Richard von Busack's After Images: The Fallen Idol

 
 

Now hitting the repertory movie circuit nationwide, The Fallen Idol could be filed comfortably under film noir, despite an ending that endorses second chances -- a sense of redemption goes against noir's idea of the city as a mousetrap for humans.  But the movie has its alleys, its shadows, a pistol in a drawer, and an adulterous husband pushed to the brink of murder. Also, it's directed by Carol Reed, whose previous collaboration with Graham Greene, The Third Man, is the very definition of noir. Reed had retrieved the "Dutch Angle," the skewed-sideways camera, to suggest a world out of alignment, as well as other cinema ideas lifted from the wreckage of German Expressionism. This includes the witchy, stylized evil of the lead villainess, Sonia Dresdel, whose last line is a cackling scream worthy of Margaret Hamilton.
 
The Fallen Idol begins with a look at the pampered though negligent childhood of Phillipe (Bobby Henrey), a European ambassador's son living in a park side embassy mansion in London. From his perch at the top of the stairs, Phillipe smiles a smile of satiety as he watches his household  scoot on their morning errands, across a vast checkerboard floor. His favorite among the servants is the butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), a jaunty character who likes to fill the Phillipe's head with stories of his African adventures. (Asked if he killed any lions there, Baines answers, "I mostly let them live.") The child is more distracted by his pet snake MacGregor than the events around him. But when this little prince gets bored and tracks down his favorite, he finds Baines huddled in a nearby tea-shop with his girlfriend Julie (Michele Morgan). Julie is about to leave for France with no forwarding address, rather than staying in London and continuing to be the other woman.

While The Fallen Idol seems like a simple drama of adultery, the suspense intensifies throughout. At the beginning of the film, we've seen a glimpse of the revolver Baines has supposedly once used, and may use again. And the pressure increases during a trip to the zoo Baines uses as an excuse to meet Julie one last time. There, the boy-prince bellows for Baines' attention, tearing the butler away from this last encounter with his lover. As in Brick, the trick here is to show the world seen from a kid's point of view. Certainly part of Reed's success is conveying a sense of a child's life, of how strange adults are, and how suddenly violent they can become. But the real point of the The Fallen Idol is to remind us of those incidents of childhood that can still make us writhe in shame years later. It's painful to recall the moments in which we thought we were the stars of the show, when actually we were supporting characters: badgering little interruptions to the adults around us, selfish and blind to the real drama going on.

Richardson's performance here is often described as his best on screen. He's certainly good looking, with his widow's peak, deadpan suavity, and he seems powerful, filling out his double-breasted coat. But there's a hint of corruption to him, a bit of paunch and jowl. Richardson was the rival and friend of Laurence Olivier. Like his contemporary, he has the same alluring, feline shrewdness visible under the mask of deference. In Richardson, we see the slyness that would break out into open warfare during the age of swinging London and beyond. (Years before Harold Pinter, Baines is a servant in subtle revolt.)

Bubbles of levity rise up in the film, right when they're needed. There's a witty whore in a plastic raincoat (Dora Bryan) trying to tone down her natural whoriness when talking to a child, while the exasperated copper who has just arrested her tries to nudge her in a more ladylike direction. There's that favorite joke of the British cinema -- fresh enough to last a dozen re-tellings -- the bit about the two cleaning women tut-tutting over a murder scene. And there's a quick biting insult to a speaker of bad French. (This French joke might have been the inspiration of the assistant director, Guy Hamilton. In an interview with Adrian Turner, the director of Goldfinger said that he directed the background scenes. Tellingly, Hamilton actually grew up in the English embassy in France.)

As in Hitchcock, The Fallen Idol uses its imagery to tell the story. It could just about be understood with the sound off. As the film unfolds, the mansion seems to get larger, and emptier; the pressure of the situation isolates the wretched Baines, like a lone chess piece on that wide checkerboard floor. But the dialog remains both important and a little elusive. Child actors of the late 1940s were generally crisp annunciators, Henrey has bit of a lisp, as well as a French accent. Not every line he says is quite heard.  One almost doesn't hear Baines setting the stage for this drama of evil: "With nothing but the smell of carbolic [a detergent] around, you hanker for the smell of rot."

The words are swift enough that Pauline Kael complained that she was waiting for an extra beat in the lines. Despite their slower editing techniques, old films often seem faster. When the information loaded in the dialog is doubled with muttered British understatement, one ends up explaining incidents in the film to people who weren't giving it their full intention. The rapid editing of today's films provides the illusion of fastness. However, that relative speediness usually just adds up to 12 separate views of the same explosion. This nervous editing in modern cinema often fails to add to the density of a story, in the way that the said and unsaid does in The Fallen Idol. This movie is a tribute to the art of reading between the lines.