Sir Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), from a screenplay by Graham Greene, based on Mr. Greene’s short story The Basement Room, is being revived at Film Forum, and is revealed once more, after more than half a century, as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of P.O.V., or point of view, filmmaking. In this instance, Georges Perinal’s rigorously subjective camera tells a suspensefully melodramatic tale as seen through the eyes of a small child, Bobby Henrey, the son of the French Ambassador to England, who, while his parents are away on a trip, is left in the care of Baines, the butler (Ralph Richardson), and his shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel). The boy adores Baines and is terrified of Mrs. Baines. One day, he discovers a set of facts that he doesn’t fully understand. For one thing, Baines seems to be very interested in an attractive young French secretary (Michèle Morgan). When he asks Baines about her, Baines tells him falsely that she is his niece. From that point on, the boy becomes enmeshed in a web spun by the lies, deceptions and subterfuges of grown-ups.
 
When Mrs. Baines is found dead at the foot of one of the embassy’s winding staircases, Baines is suspected of having murdered her. The boy had fled into the night after witnessing Baines violently arguing with his wife after she’d caught him cheating with the secretary. Baines later claimed that she must have slipped on the staircase and fallen to her death accidentally. The boy tries to protect Baines, but he only succeeds in making him look more guilty with his childishly inexpert lies. Things look very bleak for Baines until—but even after half a century, I am not allowed by guild rules to give away the plot, the ending of which is considerably changed from the one in the short story by the screenwriter (and short-story writer) himself.
 
Still, the film works beautifully and reminds us of the glories of the black-and-white cinema at its peak, shortly before the beginning of its gradual demise. When it came out, I was working at a menial job for the Selznick Releasing Organization, which David O. Selznick was using mainly as the American distributor of Sir Alexander Korda’s British films. Strange to say, The Fallen Idol didn’t do well in America, and it contributed to the eventual economic downfall of both Selznick and Korda.
 
I recall Selznick on the telephone arguing endlessly and fruitlessly with a Texas owner of a large movie chain, who refused to open the picture in Texas because of the little boy’s fondness for a pet snake. I later learned that in Texas, mothers frightened their children to sleep with stories about snakes. The point is that this little detail about the boy wasn’t in Greene’s original short story, but had been added by Greene himself to the screenplay to make the boy more interestingly complex and, indirectly, to make Mrs. Baines more unsympathetic.

-Andrew Sarris