Dir. Carol Reed, UK, 95 mins, 1948
Cast: Ralph Richardson, Michele Morgan, Sonia Dresdel, Bobby Henrey
Review by Peter Fraser
After the success of The Third Man in 1949 Carol Reed was considered by many to be among the world’s greatest living directors but his reputation did not rest solely on that jaundiced thriller, remarkable as it is. In fact it was the two films that he directed before The Third Man that established him, for a time at least, as a director of the first rank. The movies were Odd Man Out, a Belfast-set thriller starring James Mason, and The Fallen Idol, a much more contained affair in every sense, held together by a simply iridescent performance from Ralph Richardson as the butler Mr Baynes.
Mr Baynes is idolised by Philippe, the eight-year-old son of the ambassador whom Mr and Mrs Baynes serve at an unnamed London embassy. Philippe delights in hearing Mr Baynes’s tales of African adventures, which Philippe believes to be true, and when Mrs Baynes reprimands the butler for his stories he responds, ‘there’s lies and there’s lies. Some lies are just kindness.’ One day when the ambassador has journeyed overseas leaving his lonely son at home and Mrs Baynes is otherwise occupied, Philippe follows Mr Baynes to a café where he finds him with a woman named Julie. A surprised Mr Baynes claims that Julie is his niece but asks Philippe to keep Julie a secret from Mrs Baynes. Philippe becomes confused about when he should lie and when he should tell the truth and, after a tragic altercation between Mr and Mrs Baynes, Philippe’s best intentions place his idol in jeopardy with the police.
The Fallen Idol (or The Lost Illusion in the USA) was adapted from the short story The Basement Room by Graham Greene and unsurprisingly it contains a number of the themes that characterise Graham Greene’s work. Among them are many that resonate with those that appear in The Third Man, perhaps most significantly the dangerousness of innocence, the pathos of innocence lost, the problematic nature of idealism, or any black and white morality (witness the floor paving of the embassy’s entrance hall in The Fallen Idol), beyond childhood in an adult world of shifting compromises, the melancholy that clouds the thwarted romantic and the guilt that seeps from the sore of a betrayed ideal. In The Third Man it is Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, who shades upon a zealous idealist and Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, who shades upon a fatalistic nihilist, both of them retaining the little humanity that yet enables them to communicate with each other at all. Both of them, one senses, are also erstwhile romantics who have grown older and more cynical since their friendship but in the process have responded to their thwarted romanticism, as a means to fortify their crooked timbers against the world’s chill gust, in precisely opposite ways. Lime has become debauched; Martins has become ascetic; both have child-like aspects; both have inhuman aspects, but while we sense that Lime might be evil we never suspect that Martins is wholly good, hence his principles seem sanctimonious, and perhaps we sense the essential childishness of extremes.
By way of this long digression we return to The Fallen Idol, a neglected treasure that deserves to stand on a par with The Third Man. Comparatively restrained in its unostentatious style but with a hugely evocative setting and above all pitch-perfect performances, not least from the boy playing Philippe, The Fallen Idol presents us with more rounded, sympathetic figures tout court except perhaps for the harridan Mrs Baynes. Nonetheless Mr Baynes in his essential decency allows her more sympathy than the plotting and characterisation would otherwise permit: ‘There are faults on both sides. We don’t have any call to judge. Perhaps she was what she was because I’m what I am.’ A butler revealed as a flawed but sympathetic human being, Mr Baynes is ever the diplomat suggesting parallels between the upstairs downstairs espionage in the embassy and the shifting nature of truth and falsehood in the international relations in which the ambassador takes part. It’s a life lesson for Philippe and the beginning of a fall from a child’s innocence. With knowledge comes the possibility of falsehood and sometimes a little falsehood is necessary to keep the peace or, in other words, ‘there’s lies and there’s lies. Some lies are just kindness.’
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