from Carol Reed: A Biography (Knopf, 1994) by HYPERLINK "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Nicholas%20Wapshott&rank=-relevance%2C%2Bavailability%2C-daterank/103-1486617-6174244" Nicholas Wapshott

BACKGROUND

At much the same time that [producer Alexander] Korda was commissioning Greene to write The Green Cockatoo (released in 1937), he had been reading the author's short story "The Basement Room," the plot of which he believed most suitable for film treatment. Ten years later he remembered the story when he was exploring a suitable project for Reed to direct, although the title would be changed to The Fallen Idol. Korda had invited Reed to his penthouse at Claridge's one afternoon. As Reed remembered: "For a long time I had been looking for a story. Alex had been reading. I had been reading. One of us would suggest something half-heartedly. We would discuss it and throw it aside. On this particular afternoon in May [1947], Alex had an appalling cold, one of those running colds that grip one during the first fine days of spring.

"I had just read a story by Graham Greene called 'England Made Me,' which I thought quite good. Alex asked: 'Have you read another one by him, “The Basement Room"—a short story? ' 'No.' I answered. 'Very well,' said Alex. 'Here it is. Read it now.' He gave me the book and I settled down in an armchair while Alex, who was feeling dreadful, went to bed in the next room. When I had finished the story, I went to see him. He was lying with his head propped up against a lot of pillows. I said to him: 'This is a wonderful story, but I think what would really be exciting would be the continuation of it. 'Perhaps,' answered Alex. 'Shall I try and get hold of the author? Yes, do that.' I said, 'If we could get him to work with us, I think it would be good.'

"Alex stretched out an arm from under the blanket and caught the telephone. 'Is "The Basement Room" free? ' 'Yes. ' 'Well, would you ask the author if he would lunch with Carol Reed and talk it over? 'Ten minutes later the telephone rang. Graham Greene would be at the restaurant of Arlington House [Korda's headquarters] the following day at one o'clock.

"I had never met my guest before. On the other hand I had read quite a number of his stories and admired them. Many had been made into films. You must not therefore imagine that there was anything about my invitation to make Graham Greene particularly excited. Nor was I very excited myself, yet. It had been the same with so many other stories. I felt that 'The Basement Room' was pretty good. Alex thought it was pretty good. Would Graham Greene work with us? That was the problem. I am not exactly sure of the words I used, but this was the sense of them: I had read 'The Basement Room' and liked it. I had been thinking about the possibilities of making a film out of it. Would he be willing to work with us? As soon as he had come into the restaurant, I saw what sort of man he was—frightfully to-the-point and practical. There was no wasting of time with him, even to asking 'How are you?' and that sort of thing. As soon as I had put my question to him, he answered: 'How do you see it?' Then we talked things over."

Greene had been surprised at Reed and Korda's suggestion because he considered the story, conceived to relieve the boredom on a cargo ship from Liberia to London, to be "unfilmable"—as he put it, "a murder committed by the most sympathetic character and an unhappy ending which would certainly have imperiled the £250,000 that films nowadays cost." It was decided, despite Greene's skepticism, that work should go ahead and, according to Greene, "in the conferences that ensued the story was quietly changed, so that the subject no longer concerned a small boy who unwittingly betrayed his best friend to the police, but dealt instead with a small boy who believed that his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defense. I think this, especially with Reed's handling, was a good subject."

Director and author began their partnership on a sound basis of mutual admiration. Greene had admired Reed's films since Midshipman Easy, as his reviews testified, but the thing which most of all attracted him to Reed was his approach to authors. Reed had said: "I think it is the director's job—as in the old theatre—to convey faithfully what the author had in mind. Unless you have worked with the author in the first place you cannot convey to the actors what he had in mind nor can you convey to the editor at the end the original idea. In making a picture you have got to go back to the first stage to see how important something may be in establishing this scene or that character." Reed therefore offered Greene something that no other director could: collaboration on an even footing with a director who merely wished to translate the author's intentions onto the screen.

Reed and Greene set to work with a budget of £400,000. According to Greene, the two of them evolved a system whereby they would take a suite of rooms in a Brighton hotel with interconnecting doors and a room with a secretary between them. Greene would write, Reed would revise and suggest, then Greene would write and counter Reed's suggestions. As Reed explained it: "We typed the original story out but with the alterations necessary to make it lead up to the new portion. Then Graham Greene took it away and wrote ten more pages to introduce the agreed ending. All this took about ten days." It was an amicable arrangement, cool and businesslike with a great deal of well-mannered friendliness on both sides. (It is worth noting that this system led to the First International Prize for Best Screen Play of the Year at the Venice Film Festival later that year.)

Greene was particularly satisfied with the arrangement, for it allowed him as much control over the finished film as any writer could have without directing the picture himself. Greene's encounters with filmmakers had been disillusioning, beginning with his experiences with Korda and The Green Cockatoo, but Reed's meticulous approach gave him encouragement. Reed's working method, which forged a near-perfect screenplay that would be almost faithfully translated into pictures, allowed a degree of confidence, which few other film directors could offer.

The result, for Greene, was that the films he made with Reed were the closest to his intentions as an author, accepting that, as with "The Basement Room," important elements often had to be changed for good cinematic reasons, or, in the case of the title change, for not-so-good commercial reasons. Greene believed that The Fallen Idol, chosen by the distributors, was, "of course, a meaningless title for the original story, and even for the film it always reminded me of the problem paintings of John Collier."

Greene did, however, agree to certain changes asked for by Reed. The location of the story was changed at Reed's suggestion from a large house to an embassy "since we both felt that the large Belgravia house was already in these post-war years a period piece, and we did not want to make an historical film. I fought the solution for a while and then wholeheartedly concurred." Reed's account of the plot changes explained his reasons: "Though Graham Greene and I were agreed about the main lines of the new script, there were certain difficulties to overcome. In the original story, the action took place in a private house in Belgrave Square, but 'The Basement Room' was first published in 1936 and who now could afford to own a house large enough for a child to lose himself in, and who could employ sufficient servants to produce the right atmosphere for the film? To make the story modern it was necessary to turn the private house into an embassy where the man and his wife would be butler and housekeeper. The girl Julie would be one of the secretaries. Though it was not essential for the girl to be a foreigner there was much to be said for it, because at the end of the picture she had to disappear—to go home, preferably out of the country. So Emmy, as she was first called, became Julie."

Greene himself proposed some changes to his original story. He thought that the girl should be cross-examined beside the bed she had shared with Baines, the butler. Reed suggested a man who would wind clocks oblivious of the murder investigation going on about him; Greene added the snake MacGregor after a period of "sympathetic opposition" from Reed.

There was a single script conference with Korda, who otherwise allowed them a rare degree of artistic license. Korda wished the butler to be changed to a chauffeur "because children are so interested in mechanics, and the parents are going away by plane and the little boy is very interested in the engine of the car . . . " Greene objected as it was a cliché to have a film beginning or ending with a plane taking off. Korda let Greene, backed by Reed, have his own way.

As for casting, Reed wanted Ralph Richardson, who was under contract to Korda, to play the butler Baines and he persuaded Korda to recruit Michèle Morgan, the French actress, as Julie the girlfriend, when Korda was in Hollywood. Sonia Dresdel was to play Mrs. Baines.
Everything hinged, however, on finding a suitable child actor to play the central role. A boy was finally found—and in the most unlikely of places: through his picture on the cover of a book, A Village in Piccadilly, written by his father, Robert Henrey, who lived in Hertford Street, Mayfair, near to where Carol and [his wife] Diana had lived when they were first married. Henrey's trilogy of books about the new London life enjoyed by French refugees from Nazism, based upon his and his wife's experiences, had been a popular success. On the cover of A Village in Piccadilly, Henrey had placed a photograph of his eight-year-old son, Bobby.

The suggestion that Bobby Henrey would be right for The Fallen Idol came from Bill O'Bryen, production executive at London Films, although credit was later attributed to Korda himself. O’Brien wrote to Madeleine Henrey, asking whether her son would be available for a screen test. She was afraid the attention of so many adults on the set would spoil him; her husband, however, thought it might add to his character. The boy was holidaying with his maternal grandmother in Normandy at the time and, as a typical piece of Korda excitement, he was flown from Deauville to London and back for the initial test.

Reed was delighted. The boy was handsome and intelligent, spoke English with a hint of a French accent and, as an only child in a family of writers living in a small flat in central London, got on well and naturally with adults. Reed's only remark was that the boy had a black nail, caused by a hammer. He told the mother: "Don't let him lose his accent. Don't let him play with any more hammers. And, whatever you do, don't let him grow any bigger." Madeleine Henrey agreed to allow her son to become a film actor on condition that she could be present during the filming and supervise his work personally. A governess was appointed to look after the boy. Bobby Henrey was paid £1,000 free of income tax, and if the film was not finished after ten weeks he was to be paid at the rate of £100 a week. He eventually earned a total of nearly £5,000.

Filming began in September in a house at the northeast of Belgrave Square owned by the British Red Cross and St. John organization, who were happy to have the outside of the building painted and all the windows repaired. Other location filming was kept close to the house, with scenes shot in Kinnerton Street and Belgrave Square Mews, and there were also scenes in London Zoo. The cast was small and highly proficient. In the smaller parts were Jack Hawkins, Dandy Nichols, Bernard Lee and Dora Bryan as a tart. Greene absented himself from the set and two writers, Lesley Storm and William Templeton, were hired for "additional dialogue."

Reed turned to Georges Périnal, Robert Krasker's mentor, for the photography. He was a Korda favorite and had shot for him the highly atmospheric The Private Life of Henry Vlll and Rembrandt. He was an expert in color work, as he showed for Michael Powell in Thief of Bagdad and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, although here he would be working in black & white. Reed repeatedly tried Périnal's patience, demanding shots which the cinematographer thought impossible. He told Reed: "You are crazy. You cannot photograph that. It is impossible," to which Reed replied: "Yes, yes, yes, yes. Impossible. Now, Georges, are you ready?" As in Odd Man Out, Reed paid particular attention to the sound, concentrating on the boy's view of events by muffling much of what the adults said as if it were barely overheard.

Madeleine Henrey, who at the last moment was asked by Reed to play Philippe's mother in the film, described Reed on the set:

There was about his features an extraordinary openness which the child, quick to understand, exploited to the full, drawing without malice on his infinite patience. His authority was tremendous. Nobody ever questioned what Carol said, but there was no blowing through a megaphone or shouting angry words. Probably his strength was in part due to the fact that he was such an adept at hiding it. I seldom saw him sitting down in the chair with his name marked on it. Generally he was exercising his long limbs gently in the wind, passing the fingers of his right hand through and through his hair, while his features became illuminated with satisfaction, for he had the uncommon gift of being quick and generous with praise.

What was evident from the very first scene, in which Bobby Henrey runs across the road in Belgrave Square, dodging the traffic, was the extraordinary relationship which quickly developed between Reed and the young boy. Reed revealed his difficulty: "A child of eight can't act. I wasn't looking for an exhibitionist. Adults have habitual features and defenses. A good actor must take something away, lose a part of himself before he can create a role. But with the right sort of child such as Bobby, there is nothing in the way. There is absolutely no resistance. He will do everything you tell him.' Adults were too inhibited, even about the way they stood. "Adults are controlled, they hold their arms and legs still, but if a boy is upset he twiddles a string, arches his back, twists his legs."

Reed's model for Philippe, the boy in the film, was, of course, Bobby Henrey himself. As Reed explained: "I had planned certain scenes where Bobby would lean over the bannisters, but very soon I noticed that when left to himself he was always getting into the most graceful positions, curling up his hands, and this was so much more effective than anything I had imagined, so very much more natural, that I changed the scenes entirely to conform with his mannerisms. A director should plan in advance how a scene is to be played, but he should always be ready to put the camera here instead of there, and change everything at the last moment if he comes across a better way of doing it. That is why I never ceased watching Bobby when we were on location in Belgrave Square. It was my business to make him do on the screen what he did, without knowing it, in real life. When I had that miles-away look in my eyes, I was watching how he walked, and all his ways of laughing, and crossing the street. With children, it is much the same as with grown-ups. To be any good to a director, an actor or an actress must either be wonderful, or know absolutely nothing about acting. A little knowledge—that's what is bad!"

Reed discovered that to get Bobby to act he must play the part himself and get the boy to imitate him. This coaching on top of the normal director's duties meant that Reed was working sixteen hours a day, constantly talking and living on a diet of studio sandwiches. It was little wonder that before long Reed had caught laryngitis and lost his voice. He would run up and down the massive central staircase in Vincent Korda’s magnificent set of the embassy entrance hall at Shepperton, then watch the boy do the same until the gestures were exactly as Reed wished. As Richardson, at six foot three, towered above the boy, all shots of Felipe walking alongside Baines were taken from the level of the butler's waist down. Reed himself was wearing the butler's trousers, and gave instructions to Bobby from out of the camera's sight.

In one of the film's opening scenes there is a shot of the boy hanging over the landing railings looking at Baines. The facial expression which Reed demanded was of warmth and admiration—it was this hero-worship of Baines which formed the key to the story. Unable to persuade Bobby to make the face he asked for, Reed had a children's magician do his tricks at the bottom of the staircase while Bobby watched him in warm admiration from above. Philippe's lines were kept deliberately short so that Bobby could remember them and take and retake them until the inflection was correct. The longest line he had to say contained only fourteen words, albeit fourteen of the most telling words of the screenplay: "Funny, Julie working at the embassy and all the time she was your niece."

One of Reed's few problems with the boy was that he would persist in growing, encouraged by the studio habit of tea breaks, when a trolley loaded with tea and cakes would make its rounds. Reed was only half-joking when he told the boy's mother "Too much starch is fatal to a film star's line," for he put Bobby on a diet.

The only disagreement Reed and Henrey's mother had on the set was over a haircut. A scene with the boy running up the staircase was half complete on a Friday evening when the crew broke up, intending to resume where they had left off after the weekend. The next Monday Bobby arrived on the set, having been taken for a haircut by his mother. The people in the continuity department were horrified; between one stair and another the boy would appear to have lost two inches of hair. Shooting the scene would have to be abandoned until a solution was found and the delay would cost a great deal of money. The makeup department tried a number of absurd remedies, including sticking blond stage hair onto Bobby's own. Reed was angry for the first time. "It's the most expensive haircut in the world. Thousands of pounds! That's what it will cost! He can't have his hair cut between two steps climbing the stairs!" Reed's only course of action was to rearrange the shooting schedule and postpone filming on the stairs till after the boy's hair had grown. Apart from the delay caused by the haircut, the film made good time, completing on schedule.

By the time of the premiere, great public anticipation had been built up. To avoid disturbing the boy, Henrey's name had been kept from the press and no reporters were allowed on the set when he was present. Reports had started creeping out, however, that the boy's performance was exceptional and Reed's tutoring masterful. "Reed’s admirers have waited for The Fallen Idol with an eagerness for which impatience is too soft a word," wrote British critic Dilys Powell.

For American release, [U.S. producer and distributor] David O. Selznick re-titled the film The Lost Illusion, the original working title. On September 26, Selznick sent a telegram to Reed: "Heartiest congrats on your brilliant directorial job… You know how many years I have been a fan of yours and of your work but it has now reached a new high."

U.S. CENSORSHIP

The American release of the film was delayed until November 1949, partly because f demands from the American censors to cut various parts of the dialogue. The man with whom Reed had to deal, sometimes with the help and sometimes with the hindrance of Selznick's office, was Joseph I. Breen, a vice president of [the Motion Picture Producers Association], with whom he had tangled over [scenes in] Odd Man Out. Reed was anxious throughout that the integrity of his film, Greene's dialogue and the actors' performances should be maintained, and that if there were to be any cutting or patching to remove offending material, the changes should be made by him in London, where he had a range of outtakes and other useful editing material to minimize the damage. Ultimately, however, he realized that the censors had the upper hand. As he wrote to the London Films office in New York, "If it is a matter that we cannot show the picture unless it is cut, naturally I shall have to give in."

Put briefly, the prudish Mr. Breen was anxious that the prostitute Rose, who helps the police to identify Phil when he wanders away from the embassy, should not be understood by American audiences to be a prostitute. And he objected to the cross-examination of Julie in her bedroom—a detail deliberately included by Greene—and her suggestion that at the time Mrs. Baines died she had been in bed with Baines.

Breen demanded from the first scene "elimination of whole opening scene about the arrest of Rose, and open sequence with the entry of the boy. From the point where the boy looks up and starts to move in the direction of Rose, cut to sergeant on the telephone, eliminating all the first conversation between Rose and the boy and picking them up again only after Rose is seated and the boy is at her knee. In following conversation, Rose speaks with a much more natural voice without the falsetto effect and the toughness which went with her prostitute character. At the end eliminate her one sentence to the effect that she knew the ambassador . . . eliminating anything that indicates Rose is under arrest. Hopefully impression given that Rose is in some way connected to the police."

The demands were ludicrous and in retrospect laughable. What Breen missed, and attempted therefore to remove, were the brilliance of Dora Bryan's performance and her humorous portrayal of that staple of English literature from at least Moll Flanders onward, the tart with a heart of gold. In particular, Greene's line "I think I know your father" is deliberately ambiguous for comic effect, sexual innuendo softened by euphemism, and her tartlike greeting of the boy, "Hello, dearie, where do you live?," which is instantly slapped down by the policeman, is simply funny. Reed gave some ground to the censors, but also took advantage of their naiveté and banked upon them not being confident enough in their knowledge of English inflection to argue with an Englishman.

"It is most discouraging to get this sort of censorship complication,” Reed wrote. “Since there was nothing in the scene that was in the slightest bad taste, it got enormous laughs which have nothing to do with vulgarity, but was in some small way to do with warmth and kindness." In suggesting some minimal cuts, he continued, "There is no suggestion of Rose having been arrested, nor does she question the boy. With these cuts I see no reason why Rose should not be taken for somebody connected with the police in which case surely there is no reason why she should not say 'I know your daddy.' Belgrave Square is a small place, and the police station is around the corner. All policemen of this district would know the people living in the area."

As for the bedroom scene, Breen demanded a new dialogue track and "elimination of footage which shows Julie looking shyly at the bed and pointing to it. Eliminate all in the questions and answers which has the idea that Julie was on the bed, and was undressed, and that she had to dress before she could leave the room and that she had been sexually intimate with Baines. Newly recorded dialogue must register definitely Julie's story that she and Baines were talking about breaking up their affair—no more.... The piece showing Julie looking at and pointing at the bed to be cut…"

Selznick was, not surprisingly, eager only to get the cuts made and made quickly, for the picture was already doing good business in Britain and he wished to take advantage of his interest as quickly as possible. Eventually Selznick agreed to put Reed's counter suggestions to Breen, but he warned that "Carol has merely had his first taste of it." Selznick was right; Reed would have to play a similar game with Breen when it came to The Third Man.

When the film was eventually released in the United States, with a minimum of amendments, all administered by Reed, the critics unanimously commended his direction. The New York Post wrote: "All that is so deeply satisfying in the best British pictures, the subtlety, intelligence, unforced humor and tragedy free of theatrical posture is on view in The Fallen Idol. Here again director-producer Carol Reed demonstrates why he is generally regarded as Great Britain's best and one of the world's most consistent makers of movie masterpieces." The Boston Globe agreed. "The film is directed with skill and cunning by the masterly Carol Reed, one of the great names of the film industry and comparable to the best Europe has ever had."

As film critic for The Spectactor from 1935 to 1940, Greene championed the films of Carol Reed. John Maier Collier (1850-1934), British painter in the Pre-Raphaelite style

Périnal began his career in France, where he photographed Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and René Clair’s A Nous la liberté and Le Million, among many other films.
Krasker would photograph The Third Man the following year.
Alexander Korda’s brother Vincent was one of England’s finest production designers. Among his credits are Pagnol’s Marius, Things to Come, Thief of Bagdad, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, and The Third Man. Another brother, Zoltán, was the director of such films as Jungle Book and Four Feathers.
Breen administrated the MPPA’s Production Code Authority, the industry’s self-censoring body.
Rialto’s 2006 re-release prints have been struck from the original untampered British negative.