The Fallen Idol

Wednesday  13 March at 7.30pm

Carol Reed | UK | 1948 | 95 mins | PG

This collaboration between Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene elegantly balances suspense and farce as a young boy’s suspicion that the butler is guilty of murder falls on deaf ears.

“Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol is a tremendous child’s-eye-view thriller, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story… The infant son of a foreign ambassador in London has the run of the lavish official residence while his parents are away for the weekend, and becomes embroiled in a grownup secret concerning the butler Baines, tremendously underplayed by Ralph Richardson.

The movie has Hitchcockian elegance and suspense, particularly in its use of the giant stage-set for the embassy’s magnificent lobby area, much gazed at through the banisters by the little boy, banished upstairs at bedtime. Young Bobby Henrey’s performance looks a little quaint now, but it is still very likable. Dora Bryan has a hilarious cameo as the streetwalker who encounters the boy when he runs away.” –-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian