The Fallen Idol (1948)

Peter's Nite
Beef, green beans a la Nora, Home baked cookies

Deirdre Feehan on Carol Reed via Senses of Cinema:
Born December 30, 1906 in London, British director Sir Carol Reed was the second son of the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress May Pinney. Following a public school education, Reed made his theatrical debut in 1924. He joined Edgar Wallace's troupe and acted in several plays, later overseeing film adaptations of Wallace's plays by Basil Dean's Associated Talking Pictures. (1) Between 1932 and 1934, Reed worked for Associated Talking Pictures, first as a dialogue director, then later as a second-unit director and an assistant director. (2) With Robert Wyler, he co-directed It Happened in Paris (1935), a comedy based on a French play. Reed's directorial debut came with Midshipman Easy (1935), a historical romance that marked his first foray into novel-to-film adaptations.

He began his directing career as the British film industry blossomed under producers Sir Alexander Korda, Basil Dean, J. Arthur Rank and Edward Black. Reed's first successes, Midshipman Easy (1935) and Laburnum Grove (1936), were produced by Basil Dean and scripted by Anthony Kimmins from popular novels, respectively, Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy and J.P. Priestley's Laburnum Grove. Reed collaborated with Anthony Kimmins on the story and the screenplay for Talk of the Devil (1937). Kimmins scripted four of Reed's first five films, bringing his own directing expertise to Reed's productions.

Collaboration marks Reed's most successful films as he himself claimed. (3) He worked not only with the same writers (Kimmins, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene) but often with the same art directors (Victor Korda, Vetchinsky), cinematographer (Robert Krasker) and editor (R.E. Dearing). Reed served as his own producer during the 1940s and 1950s, only relinquishing control after the flop, The Agony and the Ecstasy, in 1965.

Screenonline on Carol Reed:

Carol Reed was born in Putney, south London, on 30 December 1906, one of six children of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress, Beatrice Mae Pinney. Tree, who was respectably married, supported his second household substantially. Reed grew up in solid middle-class comfort, and was sent to a traditional public school, King's School, Canterbury, which he loathed. He planned to follow his father and become an actor, but in 1922 his mother, hoping to deflect this ambition, sent him to Massachusetts to join his elder brother on a chicken farm. Having neither taste nor aptitude for farming, Reed was back in England within six months. His mother gave way, and he joined a company headed by Dame Sybil Thorndike, making his stage debut in 1924.

Edgar Wallace, the alarmingly prolific thriller writer, had formed a troupe to put on stage adaptations of his novels. Reed joined him and appeared in three Wallace productions, doubling as assistant stage manager. When Wallace accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed British Lion Film Corporation in 1927, Reed became his personal assistant, helping to supervise filmed adaptations of Wallace's thrillers during the day while still acting and stage managing in the evenings. This hectic double life continued until Wallace died of pneumonia in 1932. Abandoning the stage for good, Reed moved to Ealing Studios as dialogue director for Associated Talking Pictures, then being run by Basil Dean.

At Ealing Reed swiftly worked his way up from dialogue director to assistant director. His first experience of directing was on It Happened in Paris (1935), a comedy directed by Robert Wyler (William Wyler's elder brother) to which Reed contributed additional footage. The following year he directed his first solo film, Midshipman Easy, adapted from Captain Marryat's Victorian adventure novel. Graham Greene, writing in The Spectator, felt that Reed showed "more sense of the cinema than most veteran British directors". Greene was even more taken by Reed's next film, Laburnum Grove (1936), adapted from a stage comedy by J.B. Priestley. "Here at last is an English film one can unreservedly praise," he wrote with an almost audible sigh of relief; both films, he went on, were "thoroughly workmanlike and unpretentious, with just the hint of a personal manner which makes one believe that Mr Reed, when he gets the right script, will prove far more than efficient".

BFI on The Fallen Idol:

This is the great London film of a director celebrated for his atmospheric evocation of cities such as Belfast, Berlin, and Vienna – urban labyrinths in which secrets lurk around every corner. Shot by the great French cinematographer Georges Périnal, it vividly captures the city's sunlit squares and shadowy night-time streets, as well as the cold, cavernous interiors of the embassy residence.

The critics of the time, wearied by "a flood of second rate sagas", greeted The Fallen Idol with relief, bestowing particular praise on the amazingly natural performance of Bobby Henrey (acclaimed by The Sunday Chronicle as "the greatest Kid since Coogan") and Richardson’s beautifully understated interpretation of his role. Looking back today, the film is also notable for a wickedly funny cameo from Dora Bryan (in just her second film appearance) as the tart with a heart who encounters the runaway Felipe in a police station.

Graham Greene's script, adapted from his novella 'The Basement Room' (1935) about a young boy who unwittingly betrays his friend to the police, was to win him an Oscar nomination as well as the award for Best Screenplay at Venice. Preferred by Greene to The Third Man (his next collaboration with Reed), The Fallen Idol is a work of exceptional psychological subtlety and an acute portrayal of the separate realities inhabited by adults and children, with their conflicting interpretations of the world around them.

DVD Savant goes behind the scenes:

If the stories of the filming of The Fallen Idol are to believed, the actors working with young Bobby Henrey are to be commended, for director Reed had to coax and tease a performance out of a boy simply unsuited for acting work. Henrey had the perfect look and manner -- the typical trained English child actor would have been useless -- but he also had a short attention span, became bored easily and wouldn't follow directions. According to assistant director Guy Hamilton, Bobby would burn up thousands of feet of film looking in the wrong direction or departing from character. Much of Henrey's performance is pasted together from bits of takes brilliantly edited to create a wonderful natural portrait of a charming child. Reed must have had an enormous respect for children to maintain the patience needed to get the film he needed.

New York Times encounters Graham Greene:

''A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious,'' the writer told a questioner in a rare and vivid appearance beyond the pages of his books. He told of cataloguing his dreams, searching for the tracks of a fresh character in fiction. ''Because I was psychoanalyzed when I was 16,'' he said, ''I have always been interested in dreams and the unconscious.'

A select audience of his readers were rapt in inquiring about evil and boredom, God and Communism and the ways of Mr. Greene's mind as he spoke in a private session at Georgetown University Monday night. ''The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about,'' he told another questioner, and Mr. Greene's gratitude and longing for this serendipitous trick seemed palpable in the dimness of Gaston Hall. ''At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.''

Yes, but how do you do it? The questions in the hourlong visit were variations of this basic inquiry into the labors of imagination.

''I generally have a character and the beginning of a story,'' Mr. Greene said, ''and the end of a story.'' A pause, a thin smile from the angular, white-haired man seated onstage in a blue suit worthy of his wartime days as an intelligence agent. ''And in between,'' he continued, ''the middle develops in a way I don't foresee.'' Yes, but how do you do it? ''When I was young, I wrote a book in nine months, like a childbirth,'' he said, looking back from his 82d year. With time, the process lengthened for him to three years, then 10 years, he said, sounding autumnal. ''Now there are long intervals before the idea for a new book comes. That's a very painful period.''

Part of his charm for the audience clearly was that sharp fragments of Graham Greene's reality reappear burnished in his fiction, most graphically in his movie scripts for ''The Third Man'' and ''Our Man in Havana.'' After all his talk of dreams and flight from boredom, he sounded like a proud laborer in describing how anger had worked just as well to settle esthetic struggles with Carol Reed, the movie director.

''The fighting would begin and I'd say, 'Oh for God's sake let's abandon the bloody thing,' and after that everything would go smoothly,'' Mr. Greene told his listeners, who departed after thankful applause, still wondering how he does it.