be guilty of murder, is a |
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Amazon.com
In the impressive filmography of British director Carol Reed, The Fallen Idol is sandwiched between Odd Man Out and The Third Man--the second of three consecutive masterpieces (adapted by Graham Greene from his short story "The Basement Room") by a filmmaker at the peak of his artistic powers. Of those three, The Fallen Idol is the most delicately subdued, but it's a flawlessly plotted thriller that achieves considerable tension through the psychology of its characters. By telling the story through the eyes of a child, the plot gains even greater urgency as a variation on the theme of "the boy who cried wolf," as young Phillipe (Bobby Henrey)--the 8-year-old son of the French ambassador to England--struggles to clear his beloved embassy butler Baines (Ralph Richardson) from being wrongfully accused of murder. Baines is burdened with a shrewish, overbearing wife (Sonia Dresdel) whose rigid, disciplinarian control of Phillipe sets the stage for suspense; when Mrs. Baines dies in a terrible fall on the embassy staircase, her husband (who has been having a secret affair with an embassy typist) is the prime suspect. Phillipe, caught between his love for Baines and his suspicion of the butler's guilt, tries to convince investigators of Baines's innocence. But the boy's pleas are ignored, and The Fallen Idol expertly plays on the child's good but woefully misguided intentions. In Reed's visual strategy, a simple paper airplane can become the focus of almost unbearable suspense, and as incriminating evidence builds a strong case against Baines, Reed maintains that suspense to the final moments of the film. Low-key and yet still highly effective, the film received Oscar nominations for Reed's direction and Greene's adapted screenplay. --Jeff Shannon
Product Description
The Fallen Idol was the first of three collaborations between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene who would later team up on the legendary The Third Man and is a small masterpiece itself. An elegant thrilling balancing act of suspense and farce this tale of the fraught relationship between a boy and his beloved butler whom the child eventually believes might be guilty of murder is a visually and verbally dazzling knockout with enough tricks up its sleeve to stand with the best of early Hitchcock. Special Features: New restored high-definition digital transfer"A Sense of Carol Reed" a 2006 documentaryOriginal press bookNew essays by critic Geoffrey O'Brien author David Lodge and Nicholas WapshottIllustrated Reed filmographySystem Requirements:Running Time: 95 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 715515020527 Manufacturer No: CC1655DDVD
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
 Missing frames August 8, 2009
A. Baker (Somerset, England)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is unfortunate that the Criterion issue of Reed's film has several missing frames in the sequence in which Sonia Dresdel notices Bobby Henrey on the dangerous ledge. The British issue has exactly the same defect (as well as being inferior in every other way). Clearly both issues used the same damaged print. Otherwise, the American disc is up to the usual high Criterion standards. - Anthony Baker, Somerset, England
 British Classic January 11, 2009
Douglas Doepke (Claremont CA USA)
Was there ever a more civilized treatment of infidelity than this British suspenser. Ralph Richardson's butler Baines is the very last word in polished civility and stiff upper lip no matter how extreme the provocation. Yet he's so unfailingly kind and considerate to the boy Phillipe that he's among the most admirable of transgressors. The bond between the lonely son of the French ambassador and the hen-pecked English butler is memorably touching and the emotional heart of the film.
Director Carol Reed has basically a single set to work with. But it's a great one with the sweeping staircase, high domed ceiling, and checkerboard tiles, all keeping the eye entertained at the same time the sinister events unfold. Those events are driven by poor Sonia Dresdel who has the thankless role of the cruel wife and housekeeper Mrs. Baines that she plays to the hilt. You just know from the start that Phillipe's pet garter snake, MacGregor, is doomed in her bleak household. In fact, the screenplay has loaded the deck by making her such an unsympathetic figure. Who can blame Baines for his covert rendeszvous with the lovely Julie (Michelle Morgan) when his shrewish wife remains in the empty embassy waiting to pounce.
What really distinguishes the movie is its skill at viewing adult actions through the eyes of the child. Thus, instead of a conventional two-shot close-up of Baines and Julie in intimate conversation, Reed gives us a three-shot from the perspective of Phillipe as he watches them. We may know what's up with them, but we also share the boy's puzzlement over a world he has yet to grow into. We share that perspective throughout, which is not only an unusual one, but visually reinforces the touching bond between the child of the elite and the highly polished commoner. It also turns the emotional climax (not the dramatic) into a memorably revealing one-- a rite of passage, as it were.
Anyway, in my little book, the movie qualifies as a genuine classic, placing Carol Reed in the same Pantheon as contemporary British masters Hitchcock and Michael Powell. Once you see it, you don't forget it.
 Good September 19, 2008
Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
1 out of 9 found this review helpful
The Fallen Idol is the third film of British filmmaker Carol Reed's that I've seen. Prior to that I've watched the dreadful Oscar-winning musical Oliver!, the solid Charlton Heston biopic of Michelangelo, The Agony And The Ecstasy, and now this. Yes, I have also watched The Third Man, the 1949 film attributed to Reed, but have always hedged upon taking the Warren Commission-like stance that it was Reed's film alone, and not an Orson Welles film merely bearded by Reed. Well, after watching The Fallen Idol, the 1948 film that directly preceded The Third Man, I can tell you that I have no doubts that the bulk of The Third Man was a Welles project that used the functional journeyman studio director Reed as a studio front against the American blacklist.
This is not because The Fallen Idol is such a bad film- it's merely mediocre, even if it is based upon a Graham Greene work (as is The Third Man)- The Basement Room, but that there are only a few techniques in the film which augur the grandiosity of their usage in the later film- which was so Wellesian, that to contemplate that Reed soared to greatness out of mediocrity, for the single film he collaborated upon with Welles, then resumed a mediocre career, when the more Occam's Razor answer is that it was Welles who guided the vision of The Third Man, is to simply not recognize verities of the way art is created and the way artists work and mature.
As example, the two later Reed films I mention differ from The Third Man in that they are in color, in different genres, and made many years later, so that one could argue that Reed may have simply `lost his touch.' But, given that The Fallen Idol was made a year earlier, is in black and white, and based upon a work by the same writer, the comparisons between the two films is apt, although the difference in quality is stark. But, why would Reed agree to such a thing? Well, he wanted to break into the American market, where this film did not do as well as other films by Britons as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, he shared political sympathies with and an artistic admiration of Welles. Plus, he got locked into a career track that led to greater financial success and recognition even as the requia for his solid artistic talents diminished in need. If you were a man who recognized his limits, and had a chance to help an idol whose techniques you aped, in exchange for personal success, would you refuse? Or would you do so, and deny the obvious to your grave?
Yet, especially in recent years, there seems to have been a critical movement afoot to try and argue that this mediocre film is somehow on par with The Third Man, and since it is so manifestly inferior, it begs a reasoning of the motives. The one which makes the most sense is that some critics want to argue that Reed was some visionary auteur, and that The Third Man was not such a great sore thumb in an otherwise workaday filmic resume. In short, the argument is clearly meant to bolster the claim that Reed was the force behind both films, rather than just the first one, and a beard for the second. Yet, The Third Man clearly is an oddity- due to its great quality, and unlike the bloated solidity of The Agony And The Ecstasy or the execrable dotty musical Oliver!, this earlier film is the key to unraveling The Third Man's real provenance, for without it, those who deny Orson Welles' hand in that film can obscure their arguments with time, technical developments, and technique, while The Fallen Idol acts as a smoking gun that reveals its creator's limits, its alibiers' motives, and its successor film's great ineffability. And, for that, there is no contrived misreading needed!
Clock Watching September 14, 2008
F. S. L'hoir (Irvine, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Carol Reed's "Fallen Idol," which I first saw as a child, withstands the test of time. Even though I didn't understand the adult implications of the plot then, I have never forgotten the story (still associating it with the little wooden-seated movie house where my father took the family every week to see British films). I was not disappointed; I found it just as absorbing--and even more compelling--half-a-century later.
The screenplay is, needless to say, excellent. Working closely with Carol Reed, Graham Greene rewrote his original short story, "The Basement Room." In "Fallen Idol," which takes place at a foreign embassy in London, Greene is actually revisiting the topic of a child's-eye-view of spying, loneliness, betrayal by an idolized adult, and the overhearing of frightening things that are not properly understood (Compare "Fallen Idol" to his haunting three-page story, "I Spy," about another small lonely boy who witnesses betrayal and is frightened of things that happen in the dark.). Greene was to collaborate successfully again with Reed on "The Third Man," and--from the sublime to the ridiculous--on "Our Man In Havana."
Expertly directed by Reed, the child Philippe--played by Bobby Henrey, a non-actor--is so natural and believable that one might say that he is ably assisted by Ralph Richardson and Michelle Morgan (with Jack Hawkins in the minor role of a detective who lends his chiming watch to the boy in order to distract him). The cinematography is also superb. The moody black and white renders the melodramatic story, which in color might seem overwrought, plausible. The music of William Alwyn, who also scored Reed's "Odd Man Out," further contributes to the stark ambience of the film.
One of the delights of British cinema of the era was the non-sequitur, as when the clock-maker interrupts the police interrogation of Baines, the Butler, in order to wind one of the gigantic embassy clocks. Just when Reed has wound the plot to its tightest point, he introduces the clock-winder, who serves as a moment of understated comic relief (Part of Reed's genius was knowing when to use moments of humor to lighten the tension.) And yet, references to clocks and watches seem to serve a more subtle purpose in Reed and Greene's scenario, to emphasize both the slowness of time in the mind of the boy and the literal "watching" of something frightening that he shouldn't have seen.
This film may not be for everyone (For instance, my son, who likes action flicks in wide-screen surround-sound color, would probably hate it.), but it is certainly recommended for the discerning viewer who likes a time-tested suspense film, which can be not only watched, but also taken at more than mere face-value.
wrong format July 8, 2008
Dr. Donald Marshall (Australia)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
unfortunately the video which you sent, would not play on my Australian DVD and I had to watch it on my computer. I have not had this problem before, when ordering from Amazon.com. I can only imagine it was the wrong format. I still enjoyed watching the film and was just as impressed as I was the first time I saw it. I think the child who played phile was quite superb.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
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