After a summer closed for renovations, the Harvard Film Archive returns Friday with “The Cold Heart is More Precious than Diamonds,” a retrospective on the cinema of famed writer Graham Greene. The program begins with “The Fallen Idol,” an underseen masterpiece from the excellent British filmmaker Carol Reed.
Reed is a much forgotten name, never championed as one of the great directors of classic cinema. Most people, if they know him at all, know him for one of two movies. “The Third Man,” a classic film noir starring an indelible Orson Welles, was so critically successful that audiences couldn’t help but believe the cinematic powerhouse Welles ghost-directed, a myth that persists to this day regardless of how many times it has been debunked.
The other, “Oliver!,” winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1968, is perhaps even more of a curiosity. It was looked at derisively as a final death rattle for old Hollywood inauthenticity and excess before the coming wave of auteur visionary filmmakers, with their dynamic, gritty art of the 1970s that made movies more personal and bold than ever. Never mind that many people who hurl this critique at Reed have never seen the film they so gleefully besmirch, but “Oliver!” Is an outlier in a career largely built on more subdued studio work.
Despite his critics, Reed’s filmography contains a three-film run of undeniable quality, beginning with the James Mason vehicle “Odd Man Out” in 1947 and concluding with the aforementioned “Third Man” in 1949. Sandwiched between those two films, “The Fallen Idol” is mostly forgotten, perhaps due to the supreme difficulty of finding and watching it. While StudioCanal released a Region B Blu-ray of the film in 2016, there has not been an American release since the Criterion Collection’s DVD went out of print, making it nearly impossible to find on physical media and somehow even more rare to find on streaming.
“The Fallen Idol” is a film noir shot through the eyes of a child, a psychologically rich drama about childhood ignorance and innocence and how easily it can be shattered.
Bobby Henrey plays the young boy, Philippe, whose perspective Reed uses magnificently to unravel the intrigue, following this child as he learns about secrets and lies. The son of a French-speaking ambassador stationed in London, Philippe is a boy who sees and hears a lot while understanding very little, living a precious life being doted on by most of the embassy’s staff. He forms a particularly strong bond with the butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), even as he resents the oppressive authority of Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel).
After a vicious argument with Mrs. Baines, Philippe sneaks out of his room and roams the streets of London until he stumbles upon his hero, Baines, deep in intimate conversation with another woman, Julie (Michèle Morgan). Viewing them through the window, Philippe does not hesitate before marching in and announcing himself. Oblivious to the drama he has encroached upon, Philippe cares only about himself, the cakes on the table, and a potential trip to the zoo. Little does he know that he has stumbled upon an adult drama that will shatter the moral simplicity of his idyllic life, forcing him to reevaluate the world as he knows it for a much murkier, complex mess that it is.
As a protagonist, Philippe is wonderfully complex in his simplicity. He is frustrating and endearing and fickle and gullible. In other words, he is a kid – an authentically flawed child who takes everything at face value, caught up in a sordid affair he does not yet have the tools to understand. We watch as Philippe tries to understand hurtful truths and helpful lies, the difference between fictions designed for entertainment, such as Baines’ stories of a never-lived life in Africa, and more insidious secrets meant to do harm. This new world makes little sense to Philippe, and every character uses Philippe’s innate trustfulness against him to advance their own agendas.
“The Fallen Idol” is a virtuoso achievement in perspectival storytelling, as Reed frames much of the drama through Philippe’s eyes.
The grand staircase looms large in Reed’s directorial eye, posing as central to the film’s plot and themes. Philippe is a child of privilege, meddling in the grown-up affairs of the working class, underscoring an upstairs-downstairs dynamic. Baines and his wife live in the basement, a cozy space Philippe visits when the grand impersonality of his own rooms grows too tiresome. Baines and Philippe use the staircase, going up and down, as a path to and from innocence, to and from a different life.
If the primary job of a director on set is determining where the actors go in relation to the camera and how they move, Reed demonstrates an understated bravura in how he blocks the action to communicate shifting power dynamics and control information without the need for excess dialogue.
As the film approaches its climax, Philippe finds himself being interviewed by the police while standing at the foot of the stairs. Desperate to help Baines, he begins telling patently false stories to the police, while backing his way up the stairs. In a series of subtle maneuvers, the trio of policemen follow him up the stairs, one standing in front of his face, the other moving along the side, and the third taking the higher ground. Philippe finds himself trapped in his lies, trapped in the middle of the stairwell, desperate to return upstairs to the simpler life of the previous day.
If there is a false note in the film, it would be the ending, a too-pat conclusion meant to send the viewer home thinking everything will be okay. This does little to reduce the power of the preceding events, their moral complexity and visual dynamism. “The Fallen Idol” is a clever story filled with suspense and innocence, told with emotional nuance and egoless direction by Reed.
“The Fallen Idol” screens Friday and Sept. 4 at the Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St, Harvard Square, Cambridge. Tickets for this film and others for the “The Cold Heart is More Precious than Diamonds” retrospective, running through Sept. 19, can be purchased online and at the box office.
