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It's things like that give secrets away
Considering my feelings for Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949), I have no idea why it took me until last night to see Graham Greene and Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948), but I am very glad I finally tracked it down. It played on TCM a few mornings ago, but I was in no shape to get up for it; fortunately, there was a copy in the Arlington library. It really, really impressed me. I hope I've done it justice. If I haven't, there's Criterion.
The trouble with writing about The Fallen Idol is figuring out where to start. It is the kind of movie that is always on the verge of being other kinds of movie, always bending against the pull of its audience's expectations or fears, which is appropriate: it's about the difference between what a child sees and what he understands and the equally, interactingly perilous assumption on the part of the adult world that he can differentiate between the two; it has the setup of a comedy, but it twists dangerously near to a tragedy of Greek proportions, and for its main character it is most of the time a bouncy picaresque until all of a sudden it's horror.
The child in question is Philippe, nicknamed Phile (pronounced like there's no "e"), the son of the French ambassador1 and the only upstairs resident of the London embassy now that his father has left for the Continent to bring home Phile's long-absent, apparently long-ailing mother. He is eight years old, played by the non-actor Bobby Henrey, a lonely, willful, odd-mannered child. I can't say that he looks girlish, because that would imply that he's pretty; he has a soft-mouthed, dreamy face, a heavy sunflower head of streaked fair hair that needs cutting (not for fashion or gender, it's really a mess) and a bored, restless, finger-trailing way of wandering through the embassy that could easily come off as coy or cloying, except that he's as utterly unselfconscious and watchful as the little animals that children are often compared to—and yet this is not a film about how children are monsters, or aliens, or angels, because all those tropes simplify their subjects and Philippe is as complex a character as any of the adults who populate his world: that's part of the trouble. His mind works as quickly as theirs, he feels things as bewilderingly and keenly, but they're not the same things. He loves a little grass snake named MacGregor. He hates the housekeeper, Mrs. Baines. He hero-worships her husband, the butler, who always has a moment to spare for him, a story, a sweet, the below-stairs treat of helping polish the silver. He hardly sees his father and he barely remembers his mother anymore. There is a fairy-tale touch about the film, especially the way Reed shoots the echoing black-and-white of the vast front staircase and the checkerboard floor it spills out onto, empty as an existentialist set and Phile characteristically positioned at the top of the landing, studying adult interactions from a distance with the balusters penning in his vision like bars; at times it could be mistaken for a story by Angela Carter, drawing its archetypes in child's-eye pastels and letting the grown-up viewer fill in the subtleties of shade. But Phile is not quite the innocent hero, though he is (how could he not be—interrupting an assignation, becoming both prop and half-comprehending accomplice in covering up an affair that leads like a nightmare into questions of murder) in over his head. He can be wounding in his privilege and his self-absorption, but he can also be deliberately, experimentally cruel. He knows in an abstract way that it's wrong to lie, but the strict atmosphere of Mrs. Baines necessitates almost constant deceit. He watches everything: voyeur, cataloger, spy. We like the kid, but we don't quite trust him. (Baines has to tell him not to play with the gun in the kitchen drawer.) That's all right. He wouldn't trust us if he knew us, either.
But he does trust one adult, from which frailty the title derives one of its meanings. I know Ralph Richardson was not chopped liver, but Baines is the best work I've seen from him. In one of the other kinds of movie which The Fallen Idol is not, he would be a comic character: the henpecked husband whose slightly compromised kindnesses are just the right size for a confined, neglected-spoiled child who orders him around as peremptorily as a personal servant, but could listen wide-eyed for hours to his transparently tall tales of shooting a man in a native uprising in Africa.2 He's a bit of a joker, throwing a grave wink to Phile behind the backs of the staff or tossing out the ashes from a cigarette tray with a dancer's flourish where only the boy can see, a bit of a clown, even—Philippe can make him jump by imitating the cutting, carrying voice of his ever-vigilant wife. (One time it's funny, another it's very not.) It's clear that he's Phile's one friend and the closest thing he has to a parent in the whole chilly, immaculate house, and Phile is both devoted to and fiercely possessive of him.3 But if Baines doesn't share his employer's standoffish approach to his son, he doesn't possess his authority, either. He can amuse the boy, but he can't really protect him. And here we begin to hinge over into the kind of movie The Fallen Idol actually is, because it's fairy tale that he can't protect Philippe from Mrs. Baines, a coldly punitive, carbolic-sharp woman who is gradually revealed to be as unhappy within her marriage as her husband, though she lashes out instead of retreating, but it's real life that he can't protect Philippe from himself—his genuine affection for the boy cannot prevent him from uncomfortably, almost accidentally enmeshing Phile in the increasingly messy layering of lies and misdirection his relationship with the clearer-eyed Julie entails. And yet if Baines were only well-meaning and weak-willed, this would be a story of simpler disillusion. The last player in the butler's secret life, and the one Philippe really doesn't understand, is passion. There's nothing funny about Baines in love. Sitting beside Michèle Morgan's Julie in the shabby little tea-shop where they steal their desperately few minutes alone together, unable to say a thing because of the curious, half-complacent staring of the child on the other side of the table—enticing the torpid MacGregor with crumbs of tea-cake, waiting as usual to be entertained—he presents one half of the most agonizing picture of suppressed emotion since Brief Encounter (1945), matched only by the heartbreaking steadiness of the woman who knows he'll never be able to manage a divorce and still can't stop loving him. Phile registers that this grief-shadowed stranger is important to Baines, but not how or why: "Funny, isn't it? Julie working at the embassy and all this time she was your niece." He's the audience of the movie Baines and Julie are in, but he breaks the fourth wall; he blunders into the action and throws it all awry from some realist postwar romance to an expressionist thriller screwing itself up to tragedy.
And yet—again, yet—there is no such thing as unmixed tragedy in this world, either. Nothing is so simply defined.4 The first person to hug Philippe in the entire film is a streetwalker at the police station, saying in pleased surprise as she hears his address, "Oh, I know your daddy!"
I am not telling you everything about this film. I can't: I don't mean morally. Infinite brainspace and wordcount assumed, I could tell you everything I think about it, but that wouldn't help you with Philippe. We can look through his eyes, but we can't see through them. All we can do is peer in from the outside, the way he does with us, and try not to hurt anyone too badly by saying what we think we saw.
1. English is not his first language, which is unobtrusively important to the plot.
2. The thread about Africa is beautifully handled. The first few times it comes up, the audience thinks nothing of it. The setting is contemporary; Baines could have been there in the war. Then he begins to tell some of his stories—eagerly prompted by Phile—and they're boys' adventures, the only white man for miles, the perfume of decay in the jungle, the heat, the veldt, the ravishing native girls—H. Rider Haggard by way of Tarzan. You're really only surprised there aren't diamond mines. But the very assurance of Richardson's delivery suggests that he doesn't really expect Phile to believe him, or at least that there's some level on which the boy, if asked point-blank, should be able to say, "Oh, no, Baines just likes a good story." (He doesn't really, you're fairly certain, see himself as the sort of man who could hold off a howling mob with a pistol and a steely glint in his eye. It's almost a joke on himself, playing hero for Phile. He's a discreet and efficient butler and good overtime childcare, but as an adulterer he's no mastermind. Turn the genres just a little again and we could be watching a tragic farce, the man who can manage everything but his own happiness.) Adults are always underestimating Phile's capacity for fantasy, or making too much of it, and always in the wrong direction.
3. The film is full of compositions that look like families, constantly breaking apart and reforming around Phile, never without their shadow sides and never stable. In his father's absence, Phile eats his meals in the kitchen with the Baineses; they make a nice domestic scene in long shot, Mrs. Baines insisting on Phile's vegetables while Baines sneaks him MacGregor across the table, but the close-up reveals the strain even of politeness, how astringently or evasively everyone speaks. Julie, Baines, and Phile at the zoo make a livelier, less constricted grouping, but it's even more of a lie: the outing is Baines' excuse to meet Julie away from their usual places and an opportunity to keep an eye on Phile, whose bright, bored chatter might give away the secrets he doesn't know he's supposed to keep. The kindest substitutes are the policeman and the prostitute at the station, who want nothing from Phile but to find out where he lives, so they can get him home safe—initially, wearily adversarial, but the gentleness required by the shell-shocked child rubs off on their interactions with one another until they are nearly as wearily affectionate. The end of the film is a new configuration. It is up to the audience to wonder how it will work out.
4. Baines and Phile are both sufficiently complex characters that I find them impossible to thumbnail and the women of the story are far more three-dimensional than the plot as conventionally written demands. Julie could have been just the catalyst, but even through Phile's very limited perspective (and initial dislike: she takes Baines away from him) she has desire and interiority, conflicts that are not the same as those of her lover or his quasi-child. She is not English; she's French and it matters that she and Philippe share a language while she and Baines do not, as it matters that some of her attitudes toward sex are not his. She's part of the upstairs, secretary to one of the senior diplomats. She's younger. They are trying to love across several different kinds of line. Of course, Phile looks at them and sees only the common, incomprehensible species adult.
The trouble with writing about The Fallen Idol is figuring out where to start. It is the kind of movie that is always on the verge of being other kinds of movie, always bending against the pull of its audience's expectations or fears, which is appropriate: it's about the difference between what a child sees and what he understands and the equally, interactingly perilous assumption on the part of the adult world that he can differentiate between the two; it has the setup of a comedy, but it twists dangerously near to a tragedy of Greek proportions, and for its main character it is most of the time a bouncy picaresque until all of a sudden it's horror.
The child in question is Philippe, nicknamed Phile (pronounced like there's no "e"), the son of the French ambassador1 and the only upstairs resident of the London embassy now that his father has left for the Continent to bring home Phile's long-absent, apparently long-ailing mother. He is eight years old, played by the non-actor Bobby Henrey, a lonely, willful, odd-mannered child. I can't say that he looks girlish, because that would imply that he's pretty; he has a soft-mouthed, dreamy face, a heavy sunflower head of streaked fair hair that needs cutting (not for fashion or gender, it's really a mess) and a bored, restless, finger-trailing way of wandering through the embassy that could easily come off as coy or cloying, except that he's as utterly unselfconscious and watchful as the little animals that children are often compared to—and yet this is not a film about how children are monsters, or aliens, or angels, because all those tropes simplify their subjects and Philippe is as complex a character as any of the adults who populate his world: that's part of the trouble. His mind works as quickly as theirs, he feels things as bewilderingly and keenly, but they're not the same things. He loves a little grass snake named MacGregor. He hates the housekeeper, Mrs. Baines. He hero-worships her husband, the butler, who always has a moment to spare for him, a story, a sweet, the below-stairs treat of helping polish the silver. He hardly sees his father and he barely remembers his mother anymore. There is a fairy-tale touch about the film, especially the way Reed shoots the echoing black-and-white of the vast front staircase and the checkerboard floor it spills out onto, empty as an existentialist set and Phile characteristically positioned at the top of the landing, studying adult interactions from a distance with the balusters penning in his vision like bars; at times it could be mistaken for a story by Angela Carter, drawing its archetypes in child's-eye pastels and letting the grown-up viewer fill in the subtleties of shade. But Phile is not quite the innocent hero, though he is (how could he not be—interrupting an assignation, becoming both prop and half-comprehending accomplice in covering up an affair that leads like a nightmare into questions of murder) in over his head. He can be wounding in his privilege and his self-absorption, but he can also be deliberately, experimentally cruel. He knows in an abstract way that it's wrong to lie, but the strict atmosphere of Mrs. Baines necessitates almost constant deceit. He watches everything: voyeur, cataloger, spy. We like the kid, but we don't quite trust him. (Baines has to tell him not to play with the gun in the kitchen drawer.) That's all right. He wouldn't trust us if he knew us, either.
But he does trust one adult, from which frailty the title derives one of its meanings. I know Ralph Richardson was not chopped liver, but Baines is the best work I've seen from him. In one of the other kinds of movie which The Fallen Idol is not, he would be a comic character: the henpecked husband whose slightly compromised kindnesses are just the right size for a confined, neglected-spoiled child who orders him around as peremptorily as a personal servant, but could listen wide-eyed for hours to his transparently tall tales of shooting a man in a native uprising in Africa.2 He's a bit of a joker, throwing a grave wink to Phile behind the backs of the staff or tossing out the ashes from a cigarette tray with a dancer's flourish where only the boy can see, a bit of a clown, even—Philippe can make him jump by imitating the cutting, carrying voice of his ever-vigilant wife. (One time it's funny, another it's very not.) It's clear that he's Phile's one friend and the closest thing he has to a parent in the whole chilly, immaculate house, and Phile is both devoted to and fiercely possessive of him.3 But if Baines doesn't share his employer's standoffish approach to his son, he doesn't possess his authority, either. He can amuse the boy, but he can't really protect him. And here we begin to hinge over into the kind of movie The Fallen Idol actually is, because it's fairy tale that he can't protect Philippe from Mrs. Baines, a coldly punitive, carbolic-sharp woman who is gradually revealed to be as unhappy within her marriage as her husband, though she lashes out instead of retreating, but it's real life that he can't protect Philippe from himself—his genuine affection for the boy cannot prevent him from uncomfortably, almost accidentally enmeshing Phile in the increasingly messy layering of lies and misdirection his relationship with the clearer-eyed Julie entails. And yet if Baines were only well-meaning and weak-willed, this would be a story of simpler disillusion. The last player in the butler's secret life, and the one Philippe really doesn't understand, is passion. There's nothing funny about Baines in love. Sitting beside Michèle Morgan's Julie in the shabby little tea-shop where they steal their desperately few minutes alone together, unable to say a thing because of the curious, half-complacent staring of the child on the other side of the table—enticing the torpid MacGregor with crumbs of tea-cake, waiting as usual to be entertained—he presents one half of the most agonizing picture of suppressed emotion since Brief Encounter (1945), matched only by the heartbreaking steadiness of the woman who knows he'll never be able to manage a divorce and still can't stop loving him. Phile registers that this grief-shadowed stranger is important to Baines, but not how or why: "Funny, isn't it? Julie working at the embassy and all this time she was your niece." He's the audience of the movie Baines and Julie are in, but he breaks the fourth wall; he blunders into the action and throws it all awry from some realist postwar romance to an expressionist thriller screwing itself up to tragedy.
And yet—again, yet—there is no such thing as unmixed tragedy in this world, either. Nothing is so simply defined.4 The first person to hug Philippe in the entire film is a streetwalker at the police station, saying in pleased surprise as she hears his address, "Oh, I know your daddy!"
I am not telling you everything about this film. I can't: I don't mean morally. Infinite brainspace and wordcount assumed, I could tell you everything I think about it, but that wouldn't help you with Philippe. We can look through his eyes, but we can't see through them. All we can do is peer in from the outside, the way he does with us, and try not to hurt anyone too badly by saying what we think we saw.
1. English is not his first language, which is unobtrusively important to the plot.
2. The thread about Africa is beautifully handled. The first few times it comes up, the audience thinks nothing of it. The setting is contemporary; Baines could have been there in the war. Then he begins to tell some of his stories—eagerly prompted by Phile—and they're boys' adventures, the only white man for miles, the perfume of decay in the jungle, the heat, the veldt, the ravishing native girls—H. Rider Haggard by way of Tarzan. You're really only surprised there aren't diamond mines. But the very assurance of Richardson's delivery suggests that he doesn't really expect Phile to believe him, or at least that there's some level on which the boy, if asked point-blank, should be able to say, "Oh, no, Baines just likes a good story." (He doesn't really, you're fairly certain, see himself as the sort of man who could hold off a howling mob with a pistol and a steely glint in his eye. It's almost a joke on himself, playing hero for Phile. He's a discreet and efficient butler and good overtime childcare, but as an adulterer he's no mastermind. Turn the genres just a little again and we could be watching a tragic farce, the man who can manage everything but his own happiness.) Adults are always underestimating Phile's capacity for fantasy, or making too much of it, and always in the wrong direction.
3. The film is full of compositions that look like families, constantly breaking apart and reforming around Phile, never without their shadow sides and never stable. In his father's absence, Phile eats his meals in the kitchen with the Baineses; they make a nice domestic scene in long shot, Mrs. Baines insisting on Phile's vegetables while Baines sneaks him MacGregor across the table, but the close-up reveals the strain even of politeness, how astringently or evasively everyone speaks. Julie, Baines, and Phile at the zoo make a livelier, less constricted grouping, but it's even more of a lie: the outing is Baines' excuse to meet Julie away from their usual places and an opportunity to keep an eye on Phile, whose bright, bored chatter might give away the secrets he doesn't know he's supposed to keep. The kindest substitutes are the policeman and the prostitute at the station, who want nothing from Phile but to find out where he lives, so they can get him home safe—initially, wearily adversarial, but the gentleness required by the shell-shocked child rubs off on their interactions with one another until they are nearly as wearily affectionate. The end of the film is a new configuration. It is up to the audience to wonder how it will work out.
4. Baines and Phile are both sufficiently complex characters that I find them impossible to thumbnail and the women of the story are far more three-dimensional than the plot as conventionally written demands. Julie could have been just the catalyst, but even through Phile's very limited perspective (and initial dislike: she takes Baines away from him) she has desire and interiority, conflicts that are not the same as those of her lover or his quasi-child. She is not English; she's French and it matters that she and Philippe share a language while she and Baines do not, as it matters that some of her attitudes toward sex are not his. She's part of the upstairs, secretary to one of the senior diplomats. She's younger. They are trying to love across several different kinds of line. Of course, Phile looks at them and sees only the common, incomprehensible species adult.
no subject
I'm so glad! I didn't think I was overselling it, but there is always the chance the other person's tastes differ. Yay.
(I would read if you wrote about it. I like the way you look at stories.)
no subject
I was also struck by what a Jane Erye-ian world he lived in, which none of the other characters realize. They see his privilege, or if they feel sorry for him, it's for things that are completely inconsequential to him, like the fact that his mother has been gone so long. But he's a prisoner who must make daring escapes, whose animal friend is murdered, whose main ally (Baines) is unaccountably unreliable and nonpresent at key moments--and who may have betrayed him. He senses that Mrs. Baines is threatening him with death (which she practically is), but when he runs into the police officer and ends up at the police station, it's practically out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I found the very end painful in some respects. It was almost the height of adult-world erasure of children that Phile's desperate attempts to explain about the broken flowerpot are ignored. Of course what he has to say is irrelevant as far as the detectives are concerned, but I found it painful.