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'The Fallen Idol': Decades later, still a superb story

The best movie opening in town today was made nearly 60 years ago.

It's the 1948 British psychological thriller "The Fallen Idol," the first collaboration between director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene. Their next film together was the masterpiece "The Third Man," with Orson Welles as the elusive Harry Lime and Anton Karas' unforgettable zither score. Perhaps it's because the star and the music so dominated "The Third Man" that Greene liked to say he always preferred the earlier picture.

Rialto Pictures LLC 'The Fallen Idol' B+ The verdict: An elegant, superbly crafted psychological thriller that's been ignored for too long. Director: Carol Reed Starring: Sir Ralph Richardson, Michéle Morgan, Bobby Henrey, Jack Hawkins, Denis O'Dea Run time: 95 minutes Release date: 1948 Rating: Not rated; includes adult themes and a death. Rate 'The Fallen Idol'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Yet "The Fallen Idol" has been unjustly overlooked. The rerelease, with a beautifully restored print, may help change that.

Based on Greene's 1936 short story "The Basement Room," the movie is told from a child's point of view, that child being 8-year-old Phillipe (Bobby Henrey), who lives with his mostly absent parents in the French embassy in London. He's a lonely, imaginative boy whose best friends are his pet garter snake and the embassy butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson, amazing), whom he idolizes.

Aside from the kindly Baines, the only adult who pays any attention to Phillipe is the butler's shrewish wife, Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel, giving Margaret Hamilton a run for her money in sheer witchiness), the embassy's housekeeper-babysitter, who doesn't like little boys or their pet snakes. Or, as we soon learn, her husband.

Introduced peering down on the first-floor bustle from the balcony above, Phillipe makes a naive blunder into the secrets and lies of the adult world, thus kicking the plot into motion. On the one hand, he sees things he doesn't understand; on the other, he thinks he understands things he hasn't seen. When there's a death at the embassy, his attempts to protect his beloved Baines take a potentially ruinous, Hitchcockian twist.

The film was beautifully shot by Georges Périnal, who also did "The Thief of Bagdad," "The Four Feathers" and Chaplin's "A King in New York." Two scenes are particularly memorable. The first is a spirited game of hide-and-seek in the almost deserted embassy, with the shrouded furniture giving it an eerie, ghost-like feeling. Second is the pajama-clad child's panicked dash through the dark, rain-slick streets of late-night London — a scene echoed 20 years later in Reed's Oscar-winning "Oliver!" which also sent an innocent unwittingly caught up in adult matters fleeing through an unfriendly city.

Richardson leads a superb cast that includes Jack Hawkins and Bernard Lee, who later became "M" in the James Bond movies. Hard to believe, but little Henrey was a rank amateur, "discovered" by Reed when the filmmaker saw his picture on the cover of a book the boy's father had written. When his mother brought him in for an audition, Reed noted the child had a blackened finger from playing with a hammer. Don't let him grow, the director cautioned her. "And don't let him play with any more hammers."

He didn't, she didn't and the result is an indelible portrait of childhood's confusions, disillusionments and inevitable lost innocence.