Kritiken

When Rialto Pictures mounted a stateside theatrical reissue of THE FALLEN IDOL in 2006, it was hailed as a neglected classic. Today it feels a bit less neglected, and perhaps a bit less of a classic, too. It doesn't feel as fresh as Ted Tetzlaff's contemporaneous B-noir thriller THE WINDOW, which also stars a young Bobby (Driscoll) as a boy who suspects he holds the key to a household murder... Its virtues lie not in its narrative ingenuity, but in its emotional intensity and its precisely judged details.

Written by the great Graham Greene, the film builds up pressure subtly over time, creating an entire narrative around the cascading consequences of dishonesty. Labyrinthine interiors of the embassy contain endless hiding places flanked by massive glass windows. It's a layered and precipitous space for futile efforts of men and women trying desperately to cover their tracks.

The virginal eye and the "nasty, wicked mind," the perplexing adult whirl impeccably laid out by Reed as a matter of essential lies and unsteady witnesses. Chabrol in Les Bonnes Femmes has the trip to the zoo ("Aw, you're pretty," coos the lad to the cobra lunging behind the glass pane), the much-needed hug after the traumatic plunge comes from a cockney streetwalker at the police station.

Inside a two-year period, Carol Reed made Odd Man Out and The Third Man. Reed wasn't just on a roll, he was on fire. Somehow though, The Fallen Idol has always been the Cinderella title among this esteemed trio, perhaps lacking the pulse-quickening spectacle or thrilling baroque visuals of the other two. However, the current carefully restored release makes a strong case that this story... remains the most perfect jewel in Reed's entire filmography.

The film itself exemplifies the extraordinary craftsmanship of British cinema in the late forties, both behind the camera and in front of it. Even as a child, I could grasp that there was something extraordinary about the intricate surfaces created by Georges Périnal's cinematography and Vincent Korda's set designs and the sometimes harsh spareness of Graham Greene's dialogue and Carol Reed's direction.

In his story, Greene writes that the boy "didn't understand a thing; he was caught up in other people's darkness." Reed captures both the writer's intentions and the child's panicked isolation in a scene that finds Phillipe fleeing through city streets as steeped in shadow and dread as those in the noirs of Anthony Mann. As the film's putatively happy (and strange) windup makes it clear, when childhood ends, there really is no place left to run.

Reed is less ruthless than Hitchcock in directing the viewer. Thanks in part to Graham Greene's script, however, he does create an atmosphere of free-floating, audience-implicating guilt... As the eponymous idol, Richardson is quietly splendid. His buttoned-up butler is an amiable fabulist, roguish yet decent, understated but passionate. The yearning with which he regards the radiant Morgan fuels the movie.

One of the most brilliant demonstrations of P.O.V. filmmaking... The film works beautifully and reminds us of the glories of the black-and-white cinema at its peak, shortly before the beginning of its gradual demise.

Carol Reed's camera tricks can't quite cover the lack of a meaningful point of view... Graham Greene's screenplay centers on the pivotal moment when a child first discovers sin, but the boy's perspective is neglected in favor of facile suspense structures and a thuddingly conventional whodunit finale.